What Do We Really Know About the Back Button?

Welcome again,

The back button has been sitting in browser toolbars for three decades, and almost nobody thinks about what it actually does. Most of us understand that it returns to the previous page but what about its architecture, where it came from, what else exists? The browser’s history is a stack: linear and destructive. That was a design choice. It was not inevitable. It was a trade-off, made early, and it has quietly shaped how hundreds of millions of people experience reversibility in digital space.

This video traces that trade-off from its origins in Vannevar Bush’s associative trails and Ted Nelson’s bidirectional links, through the browser stack, Git’s branching history model, the Android/iOS navigation split, and into the scrollable logs of conversational AI. Each system encodes a different answer to the same question: what kind of past should be available to us?

Hope you enjoy it.