found via jzhao.xyz’s post on composability and shares a similar sentiment to Rhizome Proposal.
In order to build a medium for thinking whether for an individual or shared knowledge graph, the span of context of information recall, connect, and associate needs to live above and below any given app.
This post discusses how current tools for thought are aimed at automating workflows and recalling information more efficiently, rather than tools for assisting in thinking. He argues we need mediums which expand beyond basic tools and gives us new agency to do something we couldn’t do before.
He believes that the browser of the future may be able provide a medium for thinking. And although written a few years ago before recent improvements in AI, he does forecast that AI being able to draw the connections form what is being viewed (on a page in the web browser for example) and identify parallel topics and and relations that may foster new connections.
Along the lines of the “secret” to using Are.na, maybe a more local first AI agent could be used to resist the algorithmic rabbit holes and promote more serendipitous and “natural” rabbit holes discovered from our own authentic world of context and personal information.
Highlights
However, to build an enabling medium that’s more than a single-purpose tool, it isn’t simply enough to look at existing workflows and build tools around them. To design a good creative medium, we can’t solve for a particular use case.
We should acknowledge this fundamental limitation of the “note-taking app” approach to building tools for thought, and shift our focus away from building such siloed apps to designing something that lives on top of these smaller alcoves of personal knowledge to help us organize it regardless of its provenance.
Just as the early World Wide Web started out manually-curated and eventually became curated by algorithms and communities, I think we’ll see a shift in how individual personal landscapes of information are curated, from manual organization to mostly machine-driven organization. Humans will leave connections and highlights as a trail of their thinking, rather than as their primary way of exploring their knowledge and memory.