AP0110 Knowledge Graph
A small, public knowledge graph tracing the lineage of the Independent Internet — the people, ideas, and primary documents behind decentralized computing.
This wiki is a small, public knowledge graph. The source library holds one page per primary document; these synthesized pages connect them into a single story. Explore them visually on the Web 4.0 page.
The Independent Internet (Web 4.0) is the Internet as it was intended to be — decentralized, resilient, self-hosted, and free of corporate surveillance. It is the latest turn in sixty years of ideas.
Decentralization across the lineage · The governance of agent-readable standards · Compounding knowledge vs. retrieval
One page per primary document — papers, specs, and reports — that the synthesized pages below draw on.
Legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed — the oldest document in the library, and the premise the rest of the lineage keeps rediscovering.
Governance as architecture: power divided, limited, written down, and amendable — with the Bill of Rights guaranteeing individuals against the system itself.
Licklider's foundational vision of humans and computers as coupled partners, not master and tool — the conceptual seed of interactive computing.
Engelbart's SRI report laying out a systematic program for using computers to raise human problem-solving capability.
Licklider's memo naming a shared, interconnected community of computers — a rhetorical precursor to the internet.
Berners-Lee's CERN memo proposing a decentralized web of typed nodes and links — the document the World Wide Web grew from.
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.
The positive complement to robots.txt: an XML file declaring what URLs exist on a site and what the operator wants crawled first.
Nakamoto's nine-page design for electronic cash without a trusted third party — the strongest practical proof that a global system can run with no central owner.
The Ethereum Foundation's framing of Web3: a decentralized web built on user-owned, programmable infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
Why an LLM-maintained wiki accumulates understanding where retrieval-augmented generation re-derives it on every query.
How one move — removing the central intermediary — recurs from Licklider's network through the Web and Bitcoin to the Independent Internet.
The five agent-readable web standards differ sharply in who governs them — and that trajectory is the real story.