Primary Documents

Source Library

One page per primary document — the papers, specs, books, and reports the Independent Internet is built on. Every synthesized claim in the wiki traces back to a source here.

23
Sources
1776–2026
Span
80
Citations

1770s 1 source

1776 Continental Congress Full text

The Declaration of Independence

The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America — asserting that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that people have the right to alter or abolish government that becomes destructive of their unalienable rights.

Cited by The Declaration of Independence archives.gov ↗

1780s 1 source

1787 Constitutional Convention Full text

The Constitution of the United States

The supreme law of the United States — establishing the structure and limits of federal power across three branches, followed by the Bill of Rights (first ten amendments) guaranteeing individual freedoms against government infringement.

Cited by The Constitution of the United States archives.gov ↗

1940s 1 source

1945 Vannevar Bush Summary + link

As We May Think

Vannevar Bush's wartime essay imagining the Memex — a personal device for storing and associatively linking all of one's books, records, and communications.

1960s 5 sources

1960 J.C.R. Licklider Full text

Man-Computer Symbiosis

Licklider's foundational vision of humans and computers as coupled partners, not master and tool — the conceptual seed of interactive computing.

Cited by J.C.R. LickliderMan-Computer Symbiosis columbia.edu ↗
1962 J.C.R. Licklider, W. Clark Summary + link

On-Line Man-Computer Communication

Licklider and Clark sketch real-time, interactive use of computers and gesture toward an 'Intergalactic Computer Network' of connected machines.

Cited by J.C.R. Licklider PDF ↓ historyofinformation.com ↗
1962 Douglas Engelbart Summary + link

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

Engelbart's SRI report laying out a systematic program for using computers to raise human problem-solving capability.

1963 J.C.R. Licklider Summary + link

Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network

Licklider's memo naming a shared, interconnected community of computers — a rhetorical precursor to the internet.

1968 J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Taylor Summary + link

The Computer as a Communication Device

Licklider and Taylor argue that networked computers will become a medium for human communication and community, not just computation.

Cited by J.C.R. LickliderRobert Taylor PDF ↓ ibiblio.org ↗

1970s 1 source

1974 Ted Nelson Summary + link

Computer Lib / Dream Machines

Ted Nelson's two-books-in-one manifesto for personal computing and hypertext, insisting that ordinary people must understand and control computers.

Cited by Ted Nelson archive.org ↗

1980s 1 source

1989 Tim Berners-Lee Full text

Information Management: A Proposal

Berners-Lee's CERN proposal that became the World Wide Web — a decentralized, linked information system.

1990s 1 source

1994 Martijn Koster (later IETF RFC 9309) Living standard

robots.txt — Robots Exclusion Protocol

The original machine-readable web standard: a plain-text file at a site's root telling crawlers which paths they may visit. Advisory, not enforced.

2000s 3 sources

2001 Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila Summary + link

The Semantic Web

Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila's vision of a machine-readable web of meaning — the 'Read-Write-Own' turn.

2005 Google → joint Google / Yahoo / Microsoft Living standard

Sitemaps Protocol (sitemap.xml)

The positive complement to robots.txt: an XML file declaring what URLs exist on a site and what the operator wants crawled first.

2008 Satoshi Nakamoto Full text

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Nakamoto's whitepaper introducing a decentralized digital currency secured by proof-of-work instead of trusted intermediaries.

2010s 2 sources

2010s Ethereum Foundation Living standard

Ethereum's Intro to Web3

The Ethereum Foundation's framing of Web3: a decentralized web built on user-owned, programmable infrastructure.

2019 Shoshana Zuboff Summary + link

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Zuboff's analysis of an economic logic that claims private human experience as free raw material for behavioral prediction and sale.

2020s 7 sources

2024 Answer.AI (Jeremy Howard) Living standard

llms.txt

A proposed standard for a curated, LLM-shaped manifest at a site's root — telling language models what to read at inference time.

2024–25 Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation) Living standard

AGENTS.md

An open Markdown format at a repository's root carrying the build, test, style, and security context a coding agent needs.

2025–26 Google Labs (Stitch team) Living standard

design.md

An early Markdown convention for declaring a project's design system to design-aware coding agents.

2025 Anthropic Summary + link

Disrupting the First Reported AI-Orchestrated Cyber Espionage Campaign

Anthropic's disclosure of a state-sponsored espionage campaign in which an AI agent executed an estimated 80–90% of the operation with only sporadic human direction.

2026 Jake Van Clief, David McDermott Summary + link

Interpretable Context Methodology: Folder Structure as Agent Architecture

Van Clief and McDermott's paper arguing that a well-organized folder hierarchy can replace a multi-agent framework: the folder structure is the orchestration.

May 18, 2026 Andrej Karpathy Living standard

LLM Wiki: A Pattern for Building Personal Knowledge Bases Using LLMs

Karpathy's pattern for an LLM-maintained wiki: instead of re-deriving answers from raw documents on every query (RAG), the model integrates each source into a persistent, compounding knowledge base.

2026 J. Reschke, J.M. Snell, M. Bishop Full text

RFC 10008: The HTTP QUERY Method

IETF Standards Track specification defining the QUERY method for HTTP — a safe, idempotent request that carries its query in the message body and returns the result of processing it.