Writing Slowly

In the olden days (approximately 2010) there was a mass exodus to social media from blogging. It was like the Rapture but with tweeting. And today there’s a new mass exodus to AI from… well, everything.

It seems all anyone can talk about now, or even think about, is AI. Here’s some breathless reportage from the front line:

💬 “I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.” - Token Anxiety | nikunjk.com

So maybe many of the people who used to be interested in the Zettelkasten, an approach to maintaining a useful collection of notes, are now interested in AI agents. After all, just look at those efficiency gains!

But it seems to me that the Zettelkasten concept was always rather antiquated. After all, it looks quite a lot like the fetishization of an obsolete process for writing academic papers by hand, that ended in the late 1990s when its most visible proponent, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, passed away, just as digitization took over.

Luhmann commented in one of his later notes: “Microprocessors have been announced, but are not really available yet” (ZKII: 9/8,2). But his career crossed over with that of the personal computer, and by the start of the Twenty-first Century everyone was using computers. The old card indexes and their index cards were thrown out wholesale.

So already, anyone interested in the Zettelkasten is surely more than a little nostalgic and in possession of a very niche interest. Meanwhile AI has parsed everything about the Zettelkasten approach, gleaned from a thousand AI-generated videos, and spits it out relentlessly in summary, so it seems there’s almost nothing left for humans to say on the matter.

What Luhmann said of his own Zettelkasten suggests that there never really was anything much to see.

“Ghost in the box? Spectators visit. They get to see everything, and nothing but that - like in a porn movie. And the disappointment is correspondingly high.” (ZKII: 9/8,3)

There’s nothing left to see and nothing left to say. Except, that is, for nearly everything.

The affordances of old practices, methodologies and technologies tend to be superseded without recognition of their value, so people hardly notice that the new tech doesn’t do exactly what the old tech did, and in some cases it does it worse, even while commanding more persuasive PR.

To give just a handful of examples: tangible cards arranged on a desk or in drawers make unexpected connections visible, whereas digital lists and files tend toward linear, filtered views that reduce the serendipity of chance encounters; meanwhile, the writing, sorting, and handling of cards can strengthen both memory and understanding, while typing and clicking offer much weaker embodied cues; and then paper cards remain readable for years or even decades without any need for software updates or file migrations, but proprietary formats and app or plug-in dependencies can render digital notes difficult to recover.

I could go on, but I’m not trying to make an argument for why paper still beats electrons. That ship sailed a long time ago. My point is that the new tech doesn’t completely supersede the old tech; it’s just different. As media scholar Neil Postman reminded us, progress isn’t linear - it’s ecological. Every technological ‘improvement’ changes the whole ecosystem, and not everywhere for the better.

That means we can still learn from the past and from past practices. A few people are still interested in the potential of old innovations, even when its no longer fashionable to have anything to do with them. I’ve ruminated previously on what happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind.

It’s intriguing that despite incredible, relentless waves of innovation stretching right back at least to Gutenberg, the age-old question of how best to write and publish for an audience is still not completely settled. There’s still something left to see, and quite a lot left to say.

Now read: Use case for the Zettelkasten.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Translations of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten notes (i.e the few notes in his Zettelkasten that he wrote about his Zettelkasten) are to be found at Zettelkasten.de.