#fiction #films #SF #boundedimagination

Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.

A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.

It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.

Interstellar starts in the near future of 2067, when a mysterious blight is slowly poisoning the atmosphere, causing increasing crop failures and threatening human survival through starvation and suffocation. For this, technology offers no cure, and so like most of humanity, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is engaged in a progressively more futile effort to maintain agricultural production. That is, until mysterious messages guide him to a secret NASA facility where a last ditch effort is underway to find a new home among the stars for humanity. A wormhole has appeared near Saturn, leading to another star system with potential habitable planets. And so Cooper, the last astronaut, is drafted into a plan for a small crew to transit the wormhole and link up with an earlier recon team sent to establish whether any planets on the far side might support human life.

Cooper must leave his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet, Casey Affleck) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fry, Jessica Chastain) behind, not for a few years, but possibly for a lifetime. For the planets on the far side orbit a supermassive black hole, warping time and space around it. Interstellar is serious about its physics, both the orbital mechanics of spacecraft and the uncanny time dilation of general relativity theory, and the movie feels partly like a love letter to (and some product placement for) a NASA that may only ever have existed in our collective imagination. The increasing age difference between the away team and Earth caused by relativistic forces is central to the story, with Cooper forced to watch his children age decades in what to him are only a few hours, viewing their mounting frustration at his lack of reciprocal communication.

Cooper and Murph’s separation by space and time is the heart of Interstellar, and if its concluding message that love can transcend both risks being saccharine, the movie is more than salvaged by the respect with which it treats both the impersonal forces of physics, and the deeply personal struggles of Cooper and Murph. And by the incomparable soundtrack, of course.

With the relationship between Cooper and Murph the emotional core of the movie, the intellectual heft lies with the desperate attempt to secure a future for humanity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the leap into space. And while adequately compelling courtesy of the usual accidents and interpersonal conflicts that beset missions like these, this is where Interstellar falls into a depressingly familiar pattern of stories featuring mysterious catastrophes that can only be overcome via a single technologically sophisticated but highly dangerous gambit, placing the burden of humanity’s survival on the shoulders of an intrepid and often reluctant few. For Interstellar it is crop failure. In Project Hail Mary it was space bacteria. Elsewhere it might be asteroids, or the Earth’s magnetosphere, or some other quasi-plausible disaster. Regardless of their precise nature, these putative apocalypses can all easily be read as allegories for climate change, which itself remains firmly taboo on the silver screen, presumably because it is too confrontational for the audience. This displacement conveniently redefines the existential threat as something that is emphatically not amenable to radical social or political transformation, but can only be overcome through a single, ‘neutral’, technological fix. To do otherwise might after all lead the audience to inadvertently imagine a world beyond capitalism. The effect of stories like Interstellar, even if achieved unintentionally, is to enclose our political horizons and obscure the fact that the technological solutions to our actually existing existential threat are already available to us.

Interstellar does present varying responses to the blight, ranging from the reluctant hero willing to suffer personal hardship for family and humanity but unable to sacrifice the many so that a few might survive, to the scientists who hold fast to the technological breakthrough that might save humanity in some form, even if it does require cold moral calculus. There is however one character which represents the stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and, quite literally, plough on in the face of adversity: Cooper’s son Tom, who inherits the family farm and holds the agricultural frontline against the encroaching blight. Tom is neither astronaut nor scientist. He is emphatically not special, but one of millions if not billions of farmers like him desperately trying to keep humanity alive. Adherence to Interstellar’s techno-optimist tendency however requires that he is portrayed as a stubborn Luddite, engaged in a futile and even harmful rearguard action as dust storms and crop failures make his situation increasingly untenable.

And yet, we are more akin to Tom than any of the other characters. No convenient wormhole will come to our rescue. No single technological breakthrough will be our salvation. We do not need a futuristic technological fix to traverse the cosmos or go to Mars. The manifold solutions we have to our predicament, technological or otherwise, are already at our disposal. What is standing in our way is not our failure to unify quantum theory with general relativity, but a system optimised for the generation of short-term profit at the expensive of all else, including the future habitability of our planet. Our solution is the collective power of many, coming together to save the world we have from the billionaires who would happily watch millions of us die to safeguard their wealth and status.

Interstellar is objectively an epic movie, admirably rooted in real scientific knowledge and with an affective father/daughter relationship at its heart. But despite its ostensible hopeful ending, its intellectual core is fatalistic and tacitly reactionary, reinforcing the narrative that we cannot collectively solve our problems here on Earth, but must wait for a heroic saviour to lead us to the stars.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will not save us. We can only save ourselves, if we collectively decide not to go gently into that good night, but to rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Notes and suggestions

• The blight may be an invention, but the collapse of agricultural production due to soil exhaustion is a real risk. We live in an age of ecological polycrisis after all, and while soil degradation doesn’t have the profile of climate change, it is no less real.
• Want to know why technology won’t save us in significantly more detail? Then why don’t listen to the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast?
• Like Tom, and admittedly the other characters in Interstellar, we are not alone in fighting for the survival of people and planet. If you feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and are unsure about what you can do, consider supporting or joining organisations such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Other options (not mutually exclusive!) are local environmental campaign groups, green political parties, or even local (guerrilla) gardening groups. And if you are looking to slow down and work out how to stay sane in a world that feels like it is going insane, there are others who write inspiringly on how to do just that.
• Regular readers may remember that I’ve recently written about Project Hail Mary. Having now watched Interstellar for the first time, Project Hail Mary feels not only inspired by, but to some extent derivative of Interstellar, although it takes the subject into a more humorous direction.
• For an in-depth discussion of the Californian Ideology, you can listen to one of the early podcasts from General Intellect Unit.

