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From 2015, it's depressing that the sea change he felt didn't materialize. This is a very good exposition of what Vannevar Bush was actually describing and how

by pharke 6y ago

From 2015, it's depressing that the sea change he felt didn't materialize. This is a very good exposition of what Vannevar Bush was actually describing and how wrongly we've interpreted it. The comparison to junk food for our current model is apt and oft repeated. I feel it right now, the empty sugar rush of writing a comment and hoping for a reply or the drama of the up and down votes when I know I should be linking this article in to a personal datastore and expanding on the interesting parts and dissecting the clumsy ones but I don't have one that's easy to use and hard to lose. Let alone a highly polished one that incorporates the social reinforcement of seeing what others are building and getting feedback on my own work. I guess I'll just bookmark it and forget about it.

kickscondor 6y ago
It’s funny you say this, because I see this article linked all the time - and it’s had a major influence in my circles. (Public wiki and Indieweb culture.) See, for example, the recent ‘Gardens and Streams’ pop-up camp: https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-and-ui-popup-indie-web-camp-session-2020/GardensAndStreamsWikisBlogsAndUI-SpeakerView-PopupIndieWebCampSession-2020.mp4 https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-... (Which was both preceded by a year of blog posts about the concepts and which spawned a ton of discussion on the topic.) A lot of the buzz around Roam Research also plays into this, with many people suddenly tossing around the phrases Zettelkasten, commonplace books, mind palaces, personal knowledge bases and garden wikis. (You can even search HN for these terms and find regular discussion here about that. See also: Obsidian from this week.) If you want me to put together a longer directory of links I can. Or maybe you’re happy to just bookmark it and forget about it - I get that too.
- pharke 6y ago
  That's great that there is still an underground culture around this concept but my gripe is that it's been 5 years and we still haven't built anything usable. I think it's the same gripe the author has but his was that it had been 70 years and we still weren't there yet. We were on track at one point but right now we seem to be deeply lost in the weeds with no clear way out.

by pharke 6y ago

kickscondor 6y ago

It’s funny you say this, because I see this article linked all the time - and it’s had a major influence in my circles. (Public wiki and Indieweb culture.) See, for example, the recent ‘Gardens and Streams’ pop-up camp: https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-and-ui-popup-indie-web-camp-session-2020/GardensAndStreamsWikisBlogsAndUI-SpeakerView-PopupIndieWebCampSession-2020.mp4 https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-... (Which was both preceded by a year of blog posts about the concepts and which spawned a ton of discussion on the topic.) A lot of the buzz around Roam Research also plays into this, with many people suddenly tossing around the phrases Zettelkasten, commonplace books, mind palaces, personal knowledge bases and garden wikis. (You can even search HN for these terms and find regular discussion here about that. See also: Obsidian from this week.) If you want me to put together a longer directory of links I can. Or maybe you’re happy to just bookmark it and forget about it - I get that too.

pharke 6y ago
That's great that there is still an underground culture around this concept but my gripe is that it's been 5 years and we still haven't built anything usable. I think it's the same gripe the author has but his was that it had been 70 years and we still weren't there yet. We were on track at one point but right now we seem to be deeply lost in the weeds with no clear way out.