Who will read difficult hypertexts?
If hypertext is to resist or subvert the too easy flow, its texts need communities of readers. But the communities need the texts to form around. There's nothing new in this situation. The new gathers a community by appearing amid the old. We need to write what we need. Even a few resistant hypertexts will begin. Perhaps they will be stumbled into on the networks, or discovered in the bookstores. This would be a minority culture, to be sure, but on the Net, not off-line.
Universities thrive on a split between high and low culture; it gives them status and automatically legitimated territory. If the difficult texts were only produced for analysis in graduate seminars they would have little subversive potential. What I am imagining, though, would be difficult texts that cross that boundary, linking worlds that seduce and teach new ways to live within texts and images.