When Hypertext became uncool: Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface

Abstract

This essay describes some of the structural limits of authoritative hypertext works and of the cultural interface in which they are perceived by looking at new media objects such as Victory Garden, the AOL interface, and the Netscape/Mozilla browser software. Rather than 'unmasking' hypertext as not having the potential for resistance that it seemed to have, however, it is argued within a post-Marxist political framework that hypertext, when understood as the totality of computers that are linked through the internet, on a formal level does promote an authoritative shift in the politics of new media objects.