Well Ted Nelson probably continues to be apoplectic over all this messiness, but Shirky is right. Thanks to Bruce Sterling for pointing me to something I had also missed at the time.
Also, yet another example of why evolution works without need for an intelligent designer.
Screwed-up, evolvable protocols that out-learn well-designed solutions.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Clay Shirky theorizing This essay was written eight years ago and I haven’t read it till now. I really dig it when you read some assertion about the Web that’s eight years old, and it makes better sense now than it did when it was written. Either Clay Shirky is impressively prescient, or this is some kind of genuine principle here. Maybe both! [Beyond the Beyond]