Values Matter for Institutions, Cynicism is Politically Useless

What actions are proper for a police officer to take during their interactions with the public? Who has the right to make laws? Who is likely to make true claims about the age of the Earth and who is likely to make false claims? Who should you listen to when it comes to medical treatment and who should you ignore? These questions all have to do with the idea of authority, a generalized belief that a specific actor or organization has the right to take specific actions. Institutions provide a framework for answering these questions. Institutions are collections of social norms that tell us not only who has authority to do what, but also what kinds of exercises of actions are valid and what kinds are not valid. So we can say that institutions legitimate authority, that is, an institution creates the context in which an exercise of power is seen by most as right or wrong. I am using the word authority here very broadly, I don't just mean legal authority, but also other forms of authority. Whether or not someone gets to be your boss at work requires a sort of institutional authority, not just anyone can tell you how to do your job or fire you. The same is true for knowledge-based claims; not anyone can tell you what is true or false, some people's opinions are more respectable than others. The same is true for moral claims, not everyone has the same authority to talk about what is good and what is bad—think about the difference between the moral opinions of a gang member vs. a pastor or moral philosopher.

Institutions tell us who, in a given situation is an authority, and who is not. In the US, the institution of democracy (our Constitutional Republic is a specific kind of democracy) tells us who has the right to make laws and who has legal authority. Our local and Federal government tells us who has the right to arrest people, and also what those people can do when arresting someone. The system of corporations in our economy provides a framework for who can give orders at a job, and what those orders can look like. Our education and scientific systems provide the basis for identifying the people whose knowledge claims about the world are likely to be correct and whose are likely to be junk. Religious and philosophical systems provide the basis for moral claims.

Unsurprisingly, folks who study institutions are often interested in working out how authority emerges in a given system. Put differently, a lot of research about institutions is really research about how any given action can be transformed from a raw act of power to an act legitimated by authority. How do some people, say medical doctors researching infectious disease, come to be recognized as truth-tellers on the subject of disease while others, say podcasters, never seem to achieve the same legitimacy?

Cynicism about authority

One answer to this question, put forth by a group of institutional scholars in the 1970's was that institutions are built up around rituals, and it is these rituals that gives someone authority within a given field. So what gives the sentencing decision made by a judge its authority (what makes it seem like the judge has the right to send someone to prison) is the fact that the judge goes through the trial rituals. The judge wears the special robes, sits in their special seat, and makes sure all the special trial rules, themselves another set of rituals, are followed. My presentation here is quite glib, any institutionalist who took this position would be quick to point out the chain of rituals that began for the judge in law-school and continued through their career as a lawyer, then as a judge, but you get the point. The same argument could be made for the doctor vs. the podcaster. The doctor is more authoritative on the subject of infectious disease because they do the rituals. They went though the ritual of medical school, they attend conferences, write papers, etc. Whereas the podcaster did not. Their rituals involved sitting around getting high. The rituals tell you who to listen to and who to ignore.

I find this view of authority cynical for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it omits values from questions of power and authority. What actors working within the constraints of an institution believe is either treated as totally irrelevant or treated as a product of the ritual itself. A judge may say they care about justice, but that does not really matter for why people think the judge has the right to sentence people in the first place. Or a judge may say they care about justice, but that is only because they went through the rituals of law school, then lawyering, then judging, so the rituals socialized them into caring about justice. Or maybe they were socialized into saying they care about justice and the value was never there.

I think some people find view attractive because it is cynical. One can insist that the values people hold have no bearing on the outcomes of authority and power, which leaves us free to ignore them. If you want to understand the judicial system, beliefs about justice are irrelevant. But is that really the case? It is pretty trivial to show that a mere ritual is not sufficient to establish authority. Consider for example the young earth creationist. These guys hold views about biology and geology that are not well regarded by mainstream science. In fact, their ability to speak with authority about the age of the earth is pretty much non existent. Is it because they don't do the rituals? Well, what sort of rituals would be required to be a scientist (to speak with authority on the age of the earth)? You'd need to defend a PhD, collect data, do analysis, attend conferences, and write papers. But young earth creationists do those things. Many of them have PhDs, sometimes even in fields related to geology. They collect data, they have their own conferences, and even write papers in their own special journals. So why don't they speak with authority? About the only people who believe young earth creationists are people who generally reject science and want to believe in a young earth in the first place.

