Atomic Notes
- First, I recorded the quote that attracted me, giving the full reference so it can be re-found later. I was inspired by the idea that our supposedly singular vision is actually two separate processes, rods and cones, working in unison.
- Next, I made this my own by recording my own reflection: even more striking, we have two separate eyes, yet still see only one image.
- Third, I added a meaningful title: If there’s more than one way of seeing, there’s more than one way of organising. This small point about how vision works could be a metaphor for social and political organisation - that’s what I started to think. What may look like one unified effort is very often the combined result of many adjacent processes working together to create the effect of unified action. And if this is the case, then there’s surely more than one way of doing it. I didn’t elaborate, since, as I said, I wrote this on the run. But what’s implied by the post’s title gives me a jumping off point for future notes (like this one).
- First, it shows that you can write a fleeting note anywhere - even on your website if you like (don’t tell me you haven’t got one - it’s the hottest new trend, I’ve heard). And it’s just one idea, which means it’s the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful. So I’ve now transferred this post to my Zettelkasten, where it will combine and recombine for future use.
- Second it shows how from fragments you can build a greater whole. That’s how I usually write posts, especially the longer ones. But even just a single quote plus a single thought, as here, can add up to a simple post.
- Next, it shows how it’s valuable to add something of your own, rather than just collecting random quotes without commentary. Remember: nothing says “I didn’t think this through for myself” like a direct quote.
- Fourth, it demonstrates the value of a strong title. In this case, the title is doing a lot of the lifting, since…
- Fifth, I posted this online before I’d even finished the note, which means it exemplifies the maxim, publish first, write later.
- Economist Maximilian Kasy says AI has already seized The Means of Prediction, but it’s not be too late to do something about it (published October 2025).
- The sycophants will inherit the earth, or The machine began to waffle, by John Naughton.
- AI can’t break it, because higher education is already broken. Timothy Burke reflects on a painful diagnsis by T.J. Kalaitzidis. See also Joshua Kim’s Three Questions for Brown’s TJ Kalaitzidis.
- GenAI is “a tool powerful enough to explode many of our inherited pedagogies. That may not be a bad thing. From the ashes, we can build something more profound, more equitable: and more aligned with the realities of thinking and doing in the world.” - TJ Kalaitzidis How generative AI fixes what higher education broke
- Scholars are asking: What good is writing?
- According to Aaron Benanav, AI just makes work worse.
- AI is the new dumb waiter, says Douglas Rushkoff in conversation with Andrew Keen.
- Dror Peleg says AI is too busy to take our jobs. Also in conversation with Andrew Keen.
- Gaslit by machinery that calls itself a person. It’s worse than a beehive in a raincoat.
- Jules Verne could have told us the Internet is not a real person. After more than a century, why do we keep falling for La Stilla Syndrome?
- Embracing your humanity is the way forward. It’s what we’ve got so we might as well lean into it.
- It’s a great time to be writing the future. Enough with the pessimism: let’s get to work!
- What comes after content? We’re finding new ways to create, and we always were.
- Soon we’ll all be writing the books we want to read. You pump your own gas, so why not write your own books? (Yes, it’s a provocation).
- Despite AI the Internet is still personal. A little love letter to writing online for fun and no profit.
- To understand the future of AI, look to the past. Look, they have this thing called history and we can learn from it.
- Another way we might change our speech and writing to subvert our digital overlords. I just want ChattyG to give me some fancy wordplay. Is that too much to ask? (Yes, it is).
-
Leonardo da Vinci, whose notes were “a collection without order”;
-
Leibniz, who created a haystack of notes (oh, and calculus);
-
Aby Warburg, who suffered from Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections; and
-
Hermann Berger, a Swiss author who wrote a novel about a Zettelkssten (two actually) but didn’t publish it.
-
Then there’s cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who invented a whole new methodology for his Arcades Project, which he didn’t finish. Wikipedia. He’s certainly a candidate for unqualified posthumous ADHD diagnosis.
- Austin Kleon, interview on The Echoes Podcast, 10 June 2025.
Open, free and poetic
The Web is 34 years old! Following on from Plenty of ways to write online, here are some really practical resources to help you create your own presence online :
Keeping the Web free, open and poetic.
