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.
1770s 1 source
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.
1780s 1 source
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.
1940s 1 source
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
Man-Computer Symbiosis
Licklider's foundational vision of humans and computers as coupled partners, not master and tool — the conceptual seed of interactive computing.
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.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework
Engelbart's SRI report laying out a systematic program for using computers to raise human problem-solving capability.
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.
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.
1970s 1 source
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.
1980s 1 source
Information Management: A Proposal
Berners-Lee's CERN proposal that became the World Wide Web — a decentralized, linked information system.
1990s 1 source
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
The Semantic Web
Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila's vision of a machine-readable web of meaning — the 'Read-Write-Own' turn.
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.
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
Ethereum's Intro to Web3
The Ethereum Foundation's framing of Web3: a decentralized web built on user-owned, programmable infrastructure.
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
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.
AGENTS.md
An open Markdown format at a repository's root carrying the build, test, style, and security context a coding agent needs.
design.md
An early Markdown convention for declaring a project's design system to design-aware coding agents.
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.
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.
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.
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.