We can see the same problem arise in the judicial system. Ritual offers a very unconvincing account of how the judicial system has responded to Trump's justice department. At almost every level we see failure in Trumps DOJ despite the presence of ritual. Across the US, but particularly in DC and Virginia, grand juries have rejected DOJ attempts to obtain indictments against Trump's political enemies. This tells us something about the relationship between ritual and legitimacy. Grand jury investigations and indictments are done ex parte, meaning the defense is not present to make an argument against what the prosecutor is saying. The standards for evidence are also lower, meaning the prosecutor's version of the case can be weak and is virtually unchecked. Thus, grand juries have a reputation for rubber stamping whatever a prosecutor wants. If there were ever a place where pro-forma ritual would explain why some actions are legitimate it would be in a grand jury! Yet, Trump's lawyers have seen {} failures since 2024. We also see judges rejecting the arguments of the DOJ time and again, excoriating DOJ lawyers for their behavior and repeatedly sanctioning them with contempt proceedings. Why should Trump's DOJ do so poorly? After all, they do the rituals of the court room. The file briefs and pleadings, they make arguments, raise objections, etc.

It turns out, values matter a lot

What distinguishes young earth creationists from geologists and Trump's DOJ from the DOJs of other administrations, are values. Despite their claims otherwise, creationists do not really value truth or empiricism, relying heavily on cherry-picking data and ignoring obvious problems with their theories. Their rituals are hollow. We can say of young earth creationists that when they collect data, attend conferences and write papers, all they are doing is aping the rituals of science. But the rituals do not actually result in scientific knowledge because what creationists are trying to do is make the data fit their world view. By contrast geologists value truth and empiricism (they really do!) so if there is a theory that only works if you ignore data or the laws of physics, then geologists will tend to regard such a theory as a problem. The institutions that collectively make up “science” coalesce around a particular set of values. Among them are respect for truth, empiricism, and a respect for logic. In general, it will bother a scientist when their theory is contradicted by evidence. It bothers them with their theory turns out to be internally inconsistent. The young earth creationist does not care about that.

The same can be said for Trump's DOJ. Absent from the DOJ's prosecution of Trump's enemies is any concern for justice. Investigations are done so that blowhards can run their mouths on TV, sloppy incompetent work is submitted in courts to “make a statement”. Rules, procedures and in some cases even the law itself is ignored resulting in a pattern of poor performance for the DOJ and the at this point, almost complete destruction of the department's reputation.

The DOJ has all but lost the presumption regularity in the court, making challenges to their legal actions easier for defendants. Why? Because what the DOJ is doing in their prosecutions is unjust. And importantly courts recognize and care about that fact. So if you want to understand how the court system works, you have to understand the values of judges. Why they think this or that action is just and what they do when they encounter parties acting in bad-faith. Values matter. Even an exhaustive and complete description of the rituals would not be enough to describe the system.

Identifying tensions between values and practice is not the same thing as showing that values do not exist

Sometimes people respond to this argument by pointing out that the institutions will endorse a set of values, but fail to meet them, or to say that an institutional version of a value is inadequate. Certainly this sort of charge can be levied against the justice system in the US. There are countless examples of miscarriages of justice. Two obvious examples are false confessions tortured out of innocent people, and the systematic differences in how laws are enforced across different racial groups. These examples make it clear that the US justice system falls short of its own ideals, but saying that an institution falls short of its values is not the same thing as saying those values don't exist. This is the trap of the cynic. It produces a fatal mindset about the institution. If justice is not a value of the justice system, then the system is irredeemable and beyond saving, which leads to the idea that there is nothing there of value and that reform is impossible. But however unjust the US justice system currently is, it is less unjust than it used to be when we consider institutions like slavery legal race-based discrimination, and Jim crow era laws. I argue that one of the major drivers of reform in the history of the US justice system is the chasm between its values and its practice. Demonstrating unequivocally that the justice system is unjust, as the Civil Rights movement did creates a dilemma for those who value justice. If you value justice, then a status quo of slavery, racial segregation, or, for a more contemporary issue, the abuse of plea deals become intolerable. The tension between institutional values and institutional practice become the impetus for reform, and the history of the US justice system shows that drama play out over and over. Importantly each time is does play out, the system gets to be a little better.

Cynicism is politically worthless

The whole point of all of this is to point out what a losing proposition cynicism is for political power. If everything is fake, or rigged, or exists only to benefit the powerful, then there is no point in acting. But I don't think there is any reason to believe this is true. As far as the law is concerned, Trump's DOJ seems to be doing everything it can to create the impression that the DOJ can do whatever it wants, that individuals can be “unpersoned” and then disappeared, that you only have rights if the DOJ says you do, that the president can make arbitrary decisions about any legal matter. In short what Trump wants the justice system to be is what the cynic claims it already is. But people in the justice system, lawyers, judges and jurors have been rejecting this vision of the institution, because they value justice. Trump's corrupt vision for the law is horrific. It must be resisted, forcefully, consistently, and eagerly by legal professionals and laypersons alike. The way to generate the will to resist is through values. There is a clear tension between what Trump wants to do with the legal system and the value of justice. And it is easy to make a strong argument against the lawlessness that he favors by pointing that out. Contrast that with the position of the cynic. Nothing can be done, the justice system only represents the interests of the powerful, and Trump is the exact same as every other leader. Not only is this view incorrect, people in the justice system do sincerely value justice, its worthless as a basis for making the world a better place. “Everything is terrible and we can't do anything about it” is a horrible sales pitch.

What troubles me so much about those that position themselves in opposition to Trump is the number of people who take the cynical position. This leads to fatal mindset. Since nothing can be done there is not point in trying to do the difficult work of politics. Instead we get people who get on the internet to express their cynicism to people who already agree with them. That is not useful. I think one of the reasons the Civil Rights movement was successful was because it didn't fall into the trap of cynicism. During the Jim Crow era, there was arguably a détente between white supremacists and the rest of the US, in which a war-weary populace looked the other way while white supremacists pretended the system that existed in the Southern US was one of justice. This let the people not affected by the brutality and injustice of the Jim Crow system pretend like there was no unjustice, and it let the white supremacists impose a system of oppression on African Americans. What the Civil Rights movement did was demonstrate that arrangement to be the fiction that it was. A big part of the effort there was to appeal to justice and equality as values. The argument that Civil Rights leaders made to the rest of America was one that appealed to their values. The system was unjust, and you (random white American) should care about that because you care about justice. That is a far cry from the fatal mindset of the cynic and far more compelling than “everything is hopeless.”

Every year millions (billons?) of tons of food is wasted right at the point of processing. Beautiful food. Perfectly, new food. It simply doesn’t make the cut or is too expensive to harvest. Probably the real reason is the speed and efficiency at which we must capitalize (capitalism).

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Let’s take the lowly cod’s head, for example. Nobody at the local wharf would ever consider harvesting these cod’s heads—they are discarded overboard as waste. Nobody except this 91 year old man who’s witnessed times when waste was impermissible. This was food when there was none. That tradition – or necessity – is long gone in the age of mass production of boxed, frozen, and preserved food.

When one gets past the conditioning of what is not acceptable to eat, and educates oneself on the horrors of boxed, preserved, dye-injected, nutrient-deficient, commercially-productive, profit-intensive packaged foods for the masses, only then will one enjoy a feed of cod’s heads.

W

Give creativity room to breathe, and happiness will follow.

I consider myself to be a creative person. Not in the sense of painting pictures, sculptures, or drawing, but in the world of business. I've said it before, but being an entrepreneur is my art.

But like any artist, I can't be satisfied if I don't have the space to fully express my creativity. This used to cause me a lot of stress in that if I didn't have that mental space, I would feel constrained and frustrated. But my perspective on this has shifted over the past few years.

Part of being an artist is recognizing the environments that are conducive to creating art, and waiting for the opportune moments. In other words: not forcing it. I used to force it. I used to still push to be creative even when life was choking out the space for that creativity.

Sitting with the Moment

Currently, I don't have the space to be creative. The schedule I have with my newborn doesn't leave much time for anything else, let alone high-level creation. I'm tired and I'm restricted to a schedule that isn't really within my control.

Rather than get frustrated at my inability to pursue creative thoughts, I just take stock of where I am in life and I “let it breathe”. Meaning, I stay firmly in the moment and recognize that it's not the right time, but that time will come. Accepting it and moving on.

With this approach, fulfillment comes from timing. Give creativity space, and happiness will follow.

#happiness

Texas Rangers vs Atlanta Braves

This Sunday's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Atlanta Braves again in a game that starts at 12:35 PM CDT. This is the rubber game of a three-game set. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

When social media officially entered the public sphere in ~2009, I joined the platform advertised for helping people connect with family and find old friends. There was the thrill of looking up buddies from high school and college, and when the message app came along I could send messages to people I haven’t had anything in common with for decades. Like my boyfriend S.K. from high school, a midwesterner who popped out a bunch of kids, or J and R, same deal. We shared old photos and longed for our former bodies. And how quickly K.D. forgot our union ended in hateful words. It just took a single photo of us — me in my cheap vinyl dress and him in his 80s Zoot suit — for him to wax poetic about our relationship, when it was just really just eczema outbreaks and cocaine. And then came the late night boozing and a few online fights. I only participated in a handful of matches, but I was the queen of unfriending and blocking people when they saw I was virtually slurring. I thought everyone was watching and I had a double life to protect.

I had a brief stint on the popular photo app Instagram, until the ads filled up every three-finger flips, and live streaming took over from everyone with an opinion, well-formed or not. I likened it to a town square with a million people on soapboxes in a deafening chorus of diatribes. I tried to add my voice, my opinion, but it was late on the East Coast and everyone had already gone to bed. I found out that most didn’t want to engage in discourse or debate; they just wanted the thrill of getting attention.

But like everyone, there were deletions and rejoining, as I felt like everyone was on these sites and I couldn’t connect with them offline. I isolated and went where everyone else went, pushed online. 

When the friends became less interesting and their politics even more so, pop culture, the lives of people I’ve never met, and celebrities became more compelling. And there is one platform that I’ll affectionately refer to as The Carousel that is hard to resist. It's YouTube and it's bastard child, Shorts, which is effectively TikTok for people who aren't on TikTok.

If you took a snapshot of my personal, curated, algorithmically-controlled carousel and studied it a bit, you would learn about what I love, or maybe something you might not know about me: dogs, mixed race couples, movie trailers, comedy skits, stupid criminals, Miley Cyrus, and dead essayists. Yet something insidious creeps in the more time I spend on the carousel. The carousel speeds up, maybe it allows me to catch the brass ring a few times, like that high I get when I see that sweet montage of a 6-year old and her friendship with a 20-foot boa constrictor, or the genuinely sincere way Blake Shelton looks at Gwen Stefani in the duet “Purple Irises.”

Hitting refresh, I’m now shown a film of a dog whose owner has abandoned it in the freezing snow. It might not live. Kind people save the day. The carousel has now taken me below a line. I can smell the oil from the motor. Next I might see a dog trapped under the carousel, clear abuse from a now visible owner, and down it goes. I start to feel depressed, and I’m exhausted as if I had spent the night drinking. I’m scattered, confused, not able to feel really much of anything. I’ve been flooded by all the parts of my emotional makeup playing themselves out online. The algorithms have hijacked my human complexity, formed a model of my likes (and what tugs at my heart) and fed me back to me.

The word “tolerance” is key here, and it’s worse than alcohol, because it’s a drug that’s available 24/7/365. How in the world will we ever get off of it? The more the carousel pulls us along, showing us endless black mirrors, we can never become or change, trapped in an endless cycle of our need for love, purpose, to want justice, and feel joy. One is not made to feel every part of themselves at every waking moment. It’s poison to becoming, leaving one scattered and vulnerable.

#essays

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0

I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.

Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan's position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn't seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.

What Was the Purpose

There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan's argument about Personal Knowledge Management:

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It's taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?

Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven't. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.

The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:

I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.

And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or “future-proofing.” What it does suggest is, “We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. […] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.” There is no hint at the concepts being “higher-brow” or anything to indicate an ascribed “epistemological value.”

Instead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite:

Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.

Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution.

The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that's enough.

So where Brennan came up with all of this “future-proofing” and “highbrow” and “epistemological value” is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need.

Where I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it's developers have provided?

I think I am going to side with the developers on this one.

Brennan then posits his central thesis a second time:

My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.

I do wonder what “complex, robust systems” he means at this point. He's only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It's a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995).

Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

Personal Knowledge Management Systems

After providing a list of PKM's (most notable of which are PARA, Johnny Decimal, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Commonplace Books), Brennan sets out a series of questions for the examination of these systems:

1. First, what does it mean to make an important and meaningful contribution to our understanding of the world?
2. Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.
3. Third, what does the process actually look like for the actual people who write important papers and books?
4. Fourth, what is the throughput and output of the people who have dedicated themselves to PKM frameworks?

This series of questions, in itself, is something of a mess. The first question doesn't have any relationship to personal knowledge management. What a person contributes to the world isn't measured by their ability to store or regurgitate information. Making an “important and meaningful contribution” is a highly nebulous concept that is dependent on the audience and the author.

The second question is a complete shift in scope. Making “important, meaningful contributions” to academia and communications is not the same as making a contribution to “our understanding of the world”. And then there's this: “…shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.” To many, academia is quite literally a form of elitism that gate keeps information. (Aside: I could make a long argument here about what happened to Aaron Swartz in his attempt to liberate the information that was being gate kept by academia.)

Third question: surely it looks like whatever works for them, right? I mean, this is what the promise of Obsidian is in the first place: “Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.” If someone wants to use PARA, they use PARA. If they want to invent their own system (spoilers) then they will do so. Again, how is this relevant? Is a person's choice of system indicative or predictive of their ability to perform some task?

The fourth question is, possibly, the most valuable, and yet the most difficult. How do you know what people are choosing to use for their knowledge management? How does someone measure “throughput and output”? Certainly you can perform a quantitative analysis of this, however assessing the qualitative nature of this question is far more difficult.

Next we talk about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose Zettelkasten system has become widely known, and is frequently cited as a “genius” method for organizing one's notes or information. Brennan here thinks of this as a “Myth” because no one has been able to take Luhmann's notes and create new works based on them. People have realized that his system was idiosyncratic to Luhmann himself. But does that make his methodology a “myth?” I don't think so, it just means his method was specific to him.

The Questions

At this point Brennan starts going through the questions that he outlined (as quoted above), only there's a bit of goal shifting here. For example, question one is now stated as “What counts as a meaningful contribution to understanding?” Before it had to be both “important and meaningful” and it had to apply to “our understanding of the world”. But, nonetheless, let's continue. Brennan states:

The empirical literature on insight and creativity centers on incubation, the act of stepping away from a problem, unconscious restructuring, working memory offloading. This is not the act of browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.

Incubation is, quite literally, a portion of the process that systems like PARA (Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2022.) actually supports. In Chapter 3, he quite clearly states:

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us:

1. Making our ideas concrete
2. Revealing new associations between ideas.
3. Incubating our ideas over time.
4. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

(Emphasis added.)

The understanding is that this is very much in line with the ideas that works about insight and creativity have suggested. This isn't just spending time “browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.” It's storing information such that it can be found when it is needed and additional information might surface during the process that allows intuitive leaps in problem-solving. This whole concept is completely in line with the papers being cited.

And then Brennan disproves his whole point by pointing to a paper: Scholars ARE Collectors: A Proposal for Re-thinking Research Support which makes the point that academics are “hoarders” of information. And they organize and interact with this information in their own way. In other words: they make intuitive leaps through use of hoarded information.

The next question, “Are PKM frameworks used by people making real contributions, or mostly by people selling PKM?” is completely different from the one listed in the beginning of the article: “Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains, so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.”

Seriously? How does the literal questions keep changing this much? The first question mostly in scope. But now, the second question doesn't even match between statements of the question. I think I know why this happening, which I will explain towards the end of this article. For now, we'll talk about the revised question.

Brennan notes that there is a whole market of people selling books, courses, and other materials about PKM. And, makes note that it is likely that those who are writing and doing training about it are not likely applying their teachings.

Honestly, I don't know that this is really an issue. There are people that get into many lines of work, including things like life trainers, gym trainers, motivational speaking, etc. What works for one person may not work for another person. Listing off a bunch of people that don't use a system doesn't disprove the system, it only shows that there are other methods that can be used.

The part that I think was hilarious about this section was the “gotcha” Brennan tries to make of this post on the Obsidian forum. The way the original poster made his post, it's obvious that he was trying to promote his own book, and his website. But then one respondent posts a literal bibliography of at least fifty works the original poster didn't reference. The clear implication of this post: the original poster is unqualified in the field, he hasn't done his research. And yet, here we are, using this post where someone is debunking the original poster as an example.

Okay, on to the third question:”What does the process actually look like for people who write important books?” Hey, what do you know: this time the questions actually match!

Now, while I love to examine the processes of others when possible to glean any insights I can from them, and possibly integrate some of their concepts into my own, I don't see how this proves anything. Just because people that are highly successful, or are high functioning in their field don't adopt a PKM methodology or specific tool is no reflection on the methodology or the tool. It's just a matter of the person having found the tools and methods that work for them.

So, let's look at this statement from Brennan:

The analogue systems used by demonstrably prolific working writers are project-bounded and disposable. The digital PKM ideology sells the opposite promise of a permanent, ever-growing, cross-project system that gets more valuable the longer you maintain it.

Are the analogue systems always project-bounded? There are many times when fiction writers have started developing some idea or concept for a work, but found that it didn't fit the story they wanted to tell. So, do they just throw it away? No. They put it aside someplace only to be retrieved when it fits in the story they are writing.

The PKM system, on the whole, is about building a knowledge base, basically a library of knowledge that you can pull from. When you have a specific project, you pull the information that fits specifically within the scope of the project you are working on. This is basically no different from going to a library and gathering research materials. Just because a library has hundreds of thousands of books that don't apply to your field doesn't mean those books don't have value. There are likely books that don't fit in your field of study that still have value to you for other reasons.

Singling out three or four people that have processes that are completely different from PKM method doesn't disprove anything about PKM methods. It just shows that those methods don't work for them.

Okay, on to the last question: “What is the actual throughput of people dedicated to PKM?” Originally this was stated as “throughput and output” but now the scope is narrowed to “throughput”. And, what exactly is “throughput?” Is that quantifiable or measurable? Output could be quantified or measured: X number of articles, Y number of books, Z number of videos… More importantly, one could consider the potential impact based of their work product based on their relevance as measured by following.

The example given in this section is of Theo Stowell, someone who has been writing about PKM and using Obsidian for several years, and now is supposedly developing a new tool. How relevant is he? Well, the highest number of followers for Theo I could find was on Medium, where he has 1.8K followers. Everywhere else I looked (YouTube, Instagram, Substack) he had well below 1K followers, and in many cases well below 500 followers.

Now, how big is Obsidian? On Obsidian's own website, they indicated there were around 750K downloads by 2022. The most recent estimate I could find of Obsidian's distribution was in this Fueler article, which states there are between 1-1.5 million copies of Obsidian out there.

So, I don't understand the example of Theo Stowell, he doesn't seem to represent a significant presence in the Obsidian community considering there are plugins with well over 1 million downloads (23 as of this writing).

Now, we know that there is a big market around self-help, personal-development market. And organization systems, methods, and tools is a part of this market. But, honestly, it's not as big as it might seem. Tiago Forte, the most notable name in the PKM had a revenue of about $2.4M from his “Building a Second Brain” book. But when all the expenses were factored in, he netted approximately $1.26M. That is on the sale of 500K books.

Sure that sounds like a decent chunk of change, but in a market worth somewhere around $46 Billion in 2025, $2.4M is a fairly small amount compared to the potential. Obsidian is very difficult to estimate, but based on the referenced Fueler article, its revenue is somewhere between $5M and $25M annually. And even that is still a fairly small amount when compared to the overall industry.

Where Did Brennan's Article Go Wrong?

When I started the first draft of this response, I was stymied by how so much of the article had gone so wrong. I was thinking, “I don't know how I can ever explain this.” But, then, just when I thought I was going to have to say “I don't know” an article popped up on Bubbles that provided some insight: People and Blogs: Brennan Kenneth Brown. In particular, there is a segment about Brennan's writing process where he points to a post on his own site: My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight., wherein he talks about how he handles the research parts of his posts:

Regardless of my focus or topic, I go as fast as possible, as I want to reach 750 words in around 20 minutes, though sometimes it takes much longer.

How do I have articles heavy with links and stats and quotes from others if I'm writing so quickly? When I'm writing a research-heavy essay or commentary, I'll put something in brackets with TK and return back to it in the editing process so I don't slow down with the writing.

Rightly, he points out, this is a practice from journalism, as journalists are frequently writing in the field and don't have access to the research materials. But, there is a pitfall to this process: in trying to write and edit articles quickly, it can lead to poorly done research. And that is what appears to have happened with this article. Many of the cited (aka linked) articles, papers, and websites are inconclusive in relationship to their supposed point. In some cases they don't support the arguments that are being made at all.

