The Human Layer
The Human Layer is a podcast for those who refuse to be optimized, for the builders and breakers at the intersection of emergent technology, political resistance, and the fight for a positive-sum future.
The Human Layer
Hyperlocal Sovereignty: Building Antifragile Knowledge Commons
Remember when the internet felt like a collection of personal gardens rather than corporate shopping malls? In this exploration of knowledge gardens, Spencer (also known as Clinamenic) guides us through a promising path back to digital sovereignty in an age of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification."
Knowledge gardens represent more than just a return to blogging—they're philosophical and practical spaces where personal expression meets intentional curation. Unlike traditional blogs focused on consumption, these gardens emphasize co-creation, interconnection, and thoughtful organization of ideas. The metaphor of gardening itself unlocks a powerful way of thinking about our digital presence: we plant seeds of thought, tend to growing ideas, prune outdated concepts, and watch as organic connections form between seemingly disparate elements.
At the technical foundation lies the concept of local-first software, embodied in tools like Obsidian that allow users to create and manage content on their own devices before selectively publishing. This approach dramatically reduces dependence on corporate platforms that might disappear overnight or change their terms without notice. When combined with decentralized storage solutions like Arweave, knowledge gardens achieve something remarkable—true durability across time. Your digital legacy becomes resistant to the typical decay that affects corporate platforms, potentially surviving across generations as intellectual breadcrumbs for future thinkers.
The most exciting frontier may be the integration of artificial intelligence within these knowledge ecosystems. When AI can be constrained to interact primarily with your curated knowledge base—rather than pulling from the entire internet—it creates potential for deeper, more contextual insights without external noise. This approach keeps the knowledge ecosystem relatively self-contained, fostering genuine co-creation between human gardeners and AI assistants drawing from the same well of carefully tended information.
Ready to start your own knowledge garden? Download Obsidian for free and begin taking notes—that's all it takes to experience the first benefits of interconnected thought. Your digital sovereignty journey doesn't require technical expertise to begin, just the desire to reclaim your corner of the internet.
Okay, Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us. This is the Human Layer, and today my co-host and I are going to be interviewing Spencer, also known as Clint Amenick. So the mic is yours. Introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you both for having me. I'm close friends with both of you, now, so happy to be on this podcast. The last three years I've been working in the DAO space as a governance kind of engineer and consultant and researcher and as most of those DAOs have imploded one way or another, I've transitioned more into an individual kind of researcher service provider in the realm of governance and organization design most broadly and knowledge management too, which I think we might be discussing tonight. But yeah, that general sphere of peer-to-peer governance and open, transparent organization design, that's what I'm passionate about and focus on professionally Nice.
Speaker 3:It's always amazing to hear. I mean, I've heard variations of what you're up to and, for those that don't know, you're rather young and having dove into like deep layers of governance makes me jealous that I hadn't put in that time early on, when I was in my 20s I was not thinking about crypto and governance, but no, it wasn't what it is today either I don't think I was thinking of anything responsible in my 20s really like, especially not governments.
Speaker 1:I just got into politics at that point, so but I think it is interesting to see younger generations really embracing governance and trying to make it their own, for whatever the next transition we roll into as a society is, it gives me hope at the end of the day, to know that people are trying to figure out different types of governance for different types of situations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, thankfully, more than ever, the tools are in people's hands. And I think, thankfully, more than ever, the tools are in people's hands. It's just. I think the difficulty now is making it accessible enough for people to understand what to do with them and how to use them. But I do think the exciting part is for people that do have the affordances to learn how to use these things like they can be more empowered than ever.
