Simon Willison says:
💬 “I’m effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.”
I already do this easily via micro.blog and it’s a lot less convoluted. I guess he has complete control of the output though, provided he’s happy to tinker like this.
Finished reading Trip to the Moon by John Yorke
Trip to the Moon by John Yorke 📚 sets out the author’s deeply-considered views on the nature of story and goes further than his previous work on the same theme, Into the Woods.
John Yorke is a highly experienced writer and producer for British TV, and here he presents invaluable insights into how stories really work, from the perspective of someone who absolutely knows what he’s talking about. I found the section on non-western story-forms very interesting, and though I wasn’t convinced by the claim that stories in all cultures are basically fueled by ‘some bastardization of the hero’s journey’, just hearing the argument made by a true expert was very helpful.
More convincing - and worrying - was the claim that effective storytellers ‘unshackle us from empirical observation by drugging us with rage or anger or pleasure.’ Indeed, if this book has a single key theme, it might be that telling stories is a uniquely dangerous skill, whose seductive power we’d do well to understand much better than we do.
The insights of Trip to the Moon are profound, though a more rigorous edit would have served the work well. In places the text feels unbalanced. Crucial developments are often truncated in the main chapters only to resurface in the lengthy commentary at the back. Despite this imbalance, the author’s body of work remains vital for any aspiring writer. Start with Into the Woods before tackling this more fragmented sequel.
💬 The fight against the far-right is much more compelling to voters when it is framed in the practical opposition to corruption than the ideological opposition to populism. — Ian Dunt, Substack.
A lesson from Hungary for the rest of us.
Make YouTube videos and you’ll eventually be tempted to sit in a bath of ketchup or jump into a tiny pool with a goat – but either would bring relief from the cat photos the rest of us seem compelled to post.
How do social media platforms trap users in networks they would rather leave? | UNSW
On Mastodon, Harold Jarche points to the renewed relevance of Harold Innis, the mid-20th century Canadian scholar who called out US media imperialism for what it was.
💬 “We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises.”
I’ve written about Innis’s lost notes but his warnings about the distorting power of the media are very appropriate now.
I’m reading about the traditional Japanese porch, the engawa, seen here at the Shugakuin Imperial Villa.
But right now I’m sitting on the typically Australian version, the verandah, an idea the colonialists took from India.
In each case, inside and outside connect quite elegantly.
Jorge Arango’s book, Duly Noted: Extend your mind through connected notes, has its own Flickr page, with a set of photos, images and screenshots — illustrations that inform the book’s text. I like this idea and am saving it here in case it’s useful in future — whether for me or for someone else.
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.
Maybe Cory’s ‘Memex method’ was also in the back of my mind when I wrote my own version of the idea, Publish first, write later. This was a motto of the Argentinian writer Osvaldo Lamborghini, whose literary protégé, César Aira, seems to have adopted with gusto. In his fiction Aira appears not to be overly bothered by questions of plot coherence, continuity editing, or finding the right publisher — yet he’s still been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Doctorow’s blog posts, well written as they are, tend to be stand-alone pieces, always part of a larger ongoing thought process, indicated by deep links to similar ideas. They’re kinetic. They feel as though they’re written by someone who, like Aira, is all-in on ‘the constant flight forward’.
I’m deeply inspired by Doctorow’s process. It chimes with my claim that from fragments you can build a greater whole.
It also echoes and updates the approach of Henry Thoreau, who first jotted down field notes, then transferred them to his journal, and used these fragments to inform his many speeches and talks, which were then written up further into published essays and finally converted into the books, such as ‘Walden’, for which he’s now famous.
💬 “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg – by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame – in which more may be developed and exhibited.”
The advantage writers have now is that they can publish their nest-eggs directly, as they go. Perhaps this is what the likes of Thoreau and Emerson would have done, if only the technology had been available to them.
But Doctorow isn’t the only person who works like this. For example, Roy Peter Clark published a book by writing one blog post a week for fifty weeks. From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow.
Anyway, I look forward to reading a whole book on the Memex Method, though I’m not holding my breath, since the author apparently has four other book-length projects to deliver beforehand. If the process works, perhaps he’ll manage it.
Now read: Why not publish all your notes online?
———
Cory Doctorow’s pace puts almost everyone to shame. All I’ve published is Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Still, I keep on writing slowly, 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.
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.
