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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
- Projects
- Activities
- Resources
- Archive
- In-box
- Sleeping
- References
- Main
- Organisation theory
- Functionalism
- Decision theory
- Amt: office, post, job, duty
- Formal / informal order
- Sovereignty / State
- Isolated/individual terms, problems
- Economy
- Ad hoc notes
- Archaic societies
- High cultures
Atomic notes have a long history
Did previous generations ever think much about atomicity of ideas in their notes? After all, if most people were using notebooks, surely they didn’t need to consider how long their notes should be – they could just keep writing till they were done.
It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell’s ’logical atomism’ was very influential. Russell said:
“you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ 1918: 270).
A similar positivism (where the universe is made of discrete entities rather than one great holism) was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world’s knowledge centered on Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ into the 1930s.
Otlet inspired the ‘documentalists’ to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the ‘Memex’, which was a precursor to the desktop computer.
Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as ’thought kernels’, ‘concept packets’ and ‘kernel statements (cards)’ but the established concept behind this was the ‘unit record system’. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey’s Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. Engelbart said:
“Mainly what is new is the use of the smaller units of information in restricted-subject sets (notedecks) so that I gain considerable flexibility in the manipulations of my thought products at the level at which I actually work in my minute-by-minute struggle with analytical and formulative thought. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion but when I digest the writings of another person I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably–the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted…” (Engelbart, 1962: 57)
The features Engelbart found he couldn’t get from his use of cards – that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity – more even than I had realised!
Now read: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Note: This post started life on Reddit
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which masks how they were all created one by one like little atoms.
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes?
What's the future of creative work without human intent?
Nicholas Carr has written about the prospects for creative work in an age of digital production.
He argues that the era where technology merely copies art has given way to one where AI generates it by stripping away human intent and replacing it with mathematical patterns. This results in a flood of “efficient” but hollow content, which forces creators into a relentless “dance marathon” to feed the digital platforms. He suggests that as machine-made “slop” becomes the norm, the true value of art will lie in its humanity. In other words the slow, intentional, and relatively inefficient activities that a computer can’t replicate will be recognised as worthwhile. They’ll literally be a measure of value.
He touches here on a couple of themes I’ve been considering too.
The first theme is what it means for everything to be turned into ‘content’, and for a whole class of ‘content creators’ to rise from nowhere, the way a gold rush would generate a legion of instant but mainly ersatz gold miners.
Carr suggests the ‘content’ doesn’t matter compared with the ‘buckets’ that contain it. As every MrBeast video attests to, it’s the form that matters now.
MrBeast is the brand-name of a prominent American YouTuber who gained worldwide fame for his high-budget videos which feature elaborate challenges and massive financial giveaways. It’s a winning formula precisely because it’s a formula. And the formula of the show makes the content of any individual episode, though still necessary, oddly irrelevant.
If we’re not just making content what are we making?
That’s the question I’ve been pondering for a while now. Online platforms are in the container industry. They all provide containers for other peoples’ stuff. And what do you call the contents of a container, if not ‘content’? This led me to wonder whether the way forward is a) to seize the means of containment and create our own ‘containers’ or b) to deny the entire paradigm and do something else entirely.
So I wanted to know what comes after content?
It’s hard to imagine but I intend to try. At the moment the obvious answer to what comes next is ‘more containers’. As I write this, plenty of writers (including Nicholas Carr) have been moving to Substack because it seems to have some writerly buzz to it (aka ‘organic reach’). The quality of the material there is quite high, and the recommendation engine appears to be working, at least for some.
But attractive as it may seem, isn’t Substack really just the latest in a long line of platforms that seemed great then turned into mush? Blogger, Medium, and now Substack. here today, gone tomorrow. Buzzing along for now, but soon to be ensh_ttified by the venture capital money that feeds it. It’s been observed that the Substack business model is inherently unstable, so before too long the mush cycle will kick in and users will move onwards to the next shiny platform. If you don’t get this you should read John Gruber’s critique at Daring Fireball. What do I mean by an unstable business model? In brief, you can’t meet a billion dollar valuation by taking 10% of the proceeds of a bunch of bloggers. Therefore, adverts and lock-in will follow, as surely as night follows day.
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human, not necessarily because that’s fantastic but because being human is what we’ve got.
The second theme Nicholas Carr raises in his article is what it means when the automation of this machine formalism becomes so pervasive it undercuts the professional and existential self-confidence of a whole generation. Carr sums it up this way:
“In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines.”
Which is a neat summary of the philosophy of German philosopher Günther Anders, whose ideas I’ve been reflecting on. In fact, fear of AI is nothing new.
Decades ago Anders said:
💬 “Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is: “without us!".” — Günther Anders, ‘The Term’.
In some respects this is the leitmotif of this entire Writing Slowly website - the observation that from now on, by most metrics, all humans are writing slowly, that in relation to the machines, we’re second best. Coming to terms with this ironic de-centering of the human is one of the great moral and cultural challenges of our time. It’s ironic because, as Anders pointed out, we are the creators of the technologies that now confound us, and so, as he also pointed out, it’s weird that they’re now leading us by the nose.
