Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

Nelson is criticizing the dominant “desktop” metaphor and the file-folder paradigm that shaped personal computing. By calling computers “hierarchical,” he points to how most interfaces force information into nested containers (folders, directories, outlines) and then treat that structure as the primary way meaning is organized and retrieved. The complaint is not that hierarchy is useless, but that it becomes compulsory: users must decide where something “belongs,” even when ideas, documents, and references naturally overlap. The remark aligns with Nelson’s long-standing advocacy of non-hierarchical, link-rich systems (hypertext, transclusion) in which information can be connected and reused across contexts without being trapped in a single tree.