John Stuart Mill once wrote that human nature is not a Machine to be built after a Model and set up to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a Tree which must grow and develop itself according to the tendency of inward forces which make it a living thing.
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VAN PATTEN, James J., 1974. Social Control and Human Engineering: A Framework for Decision-Making. 1974. page 
pdf [Accessed 21 January 2024].
Our dreams for this technology are pulled in different directions by competing traditions as to what we put into computers and what we expect to happen there. Hypertext straddles this division and is thus able to go either way. But our dreams are most likely aligned with one or the other.