A Zettelkasten Explodes Thought: Rhizomes, Intertextuality, & Ideative Pillaging
writing.bobdoto.computerWhat I'd love to see from this Zettel Renaissance is just a dirt-simple VSC (LOCAL! PLEASE! STOP SENDING ALL MY CUSTOMER'S DATA INTO THE UNIVERSE) plugin that goes into my working directory, sucks up filenames, tokenizes keywords, then throws them all into an undirected graph with Graphviz (or PlantUML or Vega or Mermaid or Kroki or whatever), with a regex filter on the nodes.
I feel like it's one of those things that should be all over the place, but the implementations I've fooled with[1] with have been sharply limited in some way or other. I guess I should stop being a freeloader, put on my big boy shorts and have a go.
[1] TiddlyWiki, Dendron, Foam, Zettlr, LogSeq
To me that seems to miss the point. Zettelkasten forces you to really think about your notes, about how you really understand them and how they relate to each other. If you hand this off to an automation process then it's not really zettelkasten, it's just refactoring your notes.
I get the impression that there's a community of people within the ZK world that would be very much into that. For now, the local-only scene is cornered by Obsidian, which I use and adore.
Yeah, Obsidian got my attention too, but InfoSec from multiple companies gave it the thumbs down when we applied for purchase. At the last joint I asked 'em why, but they then very correctly reminded me they don't need to tell me why. Well, #@*$ you too, boys.
Anytype is local-first and plans to be self-hostable.
Dang, thanks for the lead. I saw they had undirected graphs in the feature list.
I kept wanting to like Zettelkasten but I just don’t. My personal conclusion: it’s optimized for shoveling out content. I don’t want to do that. I want a personal wiki that forms a web of links of things I want to remember, not a serialization of notes I took on well-defined subjects.
Aside: I’d bought Ahrens’s “How to Take Smart Notes” and was so disappointed. I thought it was going to be a how-to for getting up and running. It was a why-to about something I’d already decided to try. It could also have been a quarter the size with the same amount of information. I got the impression that the author put a ton of work into his own Zettelkasten and wanted to wring every word out of it he possibly could.
Love seeing Deleuze and Guattari's concepts getting explored in different disciplines.
I find that CCRU's writings intersect technofuturism with the concepts from Thousand Plateaus in a really rewarding way.
Now you mention Deleuze and Guattari, let me also mention DeLanda – Assemblage Theory in particular
I mean this politely, but this is really difficult to read. It seems to just jump headfirst into stream-of-consciousness style buzzwords, and presumes a lot of background from the reader. I tried to follow, but I honestly cannot tell if this is a legitimate thought piece, satire, or AI-generated.
Thanks for the comment. It's definitely in the hybrid rumination-essay dept, and assumes a certain level of familiarity with the subject matter. In the same way a typical piece on coding assumes as much.
Though, I did chuckle about the "satire" and "AI" part.
What buzzwords are you referring to? "Intertextuality" is a word/concept that's been around for over forty years. (Much longer as a concept). "Rhizome" as a philosophical concept/coinage about the same. They're pretty well established.
I will say, pieces dealing with the above are typically a tough sell. People feel alienated by the concepts and especially when they're leveraged so casually (as in the piece above). I knew that when writing it. But, kids gotta get it off the laptop.
Buzzword is probably not the right word. Reading this, I was left with the unique feeling that there were both too many words, but also not enough. I suspect it’s because I’m both missing context and easily confused. And that’s fine, probably. Apologies if I came off rudely.
Oh, not at all. I thought you were rather courteous. Not digging something I write is perfectly acceptable, imho. Also, "there were both too many words, but also not enough" is a perfectly reasonable takeaway. I will try to do better next time.