I Can't Stop Galaxy Braining
I have very strong, interconnected synesthesia. This makes categorization of really any kind rather non-linear for me. I’m glad to have avoided developing a need for things to be categorized accurately and completely, because nothing ever is, but I’m always looking for a bit more room in definitions, and noting which things overlap with which and where the mental threads connect. And sometimes (most times) one thing is like another thing, but only in a certain way. How are you supposed to put everything into rows and columns? Tags are such a good solution to this. You can add one, or a thousand, and you don’t even need to know what else they apply to yet. They’re a facet of something. Everything is always facets. This is the road to galaxy braining, and it starts from anywhere and everywhere.
Language has a direction, but ideas have many
Galaxy brain is not what you’re supposed to do for writing, because sentences go in one direction and galaxy is all directions. But the difference between writing essays for humans and writing code for computers is that humans are lossy compilers. We do not interpret every word and every idea as replicable tokens with fixed meanings. There’s a give to syntax, and meaningful writing, even with its many carefully chosen words and arranged thoughts, will spawn countless and unpredictable new thoughts in its readers. I’ve always felt like this winds up some tension at the heart of language – words help us drill down and get specific, but they also rebound outward at incredible speed, colliding with new words and ideas on their arc.
Seems like since writing began, we’ve experimented with ways to resolve this tension. Ways to fix ideas in writing but keep them mobile. The internet is maybe the biggest experiment in that tradition ever, animating text like never before with hyperlinks. Hyperlinks say “this text is related to this other text.” Hashtags are interesting because they say “this text might be related to some other text that might or might not exist yet.” They are inherently speculative and interconnected. It’s always a little exciting to click on a hashtag with no other results.
As a lossy compiler who likes to galaxy brain, this feels correct to me. Often when I begin writing about one thing, it becomes enough about another thing that I am suddenly writing two things. That can happen at any scale, because most things are other things too.
How do you write in all directions at once?
To some degree this is just part of what makes good writing hard. From all the delicious words and wonderful ideas, you have to choose just a few darlings to let onto the page. But sometimes that friction is too much for me and I never get there. I’ve made attempts to blog for maybe 20 years, but they never stick, and I think it’s because blogs go in one direction, and everything is only one thing: a post. After all this time, I finally found a way to do it, mostly thanks to the ideas of digital gardening.
What exactly does that mean, though? At this point in time I don’t think there’s a defined orthodoxy of Digital Gardening Concepts, so like most people who’ve tried this, I cherry-picked the ones that worked best for me. These were:
- post in-progress or incomplete things and return to them as you wish
- use backlinks – bidirectional links that show you how things are related to each other
- make it easy to create wandering, criss-crossing paths of related texts and posts
- write as if the computers will take care of your memories
- link to things even if they’re not there yet
- honorable mention: in-place previews of linked texts. Not 100% crucial for me and not currently implemented, but planned
Honestly, it might be the other way around, that these concepts led to the idea of Digital Gardens. Right now, thinking about this threatens to become Another Essay Thing, because the well of ideas one would need to dip into to distinguish between mainstream hypertext history, the recent digital-gardening / tools-for-thought movement, and theories of dense hypermedia is d e e p. I’d love to jump in (of course) but let’s just throw some hyperlinks into the last sentence and move on.
Anyway, I finally solved my How to Post Regularly problem by building my own version of a memex. You can read an incomplete accout of how I built it here, but generally the ideas above were what made the difference for me. Digital gardening is a nice term that I return to, because with gardening things don’t have to be complete, or ordered, or discrete, and you return to cultivate it. (Of course there are other definitions too.)
After a decade of feeling unsatisfied and destabilized in my relationship to reading and writing on the internet, the last year of having my memex up and running has been the most enjoyable, honest, and consistent year of personal internet usage for me since I was churning out Dreamweaver messes late at night in my early 20s. Even at the start, I was struck by how a few simple patterns could support a fundamental shift in my expectations of reading and writing the internet. It feels more than ever like a tool I can hold and use. That’s because it’s small enough for me to hold and put down, it’s simple and pretty durable, and it applies to things in my life beyond the time I spend on the screen.
An Example of Galaxy-writing
I wanted to do the proper thing you’re supposed to do with a digital garden thing and make a note about an interesting book. But the way I got that book was interesting, and in writing about it I had a chance to name that way of finding things. And I had to make a note for the bookstore where I found it. Since then, a lot more has happened at that bookstore that I want to write about, but there’s no implied structural expectation, like a dated entry in a blog, because there’s no implied structure. Things are just related to other things, and sometimes you can put labels on a kind of thing.
Where are the Hashtags
Now you may notice that none of those pages have hashtags. Most of their relationships are via backlinks. But hashags are backlinks, just with an intermediary page. When they’re not hemmed in by a single platform, you don’t even need the page in the middle, as we’ve shown with the web component implementation of Octothorpes, like this one
Thats why Octothorpes treats backlinks and hashtags as equal, first-order entities. They are remarkably similar concepts underneath. Since some of the pages on my Memex are dynamic collections of things, a backlink to one works much like hashtag. And when I galaxy brain while writing, and want to make a link to something I have in mind but haven’t written yet, I can backlink to the title I’ll probably give to it, waiting for it to be filled in once the page exists. Just like the aspirational hashtag, hoping for new posts to give it meaning.
So it doesn’t really matter what we call them – the thing that made the difference for me was having these types of links that build networks of association that are easy to navigate. That last part is cruicial. Bi-directional relationships and open-ended, linked labels let readers – and writers – chart their own paths through meaningfully related ideas.
But why should those meaningful relationships of ideas stop at the edge of my website (or my app or my platform) especially when friends are writing about related things ? What’s the point of galaxy braining if you’re alone in the galaxy?
So, in that way, we made Octothorpes to galaxy brain with friends.