Speaker 3:The potential for power is there, which wasn't always the case. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a big one. So let's start off with knowledge gardens. So explain to us your perspective on knowledge gardens, because you're deep into building the infrastructure more of like in a knowledge garden structure we have gardeners who tend and curate but you're more into the architectural side of things, the back end, and making sure all of that is secure and logical and incorporates governance. So lead us through your vision of knowledge gardens.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I think that an intuitive place to start is sort of with the whole initial wave of blogs and the blogosphere and what we would now from our perspective call web one, of people having individual websites where they post writings or reflections or whatnot, and it's their little corner of the internet, or their kind of plot of the Internet, where they can put their content and express themselves in their own manner, kind of autonomously, to my knowledge. And then over the evolution of the Internet things became more productized and corporate and the sense of having these kind of intimate little corners of the Internet where I can go to Crystal's website and see what's alive for her, that kind of gets drowned out in a lot of the noise. And I think there's been terms for this, like enchidification I think the Cory Doctorow term. I'm not familiar with his writings around that, but I think the meme of enchidification is pretty potent, of just the internet feeling like you're the product and you're not really engaging with people that meaningfully.
Speaker 2:So this idea of a knowledge garden is mostly owing to this earlier trend, slightly earlier trend, called digital gardens in general, which I believe was popularized by Maggie Appleton I'm not sure if she's the one who coined this term, but she's popularized it and it's sort of a return to the blogging mentality, but post-intuitification, like a return to being able to express yourself and your little corner of the internet and seeing how other people express themselves that way in a place that's very geared around curation and intentionality and you're very intentional about what is displayed and what is curated on this website.
Speaker 2:In a sense, it's sort of like a more philosophically imbued blog. I think at the end of the day, it's essentially a blog, but there's a lot of philosophical dimensions in the context of enchitification and trying to reclaim the Internet as a place where people can express themselves directly. This notion of a digital garden has resonated with people and so in our context, when we're talking about knowledge gardens, I think there's that sensibility of digital gardens that is preserved, but with a bit more of an emphasis on conveying a bunch of information, like it's a bit more information dense. So it's sort of, if you were to marry a wiki with a digital garden, you would get something like a knowledge garden.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I think that differentiates knowledge gardens from blogs is blogs and maybe this is just because I'm old and I've been around too long but blogs seem more of a consumption Whereas knowledge gardens seem more of a co-creation, and I feel like that is the distinction. That's very hard to see from the outside, but once you start working with one, then you kind of see that there's this back and forth. Like we at the human layer we have a knowledge garden that we share and so we can go in there and both of us can co-create something together. And then you also work on the back end of that to make sure that that co-creation is it's got the metadata attached to it, it's got the architecture. It needs to actually see the co-creation aspect of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like the simplicity in just the term garden, for me at least, was such an interesting unlock because the metaphor blossoms. It's like you can tend to the garden, you've got to pull weeds, you can plant seeds, you've got to till till the soil, composting. They're just like such a wild which some of that still maps to. I think the you know what we know from from earlier days of blogging and wikis and that sort of thing. But for me in the current era, there was something about just the term garden and like having grown up and played in the dirt and like I also have direct exposure to like why gardens are interesting, um, you know when you have to have that sort of responsibility. So I don't know, you can riff on it, but to me it was just the term garden like opened up a new way of thinking about um digital space that you know I can put time into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that, think that effect that it has on people, that the term blog or knowledge base or something doesn't lend itself to that kind of I don't know, it's less conducive to imagination perhaps. And I also think the other aspect about the digital gardens and knowledge gardens is that by cultivating it, it's something that you care for and can kind of see evolve and change over time. And especially if it's something that you care for and can kind of see evolve and change over time, um, and especially if it's something that, like you're doing intentionally, whether it's an individual or a team, like how you guys are describing it, or an organization like it, can work on all those levels. But I do think there's like the intentionality about it. That's it's therapeutic and it's refreshing to experience this on the internet too. So like see, oh, there isn't any corporate agenda on this, on this page.