Game of Likes
I was remembering that time when the MrBeast training manual was leaked and people thought it might offer some insights into how to win at YouTube. Well, it certainly gave some insights into MrBeast.
How to succeed in MrBeast Production | simonwillison.net
There was a part of the manual that made a clear argument in favour of ‘virality’:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
This is a great example of how people do things because they think they have agency but actually their environment largely conditions what they do. If you make videos for YouTube, sooner or later you’ll at least contemplate sitting in a bath of ketchup. That’s the logic of the medium controlling both what’s ‘interesting’ (50 hours in ketchup) and what’s ‘rational’ (filming it).
This little theory goes some way towards accounting for what happened to the likes of Russell Brand, the comedian turned influencer turned defendant, who seems to have pursued every attention-grabbing fashion under the sun, like a seagull checking out empty takeaway trays. It might also at least partly explain the creepy and often abusive behaviour of those ‘manosphere’ influencers in Louis Theroux’s documentary on the tendency. One of them said “I’m playing the game of life and I’m playing it very well”.
That – or the game of likes is playing him and it’s playing him very well.
Because it’s not just the medium (YouTube) that determines the message (50 hours in ketchup): there’s also the audience. ‘An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is ingfinitely more interesting…’ …well, interesting to whom exactly? The implication of the MrBeast manual was that this question was so irrelevant as to remain beneath asking. Presumably the algorithm delivered views and the view count went up, up, up. But whose views?
When you sit in a bath of ketchup for 50 hours you’ll attract the people who enjoy this kind of thing - the spectacle, the humiliation, the low-key shock value, (though presumably not especially the ketchup).
But is this the kind of attention or the kind of people you really want to attract? They just want ketchup, not you or anything else about you.
Unless and until you sit in a bath of custard.
The Writing Slowly stats page has been given a natty makeover. As a result I’ve learned it will take 18 hours to read this whole site. Good luck!
#IndieWeb #SmallWeb #DataViz #SlowLiving
Beginner’s mind: Flea turns to the trumpet
Here’s another great example of ‘beginner’s mind’ in action.
Flea, long famous as the amazing bass player in Red Hot Chili Peppers, has pivoted to jazz trumpet. As a kid he played trumpet with his stepfather, but he hadn’t played seriously in decades. That changed when he decided to make an album.
💬 “I decided I’m gonna play trumpet every day for two years, and at the end of the two years, I’m gonna make a record. I don’t know how good I’m gonna be at the end of two years, but I know I’m going on a two-year-long stadium tour with the Chili Peppers and I can play in my hotel room, and that’s what I’m gonna do, and that’s what I did. I practised every day for two years, and went and made my record.”
Did he know he’d be good enough after two years of daily trumpet playing? No, instead he used it as a forcing function. No matter what: put out the record.
💬 “I got insecure that I wasn’t good enough. But it was more being moved to tears by how vulnerable it felt, like I’m baring my soul. I was prepared that it might not work, that it might suck. I was prepared to fail. But I read this thing by Neil Young where he goes, “I’ve made shitty records and I still put them out because failure is important.” When I read that by Neil Young, someone I admire so much, I was like, f– yeah! If I fail, great. It’s beautiful to take a risk. If I fail, I f–ing tried.”
Well, by listening to his album, Honora, you can judge for yourself whether he failed (spoiler: he didn’t).
A review of ‘Honora’ in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Now read:
The greatest experts are serial beginners.
What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis.
What Billy Strings learned from his father.
The fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise.
—-
Thanks for reading. Did you know you can subscribe to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest?
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available right now.
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
Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?
In the olden days (approximately 2010) there was a mass exodus to social media from blogging. It was like the Rapture but with tweeting. And today there’s a new mass exodus to AI from… well, everything.
It seems all anyone can talk about now, or even think about, is AI. Here’s some breathless reportage from the front line:
💬 “I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.” - Token Anxiety | nikunjk.com
So maybe many of the people who used to be interested in the Zettelkasten, an approach to maintaining a useful collection of notes, are now interested in AI agents. After all, just look at those efficiency gains!
But it seems to me that the Zettelkasten concept was always rather antiquated. After all, it looks quite a lot like the fetishization of an obsolete process for writing academic papers by hand, that ended in the late 1990s when its most visible proponent, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, passed away, just as digitization took over.