Old hands will probably find a few useful tips here too.
Oh, and here’s another great big list of useful personal website stuff. Actually, I’m making a note of this for my own ‘going down the rabbit-hole’ purposes:
Resources List for the Personal Web
It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.
*Image source: Public Domain, Wikimedia.
#indieweb #webwriting #worldwideweb #blogging
Plenty of ways to write online
It’s now easier than ever to write online if you wish to. Here’s a list of more than 40 blogging platforms. Many are free or have a self-hosting option, and you can pretty much choose your own adventure here, so why not get going?
Manuel’s list of blog platforms
Now, some say writing on your own website is a wasted opportunity, because hardly anyone will read it. A better way, they say, is social media. That’s simply because the social media algorithms bring good writing to the surface to present it to far more pairs of eyeballs.
OK. The big problem with this advice is that the main platforms are capricious. They change their rules all the time, they lock you in, then boot people off for no reason, while still enabling trolls. They destroy databases with no warning; they promote genocide and fascism while claiming they’re not publishers so owe no responsibility, and they generally behave on a spectrum between exploitative and sociopathic.
You get what the algorithm gives you. This is both a meagre blessing and a wicked curse.
My partial solution is to publish on my own site while syndicating elsewhere. I keep the ‘canonical’ version here on my own website, while publicising it in as many other online locations as I wish. This is a little more work, but gives me control without total invisibility. And some of the syndication can be automated, through RSS and APIs.
POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world|Molly White
But there’s also another side to the equation. How small exactly is a ‘small’ audience? My blog has a few views. If I was doing live events I’d be truly delighted with the numbers! And since you’re reading this, now seems like a good time to thank you personally. Yes, thanks for reading!
Social media is a river. Your post there might get a lot of eyeballs but it’s very quickly lost in the ceaseless flow. In contrast, a blog post like this one is smaller and slower, but more enduring. If you’re reading this from the future, thank you for proving this point!
And anyway, to get a message across, millions of readers aren’t necessary for most people. Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic email has a million readers, and Mr Beast has about 300 million followers on YouTube. Well, good for them. But does it really matter to the rest of us?
In his post, Hope for the Web, James says:
“Every personal website is a glimmer of hope, a metaphorical star in the sky that shows how wonderful the web can be.”
That’s right! And writing online is a conversation with yourself too, a conversation you might not otherwise have. the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard might have agreed. If he was around now I bet he’d be publishing a personal website.
“Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong”. Søren Kierkegaard, introduction to Provocations
The opportunity is yours and the time is now, to write for many, to write for a few, to write for yourself. So what are your Provocations?
It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.
Watch in awe as a fleeting thought becomes a lasting note
I’ve been asked a great question about my writing process:
Curious to know, is this post, and other short ones like it, basically repurposed main notes from your zettelkasten? And, if so, care to show an example of “before and after?”
Tldr; No.
To be honest, this question put me on the spot. I often write posts on the run, and the post in question was no exception. I couldn’t think where the quote at the top of the post had come from. It isn’t in my Zettelkasten, my collection of working notes. But then I also keep a big swipe file of tasty quotes (collector’s fallacy is real!)… and when I looked, it wasn’t in there either.
But then I remembered: I have several writing projects on the go at one time, and I’d been reading through an old manuscript that I haven’t touched for some time. As I did so, this particular quote stood out for me. It inspired a new thought and so the writing of this short post was effectively me writing a new Zettelkasten post on the fly. How so?
See what I did here?
The bit where you say: So what?
Maybe I’m overstating things, but then maybe this short post is a model of how I approach writing notes in my Zettelkasten:
Now what the post failed to demonstrate is the great value of links to other ideas. After all, a linked note is a happy note. So to atone for this gross omission, I’m doing it now. And just look at all those links!
Make the most of your note
This whole exercise, of working and reworking notes, is strongly inspired by a great line in Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing:
“The note you just made has yet to realize its potential.”
I just love this saying. And I’ve written in more detail about this exact process, in How to write a better note without melting your brain. In that article I go through a worked example of how to turn a crappy note into a useful note. But unlike me you’ve probably never written a crappy note, so don’t bother reading it.
