(2021-12-31) Haigney The Rise Of The Tabulated Self

Sophie Hagney: The Rise of the Tabulated Self. A rise in personal documentation meant that houses were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, recipes clipped from magazines. As these archives ballooned, a new technology rose in popularity: the filing cabinet.

Not everyone was happy with the invention. The writer Montrose J. Moses was wary of how filing cabinets externalized personal memory: What would be the consequences of trying to turn every aspect of your life into “information” to be hoarded for later?

Nearly a century later, Moses’s anxiety has become our reality. We are constantly turning our lives into data, much of it nonphysical: photographs and screenshots and stray notes, reams of text messages and bookmarked tabs and other digital detritus

Amid this flood of data, a new category of app has emerged, one that promises to collect all the digital material we generate into one single, seamless interface. They are sometimes referred to as “knowledge-management systems” or “personal-knowledge bases,” though many users refer to them as simply “second brains.”

The best known is Notion

is Roam Research, founded in 2017, and Obsidian, founded in 2020, and Mem

these apps are designed not only to store everything that our brains can’t hold — grocery lists, passwords, meditation schedules, work tasks — but also to make us better at retrieving the information in them. Instead of tabs and folders, they allow us to sort our archives into customizable, easy-to-navigate tables

and, in the case of Mem and Obsidian, can even show us how one piece of information (say, your to-do list) is related to another (notes from a recent meeting) (backlinks)

These platforms have fostered thriving subcultures of devotees.

These apps can often encourage a radical level of self-documentation, especially as people migrate the most prosaic details of their lives onto them.

Watching Notion evangelists describe their systems, I was reminded a bit of those devoted to Marie Kondo’s methods of tidying up. But rather than emphasizing removal as an antidote to chaos, the answer lies in the act of continued accumulation

I wondered, Do we really need all of that information?

Some of these second-brain apps, like Mem, are even employing artificial-intelligence tools that might resurface information we stowed and then forgot about.