Speaker 2:It's like this is someone expressing things that they care about, whether it's like listing their favorite movies or writing a blog post. It's like it's it's a person expressing themselves and I think on one level, I think that's really beautiful. Just more people doing that than to wave a wider variety of like all this, all of these individual people are expressing their themselves in ways that actually, thanks to a lot of this architecture, stuff can be compatible and interoperable in really exciting ways. If we have time to get into that, we can. But I definitely agree with the like the potency of the gardening metaphor there and how that that unlocks so much more than just framing the soul as blogs yeah, like when I would not tend my blog on my WordPress, I would just go to it and it was still the same.
Speaker 1:But if we don't tend the Knowledge Garden, like I notice, I just go in there and vomit all over the place, and then if I don't go in there and like clean up what I vomited all over the server, it's a hot mess.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a living, breathing aspect that you can feel very viscerally, in some ways even over days or weeks, if you don't touch it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then if you haven't been in there and I've got all that junk in there, then you're going to come in and be like, oh, this is overwhelming, I don't want to be here. So it is this you do have to create. The container translates into the design of a knowledge garden, because the way the information is displayed causes you to. It's subliminal, but you engage with the content differently because it is different than a blog. You can see the co-creation aspects if it's designed well, put into the architecture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and your points about it being living and breathing. I feel like that even comes out more as you're doing what you guys are doing, where you're collaborating on something like this too, where you can see the changes other people make, can shape things in ways that you as an individual wouldn't be able to predict, or can make it feel more dynamic than if you're just creating your own individual knowledge guard, which is still doable, and that's what I've been doing for mine but the fact of collaborating on it, I think, makes it way more exciting. It's like you're kind of sharing a blog, but in much more interesting ways, I think.
Speaker 3:I hadn't extended the metaphor until just now. Now I'm curious to hear your thoughts. There's also something about having a space that you truly do have control over and can create. In my mind, I was seeing a fence around the garden Growing up. You wanted to keep certain animals out of the garden, but, like, how do you think about it also now, in a modern context of owning space online that you truly can and you know this is some of the, I guess, sort of you know, crypto and Web3 layer of true sovereignty and agency and take or leave the metaphor of the fence but like, how do you think about, yeah, having just more control and awareness of, like, who are the you know gardeners I'm letting in and out? And yeah, just what does the nation state represent within all of that? I don't know. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a few things come up here and about the degree of control that an individual or a team can have over these things. I just read that thing, I shared it with you both the essay from Ink and Switch about local first software, where I think they introduced that term and what it means to them. Local first software, where I think they they introduced that a term and what it means to them, and a lot of it, even in that paper, was directly in response to inchification, and so they're framing it as, like we're not, you know, against software as a service platforms that silo your data but also make it really convenient to do a lot of things that you wouldn't be able to do if you had to build it all from scratch on your own, but at the same time, you don't want a lot of your personal data to be, like, housed in these things permanently. Um, so, like they, I think they introduced this philosophy of local first software where you, you have some your, your stack, your process should, could you know in this light, be such that you have all your data locally and you can choose to distribute it and syndicate it through all these other software as a service platforms like Substack, paragraph, what have you.
Speaker 2:But if it's all living locally, like what we're talking about with Obsidian, then you still retain that control at the end of the day, but you can still have the perks of using these really advanced, convenient platforms. So I feel like that's in terms of the individual and team control over the content. I do think I'm very much in line with that local first mentality of giving people the tools to autonomously express themselves in ways that minimally rely on some software as a service company, being able to stay in business or you know, without introducing as much risk about your data being monetized in weird ways that you can't really see into. But you can still use these things at your discretion as like supporting mechanisms. But I think the local first aspect of it is important to me and I think that gets at what you're asking. If I understand correctly.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's part what's possible technically, but then there's also just there's a rebuilding of mental models, because we're so accustomed to handing over the keys to name your you know big tech provider of choice, but like yeah, yeah, I mean, it's all of that for sure.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's what Obsidian opened up for me, because, spencer, you talked about Obsidian for like a year before I touched into it and I was too overwhelmed with work to actually grok it. And then, once I got spit out again, I'm like okay.
Speaker 3:I need something to do.
Speaker 1:So it was actually the weekend of the inauguration. I was like, oh, I really need something to do. I was like, wait, that thing Spencer keeps, keeps talking about. So I spent like two days straight like in the hole with obsidian and you were my gateway drug.
Speaker 3:So yeah, you gotta do it and then like what?
Speaker 1:it was the local aspect that I really, really loved, because I set up our encrypted servers and, yeah, the server is still in the us for our stuff, so there needs to be redundancy if us servers get whatever shut down.
Speaker 1:But it's still encrypted and I can do everything.
Speaker 1:I installed it on all of my devices, so I it's all local and so I can actually fluidly move between devices as ideas come to me and then put them in the garden and then leave them there and then come back to them, or then Taylor can pick up a thread and he can work with it, and then we're like, okay, yeah, this one's ready to go out now, and then we push it to and we just push it.
Speaker 1:We, I'm lazy, so we just do it straight through obsidian. We don't even do the cool architecture that you set up because my brain breaks, so I just push it live. And then I'm like, oh, that felt good. Then what's next? So that local first aspect, because what I find like when I'm writing and getting into something, especially if it's a rage writing or a spicy topic, I need that writing to not have any connection to the Internet or know that it's being saved somewhere that's just for me, until I'm ready for it to go into the world, and it's very hard to do that on any other platform that I can think of.
Speaker 2:And for anyone who isn't familiar with Obsidian, it's a note-taking app. It's all just like local first an app you download. It's a note-taking app. It's all just local. First an app you download, it's free to download. I don't think it's open source. I think it is.
Speaker 1:I think partially open source. I don't think it's fully open.
Speaker 2:It's free to download. They have some other paid services like Obsidian Publish and Obsidian Sync various other things that allow you to collaborate and publish these things. But it's a free software that you can use to write things, to take notes and essentially create your own digital garden locally that you could then choose to publish as a website. But you don't have to. This could just be if you wanted to journal, you can use this tool to journal. Or if you wanted to publish a bunch of your writings or notes as a blog and then use Obsidian Publish or something like Quartz to make that into a website. That's all free to do, which I think is awesome. You're only really just paying for the domain that you're using for the website. But yeah, obsidian's got a great cult following. I don't know how long it's been in development, but it's like the perfect, I think, example of the local first software that's really leaning into the values we're talking about not sponsored by, but obsidian, if you're listening, yes we just all love obsidian that's great.
Speaker 3:It's like uh, um, I don't know if this is sufficiently open. I was thinking more like you know, uh, a farcaster and this sufficiently decentralized. I think they've hit that nice sweet spot where it is still very usable and sufficiently open.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people have used it. I was surprised at GFO when we brought up Obsidian Because we needed a container for that knowledge garden, and everyone was like, yeah, we know Obsidian. So most people in tech have had some exposure to it in whatever capacity. So it's very easy for people to use. But it's also if you have no experience with it, it's extremely easy to use. So I have no problem telling a non-technical person hey, just download this app, put it on your laptop and then work with it, and then it's only $4 a month to publish if you do want to push it out. So then it's accessible and affordable. And I think those are the big barriers to entry, because that enshitification of everything, every platform you use at this point just about has that enshitification just baked into the architecture.
Speaker 2:And then also, I think the other thing too, is we talk a lot about censorship of these platforms, and I think that happens sometimes. If you're in some kind of political arrangement where a platform is obligated to take down content, that can be done on political grounds, but even aside from that there's just the deprecation risk. A lot of these companies are just growing, feel compelled to grow way faster than any reasonable business model would permit, and then that can bloat things they can get acquired. The tech stack can change, like what happened with Mirror. Who knows where that's going and I feel like that's to me the primary danger of relying on some of the software-as-a-service platforms, even if they're run by cool people that are values aligned. It's tough to just keep a business going, and ideally someone's personal information shouldn't have to depend on that any more than necessary.
Speaker 1:And when that tech gets acquired.
Speaker 1:I think Pandora is a great example. It started as a genome project at a university. That's when I found it. I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And then, when it became a paid service, it became an actual company. I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And then I got.
Speaker 1:When it became a paid service, it became an actual company. I'm like, oh, the paid service is actually really good, I don't mind paying for this. And then it got bought by a far right political person. It became very ideological. I'm like I can't use this. And I had spent so much time crafting that algorithm to give me the music I wanted. It was heartbreaking. And then I went to Spotify to give me the music I wanted. It was heartbreaking. And then I went to Spotify and then a few years later, they tweaked their algorithm in a way that was very invasive. I'm like, oh my God, so I just landed at Apple Music, but you could get two or three years into a business model with this type of content production and then you're at the mercy of the ownership of that platform.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is the. The tension is like I will go and pour my life into Twitter, instagram, big tech of choice, because I, you know, I have this like sense of. These things are monsters and they're not going to go anywhere.
Speaker 3:So there's like this and I, you know, we've all felt that tension and I think that's part of why it's more of a a vibe shift that is needed to be like you can still have that in a sort of sovereign, you know, new garden form of the internet. That does exist, it's so. It's, yeah, it seems to scratch the same itch for me, where it's like I now have faith and, you know, feel good about not feeling like the. You know, whatever I pour my heart into is going to at some point disappear or or be used against us or get consumed and, yeah, perverted by you know, name your uh political figure, slash party of choice.
Speaker 3:But like, yeah, I think it's a how I don't know how to get there, uh, kind of cross that chasm. But it seems like more of just a mental shift that is needed. I mean, that's part of what we're, I think, trying to do even with this podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you mentioned Firecaster.
Speaker 2:I feel like one way that it could plug into what we're talking about with Knowledge Gardens is for any kind of social protocols, social platforms like that that are protocol-based, unlike X or Twitter.
Speaker 2:But if it's protocol-based and if it's something that can be interacted with directly without having to go through some app whether it's a command line or some desktop app that you have then you can integrate that into a knowledge base.
Speaker 2:And if you wanted to say, in your guys' case, make a new, a new article or a new thought piece for human layer and you wanted to like automatically syndicate that through like app protocol and blue sky and uh, farcaster, then like that can be like built into the process of quarts and publishing an article where if you have like a like a description metadata thing for some article that either of you write and you publish that and like that can be pulled into a blue sky post that's staged and that can automatically be triggered.
Speaker 2:And these are things that like you can kind of tape together with X and Twitter and other like platform-based ones. But I feel like the protocol stuff like blue sky and Firecaster is like the Cosmo part of Cosmo local and I feel like that could be another interesting thing to talk about, because we've been talking about local first stuff, but like the Cosmo part of that, like the kind of global peer-to-peer things that aren't mediated by institutions but just like protocols, can let us like ground our operations locally but still integrate with people globally in ways that don't require us to to buy into the shit where what do you think that global integration looks like?
Speaker 1:like I I know I've fleshed it out a few times, but what? What is your version of that?
Speaker 2:I mean one.
Speaker 2:One way that this manifests is, um, our weave. I think that's a good, good example of a global peer-to-peer storage layer where if you, if you two, write, write an essay or an article for human layer, as say, like a markdown file in your obsidian vault, that that can be uploaded to our weave so that anyone can access it at that are we've hash, you don't need any institutional approval to do that, it can all be accessed, like people don't need to go through an app to even access it, and then that's like that's globally available and still like rooted from your guys' local devices. So it's like kind of a way of bypassing like the main, like actors of instantification, I think. So I think that the Ar-weave obsidian combination can be really interesting. I'm hoping to see more experimentation with how that stuff works, because I do think the local first, kind of grounding or perspective, but then broadcasting things through protocols that don't need institutional approval again, less because of censorship risk necessarily, but more just because of deprecation risk. I do think Arweave is an interesting example of that.
