Atomic Notes

May 16, 2026 ∞

💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan

Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.

#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory

May 16, 2026 ∞

Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.

“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”

So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.

Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…

#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory

May 16, 2026 ∞

Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.

“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.”

Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…

#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking

May 15, 2026 ∞

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? These elements in time are all intertwined: the content of the book itself, the environment in which we read it in the first place, the environment of the place where the notes were made, the notes themselves, and the circumstances in which, later, perhaps much later, we recollect all these factors by re-reading the notes in a new context.

And you do actually remember at least some of what you’ve read. Your reading, or a part of it anyway, sticks in your memory in ineffable ways. Without thinking about it, you have been engaging in what literary scholar Andrew Elfenbein calls ’the differential allocation of attentional resources.’ But how?

A tabby cat is perched on the edge of a sofa in a sunlit room with bookshelves and an armchair in the background.

This cat has allocated his attentional resources, differentially.

Yesterday I spent a little while looking over the bookshelves in our house, reminding myself of some the books I’ve read and noticing what I haven’t read yet. It was an odd experience because what I remembered of each book varied widely.

I remembered many of the titles, and seeing their spines was a prompt to remember their contents. A surprising number of books I’d forgotten I had ever read, but seeing them again enabled my memories of their contents to come flooding back. A few books I had no memory of having read, even though I’m pretty sure I must have done. And a few more books I was convinced I had never actually owned and vaguely remember thinking I ought to buy a copy.

I suspect the memory-aiding features of the bookshelf itself are qualitatively different from those of a plain list of the books in that bookshelf. The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me. It might explain why I get frustrated when someone reorganises these books: they’re literally reorganising my memory.

Now I’m minded to take photos of these shelves, so that as I dispose of my books (it’s a working library after all) I can at least look back on how they used to be.

All this got me wondering: what does it mean to be ‘well-read’ when you can only partially remember what you’ve read?

Perhaps being well-read is really only something that can emerge in your writing, not as something you carry around with you in your memory. Or is it about the way you weave your reading into your conversation? These days it seems as though being well-read might just be a mark of someone washed up from a previous era, before there were mobile phones and AI summaries of everything.

Scan your own shelves today. Is there a book staring back at you that you have no memory of reading? Or one where the spine alone brings the whole story back? I’d love to hear about the books that have stayed with you, or about the ones that vanished entirely.

If our notes eventually replace the books themselves, we are essentially building a library of our own interpretations. Does this feel like a loss of the original work to you, or a necessary step in making the ideas your own? How do you decide what is worth ‘preserving’ in your notes, and what do you allow yourself to forget?

In an age of instant AI summaries, the slow act of reading and note-making feels almost counter-cultural. Do you find that digital tools change how you remember what you read? Or do you still find that the physical presence of a book, its size and colour, its place on a shelf, is what makes the memory stick? I’d like to know about your own ‘memory-aiding’ systems in the comments.

Meanwhile, here’s a podcast about what we remember, having first read:
What we remember after reading, with Andrew Elfenbein | How To Read Podcast

And here’s a podcast about the fallibility of memory, and why that might actually be a good thing:
Memory Lane | Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

I’ve written a lot on making notes, including:

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And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

May 10, 2026 ∞

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.

A fluffy black and white cat sits inside an orange bucket.

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.

May 4, 2026 ∞

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.

May 4, 2026 ∞

‘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.

—-

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.

May 4, 2026 ∞

Notes about notebooks?

Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the history of laboratory notebooks.

Aghayeva, U. “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/52wg-76ye
Source: Scott Nesbitt’s The Monday Kickoff - well worth subscribing to.

#notetaking #notebooks #historyofscience

Apr 29, 2026 ∞

I find writing on the train works well. It helps that there’s a good view. Anyone else do this?

#writing #notetaking #writingcommunity #photography

A serene landscape features a large body of water, lush green trees, and a distant mist-covered hill.

Apr 27, 2026 ∞

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.

“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?

And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:

📚 Beautiful Particulars: How AI’s attention to the smallest of differences is reshaping our biggest ideas.

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.

Apr 22, 2026 ∞

💬 “For good or ill, a new generation, though raised in the lap of AI, will not be speaking or writing anything like the ‘intelligence’ that raised it.” - Notes on the artificial style of writing.

#Zettelkasten #LLM #AIPhilosophy #Writing #Notemaking #AIWriting

Apr 21, 2026 ∞

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:

Projects
Activities
Resources
Archive

Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:

In-box
Sleeping
References
Main

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.

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

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.”

Thoughts on ‘The Memex Method’

Today I noticed that the ridiculously prolific author and tech activist Cory Doctorow is commissioned to publish a book in 2027 on “The Memex Method”, which he described in a post of that name back in 2021. The basic idea is that he publishes continually in public by means of many, many blog posts, then collates it into books.

💬 “Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.”

I mentioned this post back in 2023, when I suggested: to build something big, start with small fragments.

Writing is still about thinking

According to author Larry McEnerney, writing is an essential part of a sophisticated thinking process. He says:

💬 “So here’s what you’re doing, you are thinking about your world in very difficult ways. This is a terrifically good thing, and it’s the source of most of the value of your work. Now, you are also writing about that world, and this is where it starts, the problem starts arising. Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you’re doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking.” - Larry McEnerney: The Craft of Writing Effectively | Youtube

In my own reading I’ve felt there’s a difference between published writing as useful information (e.g. ‘how to fix that annoying computer problem’) and published writing as the voice of a human grappling with complexity (‘how I fixed my annoying computer problem ‘).

In the first instance I don’t care if the ‘author’ is AI, so long as the suggested fix actually works. I don’t need evidence of a thought process; I just want to fix my computer. In the second instance, the central thing I’m looking for is evidence of human thought. And if the writing starts to smell of AI, I don’t bother even finishing it.

But even though the AI-written information articles always seem highly plausible, I’ve found the ‘information’ contained to be highly untrustworthy. Sometimes it’s correct and helpful, other times it’s wildly off beam. That’s not exactly ideal. I noticed that at least one version of Microsoft Copilot says it’s ‘for entertainment only’ - which makes it a bit worrying that they named it Copilot.

So whether I do need a human or don’t need a human, either way, AI prose isn’t really doing it for me.

Well, here are some articles that consider the vexed question of whether AI text counts as writing, or just glorified Lorem Ipsum filler – or worse:

Alex Woods | Don’t let AI write for you.
N. Cailie | I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era.
Elizabeth Spiers | The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites.
“We can decide that we want to be human” | The Guardian.
Less Wrong | Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture.
Manuel Morale’s two-step process for writing AI-free blog posts (an amusing response to an interesting discussion).

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters, which I wrote myself and I also took all the photos myself. If you’re interested in learning, teaching, art, fighting, or Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, you might just find this short book of relevance to you.

Mar 30, 2026 ∞

AI is changing how we think. Many people now swap deep reading for building with agents. Is the Zettelkasten just a nostalgic relic of a Twentieth Century academic process? This article explores why “efficient” tech might actually fail our cognition.

💬 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.

Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?

#Zettelkasten #AI #PKM #Philosophy