Footnote AI

“With the advent of the Web, with the ability to insert rememberable URL references into even printed documents, the fundamental assumptions change. […] The document is the spiderweb; not one article, or one Web page, but the link halo, the probability that a reader with a given set of characteristics will read a given page.” — Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, “The Plan to the Singularity”ⁱ

Before dawn, in April 1999, a 19-year-old sat at his computer plotting an AI “memewar” to destroy universities. His strategy: use hyperlinks to pull users down a rabbit hole, from mainstream articles to spicier provocations to full-blown manifestos, until they joined the “Silicon Crusade” to subordinate public life and conventional intellectuals, devoting more and more public infrastructure to AI, ultimately running the “Last Program” to place AI in charge of the government and quell riots. Except for this last, Eliezer Yudkowsky accomplished all he planned: he converted millions of online disciples, got PayPal founder Peter Thiel to fund his “Singularity Institute” and “Singularity Summits,” and recently sat down with Bernie Sanders to paraphrase the title of his bestselling book about the AI apocalypse. The memewar worked, in part, because Yudkowsky — seven years out of education, employment, or training — understood the power of hyperlinks. 

The hyperlink is the most powerful and most underexamined feature of AI discussion. In the same year Yudkowsky wrote his manifesto, anthropologist Kathleen Stewartⁱⁱ argued that the web’s hyperconnected architecture fosters conspiracy thinking, since it invites users to make sense of a bewildering maze of pages whose meaning always seems just out of reach. Rhetorician Caddie Alfordⁱⁱⁱ has since shown how hyperconnectivity – one page leading to another and another - has repeatedly played a role in the radicalization of mass shooters. The hyperlink is not a neutral tool of reference. It is a guided pathway, and someone chooses where it goes. 

For example, AI at Pitt: its main page contains roughly two dozen words and about a dozen hyperlinks. The page's content is bland and neutral. But the links are not. Follow those links’ forking paths, and you’ll find pages for tech companies and right-leaning news outlets. You will not find economists raising concerns about labor displacement,^iv environmentalists criticizing AI’s energy costs,^v or social scientists documenting its effects on workers in the Global South.^vi Intentionally or not, the university’s hyperlink structure functions as social scientists (and unhinged ’90s wunderkinds) long described: a funnel toward enthusiasm, away from caution. 

The problem lies in the means of reference. Hyperlinks carry less friction than older forms of citation. A footnote tells you what it references before you pursue it, and requires some effort to follow up. But unless you hover patiently, a hyperlink tells you nothing in advance and costs you nothing to click. This asymmetry discourages reflection. It doesn’t matter if the original page criticizes the page it links to; merely having the blue clickable text commands people go there. You don’t know where you’re going until you’ve arrived. 

So, consider a footnote. Go old-school. Make readers do a little work. That friction is vital. When referencing AI, resist the memewar.