The Oracle of Bacon: Thirty Years Later
Summary
The Oracle of Bacon: Thirty Years Later revisits the iconic web app that measured actor connectivity and popularized the idea of small-world networks. It traces the game's origins from Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, links to Karinthy, Milgram, and Watts & Strogatz, and argues that early dynamic web content helped reveal how connected the world is, while warning against misinterpreting adjacency as causation—an insight with implications for how we think about networks in AI and information systems.