——
Thanks for reading this crappy note. You might like to sign up to the weekly email digest, for all the week’s Writing Slowly fragments, presented in a (slightly) greater whole.
And look out for my new book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
Hot takes on our future with AI
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Writers. Of this little book, let’s just say it’s quite keen on humans.
Meanwhile, here are eight hot takes on the latest problems, questions and opportunities AI is giving us. It was going to be just three, but the hot takes are coming thick and fast right now. If only there was a technology that could just summarise everything so we don’t have to read it. Until then…
And do I have my very own hot takes on AI? Well yes, as it happens, I do.
Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And if you like this website, you can always sign up to the weekly email digest.
If there's more than one way of seeing, there's more than one way of organising
💬 “Our eyes are built for two perspectives. During the daytime we rely on our cone cells, which depend on lots of light and let us see details. At night the cone cells become useless and we depend on rod cells, which are much more sensitive. The rod cells in our eyes are connected together to detect stray light; as a result they don’t register fine details. If we want to see something in bright light, we focus the image on the center of our retina (the fovea), where the cone cells are tightly packed. To see something at night, we must look off to the side of it, because staring directly at it will focus the object on the useless cone cells in the fovea. The way we see in bright light differs from the way we see in shadows. Neither is the ‘‘right’’ way. We need both.” - Gary Klein (2009) Streetlights and Shadows. Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision-making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
On reflection, more can be said along these lines. Another way of looking at this ‘double perspective’ of human vision is to note that it constantly depends on some kind of accommodation between our two eyes working simultaneously and in concert.
So although vision is actually several processes taking place at once, we insist on perceiving it as one unified process. We can’t help it. We’re made to synthesize. But that doesn’t mean it is one process.
The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!
#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction
💬 On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts
Once we’ve let our thoughts mature for a while, we’ll want to produce something for other people to look at, an artifact.
Exactly so.
As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.
I designed a book in three and a half hours
A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.
Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.
Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.
I’m unqualified to diagnose the following writers with ADHD but I’ll do it anyway
Yes indeed: confidently diagnosing deceased note-making writers with ADHD, while in possession of no medical qualifications myself, is a temptation I simply cannot resist.
For example I have wondered about:
As I said, it’s interesting, but for now I’ll stop there.
—-
This post started life as a comment on Reddit. If you’d like more from me, but in a weekly email, why not subscribe right now?
💬 “The things that make us different, in the right context are superpowers. You know, Saul Steinberg said the thing that we respond to in any work of art is the struggle of the artist against his or her limitations.”
This makes me feel like there’s an awful lot of wrong context lying about. I guess we all need to find a place where we can thrive, or else make it ourselves.
The original quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s recollection of a conversation with Saul Steinberg.
#creativity #writerslife #deepthoughts #inspiration
💬 Most attempts at providing computerised tools for writers have thrown out the affordances that previous analogue systems offered, almost without noticing their loss. - writingslowly.com on Ted Nelson’s evolutionary list file.
“Sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.” - writingslowly.com
Don't let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever
The Zettelkasten note-taking system offers a structured approach to organizing thoughts but might induce “archive fever,” which may lead to an obsession with preservation over actual writing. Here’s how to protect yourself.
📷 Photo challenge day 25: decay.
My worm farm is amazing! By turning waste into compost these little wrigglers perfom a kind of magic.
It’s also a metaphor for my writing process. I don’t worry if the input is rotten. The output will be quite different.
See also: No writing is wasted
Don’t throw away your old notes
Don’t throw out your old notes, even if you feel overwhelmed by them. Here are some helpful ideas on what to do instead.
What to do when you've made some notes: Start writing
The next step after taking notes is to create a finished piece of writing, acknowledging that the first draft may be disorganized but serves as a foundation for improvement.
What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book
Historian Dan Allosso led a discussion on Bob Doto’s insights on flexible note-taking and writing processes. It emphasised the importance of iterative development and audience engagement. Here are my notes.
Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress
This whole article dumbed down by AI summary: Cultural trends often leave behind valuable ideas that merit revisiting rather than being dismissed as unfashionable. And I thought I was being clever.
💬"When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.