Astral Codex Ten

Douglas Engelbart

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Douglas Engelbart

Article

Douglas Engelbart is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 29, 2021 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Consider Douglas Engelbart, Norbert Wiener, Jaron Lanier, etc”; “Engelbart spent two years faffing around in the Philippines; Engelbart quoted heavily from Bush’s article”; “Engelbart had invented a vast array of tools”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, 1987, 1988.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: September 19, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
5. The last part of the piece is explicitly about the role I see mechanism playing in a democracy. I find it hard to understand how one could see the piece as opposed to mechanisms. My argument was that the appropriate way for mechanisms to be adopted is through public communication across lines of difference and in different value systems/communicative modes. One thing I find striking in the history of technology is that the vast majority of technologies that are actually useful today were pioneered by people who had similar critiques to mine here of technocracy, while those who zealous defend technocratic approaches have generally either not themselves actually developed successful technologies or have great technological dreams that have generally led to poor social outcomes. Consider Douglas Engelbart, Norbert Wiener, Jaron Lanier, etc. Calling people like this, most of whom were not even willing to express their views in the rationalistic terms I wrote in, "anti-technology" redefines technology to be only rigid and inhuman systems that fail. The process of socio-technological change has a far greater element of the "socio" when it succeeds than those focused on autonomous "technology" allow. Communication and collaboration outside of affordances of the technology itself are always critical to success. See, for example, Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, or anything else in the field of human-centered design.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
But Doug Engelbart didn’t have much else to do.
Of course, they didn’t, and so Engelbart spent two years faffing around in the Philippines. He lived on a remote island with nothing to do but read and read and read. He spent his first five days camping out by a little stilt hut with a sign reading “Red Cross Library”—and in the Red Cross Library, there was a copy of the September 1945 issue of LIFE magazine in which Vannevar Bush’s description of the memex had been reprinted.
Engelbart claimed that he found the idea “intriguing,” but had lots of radar-technician-ing to do or something, and so it didn’t really resurface for him until 15 years later, when he was writing his Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Engelbart quoted heavily from Bush’s article, and commented:
Inline links: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework