Future-proofing Your Knowledge in the Age of Information Overload
How to create a personal knowledge repository and why it matters.
What if Substack went bankrupt? What if Elon stepped down from Twitter and the next CEO starts purging anons from the platform? How about if Telegram’s data was seized by authorities and your favorite channels were shut down? How will you collect, preserve and distribute valuable information when the platforms you rely on are compromised or no longer online?
Even if these platforms aren’t going anywhere for a while, do you really want to rely on their servers to preserve the digital gems of knowledge you’ve encountered?
The average American consumes 34gb of data per day.1 In the new economy, digital content is an asset. As censorship of CDNs, social media platforms and search engines increase, the accessibility of what I call “alternative knowledge” will become more scarce and therefore more valuable.
This is why you need to create your own memex.
What is a Memex?
A memex is a hypothetical device described by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 article “As We May Think”. It stands for "memory extension" and is considered a precursor to the concept of hypertext and the World Wide Web. The memex was envisioned as a mechanical device that could store and retrieve vast amounts of information by interconnecting documents, books, communications, records, annotations, and personal notes. It aimed to supplement human memory and facilitate information organization and retrieval.
Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.2
In the digital age, Bush’s concept of a personal memex is no longer hypothetical, but something you can actually build digitally. Your memex can be built as a centralized knowledge repository consisting of various integrated applications, automations and methods that meet the following criteria:
All data is owned by you.
The memex is private but sharable and can be accessed both online and offline.
Information capture must be quick and efficient across any digital medium.
Must sync across all your devices when online.
The applications used should be open source, or at the very least, allow you to own all your data.
All information should be easily searchable and interconnected to optimize resurfacing of knowledge with “exceeding speed and flexibility”.
Each criteria must be met at minimum in order for this system to be efficient and useful enough to compel users to commit to using it frequently in the long term.
To be clear, I am calling the digital implementation of this system a memex for the purposes of this article. What we are really referring to here is known as personal knowledge management or PKM for short. Some also call it a second brain.
Why would anyone need this?
As stated above, we can’t trust 3rd party platforms to be arbiters of alternative knowledge.
In the knowledge economy, you can monetize what you know. Meaning, the knowledge you collect and curate can be expressed in various ways that can generate income for you.
It will help you develop the evergreen skills to express your knowledge, such as writing, note-taking and communicating your ideas effectively.
It will enhance your working memory. Because of the information overload we experience every day in the digital world, we tend to forget where to find information we encountered even within the same day of seeing it. This is a problem everyone experiences to varying degrees.
Building a PKM system allows you to outsource valuable information into a centralized location, reducing cognitive overload.
“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.” -David Allen
Personally, I would not have been able to share even half the content I’ve published here and on Twitter without using a PKM system. Because of it, I’m able to easily organize and curate my ideas, thoughts and digital information I find valuable.
How do I build my own memex?
Up until the past few years, it would have been challenging for anyone who isn’t moderately tech savvy to create something like this, let alone see a practical reason to. Like with any highly flexible digital tool, there is an initial learning curve, but its minimal and you’ll mostly learn by just using it and figuring out what works best for you.
The application I use is Obsidian, and there are very good reasons for this. It exceeds all the criteria listed above for building a knowledge repository.
Obsidian gives you total ownership of your notes, since it is essentially an advanced plaintext editor and your notes are markdown files.
Generating the notes in Markdown makes them future-proof. Even if Obsidian dies and for some reason you can no longer download the application, you’ll still be able to read, write and edit your notes with literally any computer.
You don’t need to be connected to the internet to use it.
It’s free. The only thing that will cost money is if you buy syncing functionality on their servers, which you don’t need. You can sync your Obsidian vault yourself with Github, Google Drive, Nextcloud, iCloud, and multiple other ways for free.
Its flexibility is unmatched. With over 1000 open source community plugins that enhance workflow efficiency, integration with other productivity apps.
The power of Obsidian really is in it’s flexibility and bi-directional linking. This is what makes it perfect for building a memex as a personal knowledge management system.
How I use personal knowledge management
I have my read-it-later app synched with it, so when I find articles I want to read, I send them to my read-it-later, make highlights and annotations in there, then it automatically gets processed in Obsidian where I can easily reference it.
I also use an open source software called Zotero which has my entire library of books and PDFs, this also connects with Obsidian and pulls highlights, annotations and generates bibliographies for footnotes. These are just a couple of the integrations I use to capture and curate information with little to no friction.
My PKM system has made me a much better writer and helped me to quickly resurface information I captured that is incredibly difficult to find through web searches. I can process my thoughts more clearly by offloading valuable information into Obsidian so I can clear up precious cognitive real estate for idea generation.
This system is a literal knowledge machine in an age where despite information overload, its becoming harder to actually make information your own.
With all the ways you can monetize what you know in the new digital economy, a PKM acts as a vault that stores your valuable gems of interconnected knowledge, which is why Obsidian calls your notes repository a vault.
Do I have to use Obsidian?
No, you don’t even have to use Obsidian for PKM, there’s a handful of other apps that will suffice. You can look at Joplin and Logseq for open source options. Many use Notion but that is not an option for me as you don’t own your data and it requires internet connection to access your notes.
By the way, in case this sounds too “sales-y”, I am by no means affiliated with Obsidian, it’s a free application and I gain nothing if you decide to use it, so I’m purposely not even going to include a link to the application. If you want to try it, search for Obsidian.md and have at it.
I know this article is a little different from what I normally write about, but if it gets any interest, perhaps I’ll follow up with a tutorial on how to get started.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah; Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262232272.
Would definitely be interested in a tutorial. I've been thinking about a similar concept lately, I had no idea that something like this actually already existed. Very cool!
Having a way to capture and process information is likewise an excellent way to avoid mindless browsing, viewing, etc.
For example, watching videos, films, reading books, etc.,.. one can more intentionally use this time via adding notes to logs, notes, [...] thereby making consoooooming choices "INPUTS" to a productive engine.
[I am a David Allen "Getting Things Done" practioner/shill] 😁