Assuming all goes well, I will be re-entering school in the fall, at my ancient age, to study philosophy. The road that got me here isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not my primary focus for this essay. But, as a result of this decision, I’ve been re-learning how to take more detailed notes as I read; I’m using Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy” for this exercise, both because it’s a fairly simple read, designed for the layperson, and because it provides a nice entryway into the world of the philosophy of knowledge, which is a thing I find interesting.
I have, in the past, described my brain as a cocaine addled rat in charge of a radio dial, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s also a cocaine addled rat who stops turning the radio dial at random and tells you to really pay attention to this next song, maaan. It leads me down some strange rabbit holes, and the almighty algorithm periodically notes that I am in a rabbit hole, and feeds me an ad related to it. A little bit ago, as I was surfing over instagram, the algorithm fed me something about “antinet”. It turns out that “antinet” s just a form of something called “Zettelkasten”, which is also hilariously adjacent to “Zettel’s Traum” or “Bottom’s Dream”, which we do not speak of on this blog.
However, it should be noted that “Bottom’s Dream” was, at least at some point, a Zettelkasten. And what is a Zettelkasten? It’s a collection of short notes, usually written on index cards, which are indexed and cross referenced. There’s a bit more to it: each note is meant to be “atomic”, a single topic. You provide tags for indexing and cross-referencing, using a specific system. It’s a personal reference database; a way of organizing things you learn. As you add more cards, and make more links, the idea is that you will, in time, make surprising and new connections out of things. There’s software for this, but originally (and as we will see in a bit, presently) this was done via pen, paper, and boxes.
Honestly, it makes a good deal of sense, especially for something like philosophy, where you might have a card containing an idea, who was it’s originator, who built upon it, books that mention it, etc. You can take a look at a concept , “a priori knowledge”, its origin, refinement, critiques, etc, as atomic ideas as you come across them, and via cross reference, you have built a little history. There’s no need to go down a rabbit hole figuring out everything at once; you build the rabbit hole yourself, and, ideally, learn as you do so. And, if you’re doing it right, you can also remember where you learned the thing from, something I am terrible at doing, but something that would be important if say, writing a paper on the subject. From what I can tell, the most popular was of doing something like this these days is via software, and the most popular software for doing so is Obsidian. (There are others, like DevonThink, and some people use wiki software).
Enter “the antinet.” Antinet is a hard-line, closed system of Zettelkasten. The website (which I will not link to) promises a lot of things, but charges for all of them; it mentions a book which you get “for the cost of printing”, but the real product appears to be a newsletter. There’s a subreddit, which refers to users of Obsidian as “bubble graph boiz”, which consists largely of photos of Zettelkasten– which means photos of boxes, with index cards in them. The author of the book on “antinet” makes youtube videos with a surprising amount of vitriol in them. He has been to the Zettelkasten Sinai, and come down holding a set of commandments which you can pay $40 a month to receive. He also says “frickin” a lot. Dude, just say “fucking”. It’s fine.
In addition to the newsletter, your money gets you free books, and a digital copy of his own Zettelkasten, which is a kind of matter-antimatter collision I can’t begin to unpack– though it’s not “software”, just presumably a whole boatload of .pdfs. He also mentions his divorce, and I imagine his ex-wife yelling something like “bring ONE MORE INDEX CARD INTO THE HOUSE AND IT’S OVER”. Mostly, he pitches “financial freedom”, which on the internet means, “probably going to mention drop shipping or something like that fairly quickly”, though again, I don’t know because I’m not willing to hand out $40 to find out.
Despite my overall level of crankiness about this, I am not going to take a side on the analog vs. digital Zettelkasten. Because taking a side about a note-taking method strikes me as inherently dumb. As for the photos of Zettelkasten, even I can relate to the excitement about a thing; a friend hipped me to Obsidian, and making connections with it and looking over it is neat, and watching the little graph view grow as I add to it is cool as well; I can see the same appeal occurring with handwritten cards. I shared a few of my Obsidian screenshots with my friend, so… guilty.
That having been said, I’m doing it “wrong”, at least according to the methods of the Zettelkasten orthodox. While some of my cards are atomic, the ones about books are not, they are straightforward notes about the book, in outline form. As key concepts that I expect to come across in further reading are introduced, they get “atomic” cards, but I would expect over time that those become less atomic.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” really would be my answer here, and it appears to be the answer of the sane, even within the community of Zettelkasten advocates. Note taking is a kind of personal activity; a framework may be helpful or you may naturally develop and modify one over time. What’s interesting to me here is how a sort of fairly innocuous ideas can rapidly become political. We’re driven to “tribe up” over the silliest of things at times, and a note taking system seems one of the weirdest things to build an identity around.
Watch what distracts you. This diversion has been a fun ride for me, but it must come to an end. Spend time building, not arguing about how to do it.
The Lithole 
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