This response post has been a two-day slog for me through all of this, and trying to do some quick research of my own to correct the misleading information in the original article. Indeed, a lot of this is my opinion or my interpretation of the materials that Brennan has placed before his audience. However, it's pretty simple to see that there is a substantial portion of his article that just was not well considered.

Conclusion

And this is where I get to point to a substantial irony in this story. Much of Brennan's issue with PKMs and tools like Obsidian is that we don't see a lot more output from people. That instead, we see quite a few people that have gone the route of trying to become influential in the PKM field, and writing their own books about it (with or without appropriate levels of research).

Brennan himself, has documented that his approach is to write a post every day. He makes it a process by which is tries to write 750 words in 20 minutes. He also notes that he has written quite a few novels, all of which are self-published works.

Personally, all of this is sounding completely backwards from what I was taught to do when writing a research paper. I was always told: come up with a thesis, do the research, and only when the research is complete write the paper. In fact, I was called out several times in school for not having done my research well, and trying to use sources in a narrow manner to prove points that they didn't support. Sound familiar?

I always had the excuse that I was working on a deadline, and I didn't realize the complications that I was going to run into, so I did the best with the materials that I had. But the fact was that I hadn't done the research properly, and I hadn't based my writing on the research. Instead, I went into the writing process trying to prove my thesis correct, even when it was weak or incorrect.

And that's the issue with Brennan's article. There is just a lot of the research that doesn't completely support the underlying statements. And even Brennan knew that he couldn't make the information fit the narrative that he had in his mind when he sat down and started writing. That's why we see things like restatements of questions that have substantial shifts in scope.

In the end, I think Brennan went into his post with good intention. But he became over-ambitious and let the whole thing creep out of his control. However, there is one thing that we both agree on: AI. As he states in his article:

I promise there is a deep debt to be paid if you attempt to offload cognitive labour to a non-deterministic machine, especially if you care about objectivity and facts.

Indeed, AI is no replacement for the labor of actually committing one's own cognitive processes to the page or screen.

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Categories: #Essays Tags: #response, #pkm, #knowledge, #management, #research, #writing, #notes, #notetaking License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

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• The Dink
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• Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston
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• King of the Hill — Season 15
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• = Obsession
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• = House of the Dragon
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• Here we go. — Spider-Man: Brand New Day
• Most important thing we know. — Digger
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• The wait is over. The Odyssey is in cinemas now. — The Odyssey
• you're not ready. — The Furious
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As of today, I have managed to keep eight pounds off overall. It's not what I wanted, but it's consistent, so I will take it. I'm trying to be easier on myself. At this rate, my goal should still be manageable by the end of the year. Since I have changed my days around in creating new habits, I think that will make it even more manageable.

The habit breaking is rough. It's getting easier, but I have a very addictive personality. I'm having to be very strict with myself so as not to stumble backwards. I'm not fond of being strict with myself. I'm also not fond of my breasts exploding out of my bras, so strict it will be. I'm still refusing to shell out $40 or more for something I have zero intention of needing very long.

Mindset is a bitch. I do not enjoy needing to be determined at this point in life. Life is not what I would like it to be, but I think that is probably the case for many. I'm thankful I have the time to complain.

As always, the news is highly frustrating and disturbing. It and my dreams stress me out. My dreams have been both extremely nice and extremely horrifying. I am not sure which is easier upon waking—the realization of something so wonderful being little more than a dream, or the memories of the unfathomably horrific and knowing that though it just a dream for me, it might not be for someone else.

It's been a little over a month since I made a few major life choices. That is what July appears to be being for me. Overall, I'm happy with them. I find my day-to-day more peaceful. I definitely hurt feelings with my choices. I own that. I'm not happy about doing so, but there are certain things I won't tolerate in my life no matter who someone is. I should have made one quite a time ago, but I made excuses for the person. That is a danger of seeing varying perspectives, and wanting to believe in people.

I think that is likely one of my biggest strengths and weaknesses simultaneously. I find it extraordinarily challenging to give up on someone. To me, that feels like a failure all the way around. However, sometimes there is very just cause for just walking away or placing considerable buffers between. I am getting better at that.

It hurts me a bit to intentionally do so. My nature is to help and heal. Going against that can be a hell of a personal challenge. As I get older, I just don't have the energy reserves I once had not to do so. Another thing I'm trying to figure out...how to keep my nature intact when life seems determined to lesson it out of me. Good thing I'm hardheaded.

I am trying to keep an optimistic mindset. It is challenging. Especially this time of year. I refuse to not succeed on that. It's possible I will fail at every other goal in life, but my spirit will not be defeated. I will have my happily ever after. I almost wrote, “Even if it kills me.” Alas, I think that'd be tempting fate a wee bit too much.

Written July 19, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

Ireland’s public policy challenges are becoming more complex. They cross domains. Housing affects transport. Transport affects energy. Energy affects climate and the cost of living. These systems cannot be understood in isolation. They need clarity. They need structure. They need explanation.

