The critical perception of net literacy as 'advanced' is made explicit in the theoretical claims of the hypertext research community, where hypertext practice is proposed as a privileged instantiation of post-structuralist critical theory or even, in a sense, as its objective correlative. However, the critical theory in question was developed as a critique of the literary tradition, prior to the implementation of networked and link-node text. The majority of the subversive tropes and figures of electronic text - intertextuality, non-linearity, the 'writerly' text (Barthes, 1973!), the nomadic reader and problematized author - are, arguably, functions of the digital characteristics of writing, regardless of delivery medium (see: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext, Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1997). These tropes and figures were latent in literacy and not established by the 'advances' of hypertext. The critiques of structuralism and post-structuralism were precisely designed to show how, for example, the supposed voice of the author was a cultural construct, by no means implied by any essential characteristics of writing. Rather, writing itself - long before its translation to node-link webs - subverted these constructions, exposed them as intertextual, non-linear, fragmentary, of problematic origin and reception.