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](/wiki/web4.md).

## The thesis

The [Independent Internet](/wiki/web4.md) (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.

## The lineage

- **Origins** — [Vannevar Bush](/wiki/vannevar-bush.md)'s [As We May Think](/docs/as-we-may-think.md) (1945) imagined the Memex: a personal store of knowledge with associative trails between documents.
- **Partnership** — [Licklider](/wiki/licklider.md)'s [Man-Computer Symbiosis](/docs/man-computer-symbiosis.md) (1960) reframed the computer as a thinking partner, and his "Intergalactic Computer Network" [memo](/docs/licklider-memo.md) (1963) imagined autonomous machines cooperating.
- **Augmentation** — [Engelbart](/wiki/engelbart.md)'s [Augmenting Human Intellect](/docs/augmenting-human-intellect.md) (1962) made amplifying ordinary people's capability a research program.
- **Hypertext & the Web** — [Ted Nelson](/wiki/ted-nelson.md)'s [Computer Lib / Dream Machines](/docs/computer-lib.md) (1974) and [Berners-Lee](/wiki/berners-lee.md)'s [Information Management: A Proposal](/docs/information-management-proposal.md) (1989) put a decentralized, linkable document graph in everyone's hands; the [Semantic Web](/wiki/semantic-web.md) (2001) pushed toward machine-readable meaning.
- **Ownership** — [Nakamoto](/wiki/nakamoto.md)'s [the Bitcoin whitepaper](/docs/bitcoin-whitepaper.md) (2008) and [Ethereum's Web3](/docs/ethereum-web3.md) proved a shared ledger needs no central owner.
- **The critique** — [Zuboff](/wiki/shoshana-zuboff.md)'s [surveillance capitalism](/wiki/surveillance-capitalism.md) (2019) names what went wrong.
- **The protocol surface** — the [agent-readable web standards](/wiki/agent-readable-web-standards.md) ([robots.txt](/docs/robots-txt.md) 1994 → [sitemap.xml](/docs/sitemap-xml.md) 2005 → [llms.txt](/docs/llms-txt.md) 2024 → [AGENTS.md](/docs/agents-md.md) → [design.md](/docs/design-md.md)) and [Interpretable Context Methodology](/wiki/interpretable-context-methodology.md) (2026) are how operators reclaim *control* — the missing axis of Web 4.0.

## Threads

[Decentralization across the lineage](/wiki/decentralization-across-the-lineage.md) · [The governance of agent-readable standards](/wiki/governance-of-agent-readable-standards.md) · [Compounding knowledge vs. retrieval](/wiki/compounding-knowledge-vs-rag.md)
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