Marshall on Policy has always tried to make public policy understandable. But essays alone cannot carry the weight of a changing system. Essays explore ideas. They test arguments. They follow a line of thought. They are valuable, but they are not enough. A more structured form is needed. Something that explains how a system works and why it matters. Something that shows the choices ahead without turning into advocacy. Something that is calm, clear, and constructive.This is where policy briefings come in.

A policy briefing is not an opinion piece. It is not a reaction to the news cycle. It is not a polemic. It is a way to explain a public policy system in a structured way. It sets out the landscape. It defines the forces at play. It outlines the choices. It shows the consequences of those choices. It gives readers a clear picture of how a system works and where it is going.

Ireland needs this. The public conversation often jumps from headline to headline without explaining the system underneath. We talk about housing without talking about land. We talk about transport without talking about demand. We talk about energy without talking about storage, tariffs, or spilled electricity. The result is confusion.

People know the symptoms but not the structure. They know the problems but not the system that produces them.Policy briefings are a way to fix this.They are slow. They are deliberate. They are structured. They build understanding over time. They give readers a clear foundation so that later debates make sense. They are not about winning arguments. They are about explaining the system so that arguments can be made on solid ground.

This is a new direction for Marshall on Policy. It is a shift from essays to architecture. The briefings will sit alongside the essays, but they will do a different job. They will build a coherent picture of Ireland’s public policy systems. They will unfold slowly. They will be supported by technical notes at insights.marshall.ie. They will form the backbone of a larger project to explain Ireland’s energy system clearly and constructively.

The first briefing looks at Ireland’s spilled energy problem. Later briefings will explore flexible demand, storage, tariffs, infrastructure, and the longer‑term question of export potential. Each briefing will be supported by detailed notes. Over time these notes will grow into a full index of insights. This will become a reference layer for the entire project.

This is the beginning of a new phase for Marshall on Policy. A shift toward clarity. A shift toward structure. A shift toward explaining the systems that shape Ireland’s future. David Marshall Dublin

Marshall on Policy https://policy.marshall.ie

I’m starting a new series of Energy Policy Briefings. These will be clear, structured explanations of how Ireland’s energy system works and the choices ahead.

The first briefing looks at Ireland’s spilled energy problem and why it matters. Later briefings will explore flexible demand, storage, tariffs, infrastructure, and the longer‑term question of export potential.

Alongside the briefings, I’m building a quiet reference space at insights.marshall.ie. It holds the technical notes that support each article. Over time this will grow into a full index of energy insights.

The plan is simple. Briefing 1 will publish mid‑week. Briefing 2 will follow on 2 August. Briefing 3 will arrive around 12 August.

This is the beginning of a longer project to explain Ireland’s energy system clearly and constructively.

Eventually I hope to assemble the entire project into a single lication as one reference document

Yes. That feels like the right stance — and it changes the nature of the style sheet.It means the style sheet is not a list of prohibitions. It is a record of editorial judgement.Not:Always use X. Never use Y.But:When this kind of problem arises, here is how I understand the reader’s need, the sentence’s work, and the available marks.That is a much richer — and much larger — task. But it is also exactly the right task for an essayist.I’d frame your stance like this:Editorial stanceI take Hart and Butcher not as authorities for the imposition of arbitrary rules, but as companions in judgement. Their value is to encourage care: to think critically, practically, and supportively about the reader’s relationship with my words. The aim of style is not correctness for its own sake, but the best presentation of thought to a reader. Where a question of punctuation, typography, spelling, structure, citation, or layout arises, the governing question is: what will help the reader enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay?That gives us the governing principle.Then each style-sheet entry can follow a common pattern:Style-sheet entry pattern1.FunctionWhat is this element trying to do?2.Reader relationWhat does the reader need at this moment?3.Available formsWhat marks, constructions, or layout choices are available?4.Preferred tendencyWhat does your house style usually prefer?5.Exceptions / judgementWhen should that tendency be overridden?6.ExamplesOne or two sentences showing the difference.So for the current issue, the heading is not “En dash”. It is probably:Parenthetic movementAnd within it we would distinguish:•subordination, when the relation between ideas should be explicit;•commas, when the aside is light and integrated;•round brackets, when the material is cooler or off-stage;•spaced en dashes, when the essayist’s thinking voice visibly turns aside;•recasting, when the sentence has become overburdened.The emerging rule might be:Prefer relation before interruption.If the secondary material has a clear logical relation to the main clause — cause, concession, condition, time, purpose, definition — express that relation through syntax, often by subordination. Use parenthesis where the secondary material performs a genuine aside, qualification, hesitation, self-correction, or tonal adjustment.That already sounds like your style sheet: not a rule about punctuation, but a rule about thought becoming readable.

I’m really tired and so short post, but we had Our first date today! All Things considered it ended up being eight hours, and I’m not like super overjoyed with myself for it being that long because I really wanted to be intentional with not confusing, intimacy with intensity, and we did talk a little bit about trauma dumping topics, which is also not great but we talked about a lot of other stuff and so I’m really happy with how the date went. I also find myself pacing things a little bit better at least than it happened in the past so I am happy with that. And I really do. Think she’s a cool person and I find her funny and easy to talk to. There are a lot of things that are green flags, and a couple beige ones. Here’s to hoping.

At the rise of the brightest sun I dive into the deepest shade