AS WE MAY THINK

As We May Think

Author: Vannevar Bush
Published: The Atlantic, July 1945
Type: Visionary essay

Historical Context

Written as WWII was ending, Bush (who led wartime scientific research) turned his attention to peacetime applications of technology. The essay imagined how information technology could augment human thought.

The Memex

Bush proposed the "memex"—a theoretical device for storing and retrieving information through associative trails, not hierarchical filing. Users could create links between related documents, building a personal web of knowledge.

Sound familiar? This was essentially hypertext, described 20 years before it was technically feasible and 40+ years before the World Wide Web.

Key Ideas

• Information retrieval systems should mimic human associative thinking
• Technology should augment, not replace, human cognition
• The problem isn't creating information but finding it later
• Trails through information are as valuable as the information itself

Why This Matters

Bush influenced Douglas Engelbart (who created the mouse), Ted Nelson (who coined "hypertext"), and ultimately Tim Berners-Lee (who created the Web).

But reading it now, I'm struck by what we've lost. Bush imagined personal knowledge management—building your own trails through information. Instead, we got algorithmic feeds that choose for us.

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