Luhmann commented in one of his later notes: “Microprocessors have been announced, but are not really available yet” (ZKII: 9/8,2). But his career crossed over with that of the personal computer, and by the start of the Twenty-first Century everyone was using computers. The old card indexes and their index cards were thrown out wholesale.
So already, anyone interested in the Zettelkasten is surely more than a little nostalgic and in possession of a very niche interest. Meanwhile AI has parsed everything about the Zettelkasten approach, gleaned from a thousand AI-generated videos, and spits it out relentlessly in summary, so it seems there’s almost nothing left for humans to say on the matter.
What Luhmann said of his own Zettelkasten suggests that there never really was anything much to see.
“Ghost in the box? Spectators visit. They get to see everything, and nothing but that - like in a porn movie. And the disappointment is correspondingly high.” (ZKII: 9/8,3)
There’s nothing left to see and nothing left to say. Except, that is, for nearly everything.
The affordances of old practices, methodologies and technologies tend to be superseded without recognition of their value, so people hardly notice that the new tech doesn’t do exactly what the old tech did, and in some cases it does it worse, even while commanding more persuasive PR.
To give just a handful of examples: tangible cards arranged on a desk or in drawers make unexpected connections visible, whereas digital lists and files tend toward linear, filtered views that reduce the serendipity of chance encounters; meanwhile, the writing, sorting, and handling of cards can strengthen both memory and understanding, while typing and clicking offer much weaker embodied cues; and then paper cards remain readable for years or even decades without any need for software updates or file migrations, but proprietary formats and app or plug-in dependencies can render digital notes difficult to recover.
I could go on, but I’m not trying to make an argument for why paper still beats electrons. That ship sailed a long time ago. My point is that the new tech doesn’t completely supersede the old tech; it’s just different. As media scholar Neil Postman reminded us, progress isn’t linear - it’s ecological. Every technological ‘improvement’ changes the whole ecosystem, and not everywhere for the better.
That means we can still learn from the past and from past practices. A few people are still interested in the potential of old innovations, even when its no longer fashionable to have anything to do with them. I’ve ruminated previously on what happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind.
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. There’s still something left to see, and quite a lot left to say.
Now read: Use case for the Zettelkasten.
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.
Translations of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten notes (i.e the few notes in his Zettelkasten that he wrote about his Zettelkasten) are to be found at Zettelkasten.de.
Updating this site to Hugo 0.158 has caused the Search function to break. Normal service will shortly resume. 🤞
An update to the update: rolling back to Hugo 0.91 until plugins are updated. Search is back in action.
A mind like a skittish and unbroken horse
“Unless it is occupied with some governing object that restrains and disciplines it, the mind will scatter itself wildly across the vast field of imagination.” - Michel de Montaigne, “De l’oisiveté” (Essais, Book I, ch. 8), first published 1580.
It’s important to work with the end in sight, says Venkatram Belvadi. He says he limits the projects he works on concurrently to only two. This is laudable, provided it can be done. I can’t do it, and neither, apparently, could the French essayist Montaigne.
In fact, Montaigne didn’t know to what end he was writing. He simply (or so he claimed) recorded his disordered thoughts.
“[The mind] engenders within me so many extravagant chimeras and fantastical monsters—so disorderly and irrational, crowding upon one another—that, having leisure to observe their foolishness and grotesque strangeness, I have begun to keep a record of them, hoping that, if I live long enough, I may one day make my mind ashamed of itself.”
If you do know what you’re working on then Venkatram’s advice, no doubt, is very sound. He abandoned his Zettelkasten, his unhierarchical collection of notes, and replaced it with a series of folders. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Montaigne and letting my mind wonder “like a skittish and unbroken horse”. To coral at least some of the prancing about, I’ve found my Zettelkasten to be quite effective. I wonder if I should add Montaigne to my deeply irresponsible list of writers with ADHD?
This video of Kurama-dera, a Buddhist temple outside Kyoto, is quite lovely. And the snowy scenery makes the place look completely different from when I visited it in late Summer.
Summer:
Winter:
📷 From time to time the world offers you an extraordinary, fleeting gift.
#photography #clouds
💬 “You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something.” - Sam Henri-Gold
Are you accumulating notes or actually creating something?
Semyon Vengerov gathered two million filing cards but never finished his dictionaries. What lessons does this Russian scholar offer for modern personal knowledge management?
#PKM #Zettelkasten #Writing #History #Notes