Thread by @NickMilo

Note Wars: The Age of the Linked Note

A thread 🧵on the history ideas and the current state of notes.

THE ANCIENT AGE

After many millennia of wandering in darkness, something emerged into the consciousness of humanity: ideas! Since that Promethean moment, humans have tried to figure out how to handle them.

The ancient Greeks constructed elaborate Mind Palaces, where they held memories in the mind. Ideas were also shared by making sounds with vocal chords into what we call words. Thus came the beginning of "Rhetoric": where words expressing ideas were spoken to each other.

Many centuries passed in fragile candlelight as monks in monasteries used a new invention to pass the torch of knowledge: Paper! They took the ideas from the air and married them to a physical surface in an act known as writing.

Writing allowed ideas to be captured and shared, but these physical treasures were not available to most of humanity, until the birth of the Gutenberg Press, allowing ideas to be easily duplicated and reach the rest of the population at the speed of horse.

The Gutenberg Press caused a major change in how humans interacted with ideas. Instead of attempting to keep ideas in the mind, they could now be stored in physical form—and more!

With ink and lead, humans could now make markings next to the things they read—allowing the species a way to actively engage in conversations with the ancients from eons past, whose bodies had long returned to the Earth.

This quasi time-travel accelerated the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and scientific revolution.

THE PRE-DIGITAL AGE

But just as quickly as information flooded the world, there arose a need to make sense of it—to catalog and categorize it. Thus was born the Dictionary, the Encyclopedia, and yes, the Thesaurus.

These early sense-making compendiums preceded another one of its kind: The Syntopicon, largely compiled from an enormous collection of notes on index cards.

The index card forced the user to quickly write down the essence of an idea on a tiny amount of physical space.

Seeing great power in the index card, Niklas Luhmann made it the foundational unit in which he organized his knowledge.

After years of building an army of these tiny notes, they morphed into an inorganic conversational partner—allowing Luhmann to bridge his past thoughts into conversations with his future self.

Luhmann had taken personal time travel to a degree previously unmatched.

However, with the coming of the digital revolution and Microsoft Word, Luhmann's methods would be buried, only to emerge years later during the height of the Clone Wars.

EPISODE 1
THE COLLECTOR'S MENACE

Around 2010, Evernote burst onto the scene, which changed the note-taker's interaction with knowledge. Humanity could now create notes faster than ever before. And they could collect online articles just as quickly.

This new ability led a generation of promising thinkers to be seduced into becoming Collectors.

Caught in the trap of the "new and shiny", these Collectors became obsessed with newness, at the cost of their Note-Making muscles, which atrophied with disuse, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

EPISODE 2
ATTACK OF THE CLONES

With the creation of online platforms like Medium, the masses finally had a way to easily share ideas. But because the online platforms rewarded output instead of the slower inherent joy of thinking itself, many succumbed to the dark side.

They learned to quickly regurgitate the thoughts of other people. This gave them more followers and they began to grow in power.

At the same time, the Note-Makers Council for Joyful Thinking had rediscovered the ancient texts of Niklas Luhmann's "Zettelkasten", which caused "The Great Folder Rebellion".

Between their pre-occupation with the Zettelkasten and the relentless "Attack of the Clones", the Note-Makers were no match for the Summarizers, who at last revealed themselves, in what became known as...

EPISODE 3
REVENGE OF THE SUMMARIZERS

Celebrating their countless subscribers, the Summarizers won the Clone Wars, grabbing power across the galactic interwebs, and forcing the note-makers into obscurity.

The Summarizers enforced rigid principles to the masses: highlight, highlight the highlights, copy, paste, shuffle, and publish!

Hiding behind the mantra that "everything is a remix", they regurgitated the regurgitations of other regurgitators, all grasping for their own pocket of power in the online arena.

"Collect, Summarize, Regurgitate."" Thinking was no longer meant for joy. It was only a means to an end: get more followers, gain more power.

Which brings us to the current moment...

EPISODE 4
A NEW NOTE

And yet, the Promethean torch of ideas burnt in rebellious pockets across the interwebs—from The Archive to @RoamResearch to @obsdmd..from Dagobah to Mon Calamari. The practices of deep, emergent, and joyful thinking were finding a new hope...in a new note.

2020 marked The Age of the Linked Note. While Evernote made fast notes, and Zettelkasten made notes "atomic", the Rebellion made notes easy to link.

For the first time in human history, people now had the ability to build an ever-evolving garden of deep and personally meaningful ideas—ideas that would grow with a person over time—in a way that was safe, reliable, and joyful.

Equipped with the ability to easily create links between ideas, Note-Makers across the galaxy started to fight back. The Note-Makers Council for Joyful Thinking regained their power to battle against the dark forces of the Regurgitators and their mass of followers.

The future is unknown, but there is a new hope in the galaxy.

May the Joy be with You.

Hey, if you loved this please:

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(3) Join the Webinar where we will tour the 6-Week "Linking Your Thinking" Workshop: zoom.us/webinar/regist…