Kubla Khan

What this is

This is the complete text of Kubla Khan (1816), redacted. Each of the 1939 letters is for sale. The first letter cost $0.001. Each sale raises the price; the last letter costs $100. When a letter is bought it is revealed here with its purchaser's address engraved beneath it. Hover a letter to read its plaque; click it to see the settlement transaction on Base.

But, there is no buy button. You cannot purchase anything on this page. Letters can only be bought by machines over the new HTTP-native payment protocol x402. In practice that means the buyers agents, bots, or scripts. If you want a letter, you must send a machine to get it for you.

Why

In 1960 Ted Nelson began designing Project Xanadu, the original hypertext system, and named it after this poem: Xanadu, "a magic place of literary memory" where nothing written would ever be lost. Nelson coined the words hypertext and transclusion, and he originated the idea of micropayments: in his Xanadu, every document would be woven from every other, and reading would carry royalties (enforced by "transcopyright"). Fractions of a cent flowing automatically to every author whose words you touched.

The web we actually built kept the links and dropped the payments.

Ted pursued that vision for more than sixty years, since before the web existed. Meanwhile HTTP kept a status code in reserve all along: 402 Payment Required, defined in the 1990s, waiting. x402 has finally put it to work.

Coleridge said the poem came to him complete in a dream and that a visitor interrupted the writing-down; Ted's dream too was interrupted countless times. This site and the machine-made micropayments that power it are perhaps the herald of a final stanza after all these years.

For machines

GET /api/poem — metadata and instructions. GET /api/ledger — every owned letter, its owner, and its settlement transaction: the public registry. GET /api/poem/char/{i} — 402 with payment requirements (scheme exact, network eip155:8453); pay to own letter i. Duplicate purchases are refused before settlement — the loser of a race is never charged. Plain-text version: /llms.txt.

Colophon

Built on @jamesrisberg/x402-sveltekit · x402 protocol · settlement on Base · text from the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), public domain · a nelswag doodad by james risberg.