One possible way forward is to challenge the slippery use of “us” and “we”, as in the sentence you just read. It masks some important detail, especially the detail of who benefits and who pays for technological innovation. For example, as I write this, nameable individuals are directly profiting from the use of AI to identify targets for missile and drone strikes in Iran. This targeting is horrendously error prone, even on its own terms. I’m not profiting from the killing of schoolchildren and you may not be either. The victims of these attacks aren’t profiting either; they’re dying. Perhaps if there’s to be a ”we" in this context, it might be me, the victims of this automated violence, and you. Because when they’re blowing up children just because the algorithm told them to, you can be sure their code will be coming for you and me rather than for its owner. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. It’s merely speeding up the kill chain.
Conversely, if it’s true that “we all benefit” from AI, then, as philosopher Rod Tidwell said, show me the money.
Well, piece by small piece I’m addressing the question, What must I do now? My provisional answer to this question is that you’ve got to choose your own race and finish it.
But you might also notice that I’m doing my best here to form and maintain my own little container, a slightly eccentric bucket in which to mix my own ideas, which I’m still not calling content.
That got a bit heavy so here’s an adorable cat in a bucket, courtesy of marwool.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the handy email format that never goes out of fashion.
Compare like with like
When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement.
For example, here’s the final version of a well-known voiceover:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But here’s an early draft of that famous start to Star trek. tl;dr it sucks too. [Neatorama.com]
The lesson? If your terrible draft lacks sparkle, it might just be because almost everyone’s does, at first. So if you can’t compare like with like, then don’t compare at all.
Unless you really are planning to regulate commerce and so on.
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the classic email format that never gets old and never goes out of fashion.
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if this article piqued your interest you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest, where you’ll find yourself in an exclusive club whose privileged members just get a weekly email.
The real science behind Project Hail Mary
Yes, there is some real science behind 📚 Project Hail Mary.
It’s an enjoyable and successful sci-fi novel and film, but the science fiction is frankly quite a bit more fiction than science.
It would hardly give away the plot of Project Hail Mary to mention that it has a lot to do with the microbial contamination of experimental research. I mean, that’s what the story is about – in the same way Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, was all about potato farming.
If this floats your spaceship (microbes I mean, not potatoes), you might enjoy a fascinating article about the real science of microbial contamination in experimental contexts. Apparently there’s a bacteriophage called Φ80 and it’s running amok.
How Φ80 infiltrates research labs.
Scary stuff! Perhaps someone will turn it into a movie.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.
Notes on the artificial style of writing
In which the artificial style of writing encounters the iron hand of fashion
AI makes writing more bland, as reported by NBC News. This will accelerate the rate at which readers demand new forms of writing that AI can’t yet (or ever) achieve. There’s been plenty of talk about how AI caters to the economic requirement for efficiency (aka reduced labour costs), but there’s another very obvious economic requirement too: novelty.
AI handles novelty of combination very well. Just try asking it for a story about a unicycling giraffe who learns quantum mechanics and escapes from a zoo in the Alpha Centuri star system — it won’t refuse you. That kind of combinatorial novelty it handles with aplomb. At no point will it tell you this is a bad idea. On the contrary, “You might consider how the unicycle itself acts as a metaphor for the observer effect,” says Google’s Gemini as it eggs me on. But it doesn’t produce novelty of expression. Despite the arguable novelty of this scenario, the adventures of a fugitive circus scientist space giraffe, the story, as written by AI, will still be, well, bland.
Cheaper, better and newer. Consumers crave novelty, which drives the endless parade of fashion, and the instant obsolescence of what only yesterday was highly desirable. In a sense, AI writing stands at the end of an era, the era that saw the kind of writing on which AI has been trained as up to date. For example, if a chat-bot wrote an article or a piece of advertising copy in the 150-year-old style of Charles Dickens, it would be quaint, but hardly useable. To achieve the effect it does, of being ‘as good as an average human writer’, it must mimic what’s considered the current writing style, and it does so blandly.
Now the research shows that AI-generated prose isn’t just bland, it’s also distorted in several other ways, many of them, such as pronoun use, connected with style.
How LLMs distort our written language.
But fashions change, and the blandness of the AI style will accelerate the speed at which writing style fashions change. Just as we can’t take seriously today someone who writes like Charles Dickens (unless it’s deliberate pastiche), tomorrow we won’t be able to take seriously any writing produced in the style of a bot. And that means soon we won’t be able to take seriously any writing that’s written in our current style.
Top level categories in my notes
What kind of top-level categories do you have for your notes?
If you’re doing knowledge management you might use or adapt Tiago Forte’s PARA system:
Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes.
Prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s second collection of notes, his second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.
In his lecture on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, researcher Johannes Schmidt of the Niklas Luhmann Archive at Bielefeld University observes that these headings are hardly comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann’s scholarly interests over many years.
“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann’s theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”