Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide
hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes,
and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all
information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to
eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes
are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures,
Xanadu was supposed to save the world.
Time Cube is a site by Gene Ray, the self-proclaimed "wisest human". For some reason he thinks the way we should be thinking about the day-cycle is to imagine a cube around the earth, with one edge above daybreak, noon, nightfall, and midnight, for "four simultaneous twenty-four hour days". (He uses the term 'corner' instead of edge.)
If you don't get why this is a fundamental breakthrough and the only way to look at the world, he will call you "educated stupid" and a dupe in an ongoing conspiracy theory featuring the usual villains of the Western world, especially academia and religion (and Wikipedia, which will have very little of him). For instance, something about the opposites-in-balance philosophy attached to the "time cube" representation is asserted to be fundamentally incompatible with monotheism. Anyway, ranting about this comprises the bulk of his site(s). That and racial-conflict armageddon if you make your way onto later pages.
So - a pretty normal crank after a certain point, but in some ways his website it's sort of THE canonical crank website because of its spectacularly rant-y incoherence and awesome web design.
I don't think I've ever seen someone try (or succeed) at explaining What The Actual ... is Time Cube. You seem to have done it in a paragraph and a half.
>the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures
Hm. The tone suggests that this is narrow-minded, but I really do think this (I also think that while Xanadu is flawed, it is on the right track). What about this observation is "hackerish" and is it known to be deficient in some way?
The idea that all disagreements arise from ignorance, stupidity, and communications is a point of view that privileges the speaker/thinker, because those concepts cannot always be defined in an objective, repeatable way. So it allows the speaker/thinker to think "I know more, or am smarter, or are a better communicator," rather than "this other person disagrees with me."
Take abortion, for example. Some people believe that human life begins at conception, thus abortion is murder and should be prevented by the government. Others believe that the government should privilege the rights of the mother over the fetus until birth. While these points of view are informed by scientific knowledge, they are not based wholly on scientific knowledge; they are system of human values. So no matter how well we understand the biological systems of procreation, there will likely always be disagreement over abortion.
Or consider people who believe that if they follow the precepts of their particular religion, they will be rewarded supernaturally after death. While there is no scientific knowledge to support that point of view, there's also no scientific knowledge that disproves it either. So if some people think that eating pork is ok, and others think it is a sin, there's not much science (or any other system of objective knowledge) can do to resolve that situation.
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html