When Vannevar Bush, in his 1945 article As We May Think, presented his vision of the Memex, the proposed information retrieval system that later served as an inspiration for Ted Nelson's Hypertext concept, this vision was clearly and necessarily rooted in modernity as it appeared, unchallenged, at the end of World Warn.

Bush held the view that science, having been in the service of destructive forces for the duration of the war, now was able to return to its main objective - to secure progress of mankind. It was to this end that he proposed the Memex system:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyse more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanise his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory (Bush 1945: 108).

This utopian modern optimism elicited by Bush, was considerably tempered by the time Ted Nelson's Computer Lib appeared in 1974, a book that clearly places Nelson within the social critical tradition of the American intellectual left in the 1960s. His critical stance was augmented by the ecological awareness of the 1970s expressed through journals like Co-Evolution Quarterly and The Whole Earth Catalogue, and it is no coincidence that the editor of these two publications, Stewart Brand, wrote the introduction to the 1987 edition of Computer Lib.