Polymers, Paranoia, and the Rhetorics of Hypertext

Paranoids produce not just delusions but delusional systems, structures of compound association that attempt to embrace "everything in the Creation." Here we have a clear parallel with constructive hypertext—infinitely extensible, repeatable, and emergent, with an inexhaustible latency of other orders. If the exploratory text is a conspiracy, then the constructive text is a kind of lunacy, a riotous proliferation of discourse (something like Pynchon's novels themselves, only moreso).