Brain Mulch and Mind Things

If only to be less confusing when I ramble about digital gardens and memexes and so on to Martha, I’ve been trying to figure out a clear difference between the two ideas, or at least how I’m approaching them.

Digital Gardening seems more geared towards Brain Mulch – notes about stuff, bookmarks or saved thoughts or links, encouraged to build up, ferment, and grow into more thinglike-things, but remain content with the mulching process.

On “knowledge management”

One thing I learned trying that for a year is that the specter of PKM or “personal knowledge management” that looms over all these ideas makes me want to barf. The public-note-taking part of it feels performative and is a terrible fit for my existing, useful research processes. It feels more like Digital Monoculture Hydroponics instead of gardening, crammed into a pyramid scheme where everyone’s just writing about how much more productive they are with their projects (which are mainly writing about how productive they are). Also, I swear there’s a PKM-to-Jordan-Peterson pipeline. bah.

That said, by writing this I’m currently enjoying some new benefits of the idea of public note taking. I’m not super intent on other people reading this and caring, but the idea that they might feels like it’s tightening up my thinking, like cooking a quick meal for another person instead of just your self. And my chain of messy, three-quarters-finished documents that I chucked into Garden 1.0 did help me figure some stuff out to get here. On the flip side, I can’t ever see a benefit to making public the version of that I have for painting – a sprawling, decade-old set of documents I just call “Studio Journal.”

A Goal:

Just for me, I would love to connect everything I have that’s like my studio journal, across the spectrum of private to public, so that I have the biggest pile of Brain Mulch I can make, and that it’s easy to extract sharable Mind Things when they come up.

Puttin in mind things

Many of the things that make me go “I should put that in the memex” are familiar entries in my brain, things I refer back to often. Decided to call these Mind Things. (I think Brain Mulch is where you can grow new Mind Things?) After enough years of changing devices or changing where I put things online the idea that there could be even semi-complete feeling, navigable external archive of the shelves and galleries in my brain that I consult in the studio or in conversation when I’m writing is, like, the main reason I’m building this. Jeez that would be nice.

I think the sense that most options are built on damp sand, as it were, has prevented me from really ever using any platform to its fullest potential. I’m always impressed when someone can do that. Feels like Case has accomplished that. So I think I have many collections that are entirely in my head that feel like they’re a real thing out in the world, but then I try to send my friends a link and the dream evaporates. (If any of you read that and were like “yeah, me too”, please do share!)

An example: For a long time I’ve had a notion of The Shelf – the idea that everyone has a set of core texts that have shaped the way they see the world, or at the very least come up all the time. (The very first time I gassed myself up about making an imaginary digital space, it was entirely based on this idea. I essentially convinced myself in 2003-ish that if the world had access to a combination of Goodreads and Second Life, we would enter a new intellectual Rennaisance and I would definitely get a girlfriend who read a lot of books.)

Goalz n Hopez n Dreamz

a fully unexhaustive list

Art things

• A record of art shows I’ve been to
• Significant source material
• Just, like, all my drawings, even if they’re not part of major works
• Major works, like, actually archivally-documented
• Art writing
  • which overlaps with Let’s Talk About Painting
  • which overlaps with Conceptual Labor
• Works in progress archive
• Materials & Methods archive

Nerd things

• Reliable tools
• Reliable ways
• Compelling ideas
• Project archive
• The Shelf
• Cited sources

Friend things

• Every album book painting performance blog post piece of code sculpture project product achievement my friends have ever made. I love that shit.
  • The Friend Shelf – I do have a collection of books published by friends
• Mind Things from friends
• Good Stories which must be preserved

Life things

• The Neighborhood
• Frankie
• The Studio
• The House
• Archive of delights
  • coffees wines teas beers we liked
• Moments!
• Family heirlooms and Times

Mulches

• Content mulch for Newsletter
• Development mulch for this site and other sites
• Private mulch pile linkable to Everything Else
• Bookmarks / feeds archive