digital garden

A digital garden is effectively an interconnected set of publicly available notes. You can think of it as a highly personal wiki, except its objective isn’t to document and organize information, but rather to support the development of complex trains of thought over long periods of time. In other words, it utilizes the affordances of hypertext to scaffold thinking processes (see: long-form arguments are just strings of evergreen notes)

My digital garden consists of a subset of my zettelkasten notes, which I write using [[ Obsidian ]].

One of the main reasons this digital garden is important to me is because I believe it offers a glimpse of what a healthier [[ epistemic commons ]] could look like, where more and more people are willing to think deeply and engage in [[ dialectic synthesis ]], even if asynchronous and note-based.

Unfortunately, the attention economy is collapsing our ability to engage in good-faith discourse that embraces complexity and nuance. Luckily, zettelkasten provides a space for deep, contextual, and nuanced thinking. Perhaps the more people trained in such writing styles, the better our public discourse could become.