Speaker 1:I feel too like. What I like about the Arweave component is, once you get the content on chain, we don't know in five or 10 years how we're even going to consume content or bring the content to us. But it can live permanently on chain.
Speaker 3:It's going to be a far reach from what it is today. That much we can guarantee.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean it might be just projected into our eyeballs, so who knows. But if it's on chain, then that redundancy is built in.
Speaker 1:I think the redundancy as a journalist that for me is the key point is that if I die tomorrow you could take the garden because we have a synced server, so then you can make sure that the content lives on. It's an MD file, it's a markdown file, so the entire server is a tiny, tiny file. You could just carry it around on a thumb drive and then you can also just port it over to a safer server. If servers in your country are getting shut down, easily port it over in like three seconds. And then if it's also on-chain, then you've got offshore content that is safe in a server that can't be accessed, and then you also have it on chain so that the future generation can say what were these fuckers up to you? Let's pull that in and like, really get under the hood with it. And that to me is one of the most you're just meeting, leaving breadcrumbs for the next generation through the way you structure a knowledge garden.
Speaker 2:Basically yeah, totally, and it's all time stamped, like your point about like preserving things over generations. And there were, there were some like palpable examples of this where some of the recent conferences and within the, the localism sphere of things, even from like two or three years ago. If you would go to the website, you would see like there's, there's link rot, already unfolding and like if there are resources there you can't, you can't handle because they were maybe stored on a Google drive account that hasn't like hasn't been renewed or something like like that. Yeah, and I feel like that's that's sort of the failure mode that we're trying to address here. But, like everything you're saying about, are we like totally it? As far as I can tell, it's like a viable alternative to a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 3:I'm curious. I mean, the fun thing about doing this is, I think, most that probably land and hear some of this are going to have some context. What's the like? Easy button, initially, because a lot of this. If you come upon this podcast, you hear all of this. It's daunting. It's like if you've never heard R-Weave, you've never heard our weave, you've never heard. And again, these things are simple. Even us old folks like put a little time in and you can actually get there and like use ai responsibly and like do a little, like how do I what? Is sure, but that still takes like getting over the hump of this just feels like an insurmountable initial step to even get exposed, to starting to think in these terms and then be part of building that sort of future. What do you? Yeah, what's step one? For anyone that is like you guys are speaking a lot of weird Web3 Chinese.
Speaker 2:I would say. I mean, I definitely agree, that's the main issue. It's just communicating this. I think that's the main issue. It's just communicating this. I think that's the main friction point, because the tools are there. How to use it and convey how to use it in intelligible ways, accessible ways, I think that's more of the challenge. But yeah, I would say, getting started. If any of this is of interest to anyone listening, I would say just download Obsidian and try taking notes there, whether it's journaling or if you're, or any other kind of note-taking system. If you like reading books or watching movies and want to jot down some reflections on those, you can use Obsidian for that. Again, it's free, you don't have to pay anyone to use this and it's pretty easy to use. And I think as you start getting into that rhythm, then a lot of what we're talking about becomes more intuitive, I think, and that's part of what, like there's so much fear in the things I create and produce, knowing the like typical Web 2 mindset is.
Speaker 3:then it's out to the world and how are my friends going to react? And what does this mean? You can go, and you know in the metaphor, go like plant an interesting seed in the garden and you can do that on your own, no one else needs to see it. And, like you can see what grows and sometimes interesting things grow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, I mean, I think. I think journaling is a great example of this too, where, if you just if, if you're in the habit, or want to start the habit of just every other day, you know, reflecting on what that day was like or what you're what you did that week, and those can each be notes in a, in a private obsidian base. Again, you don't need to publish any of this stuff necessarily, it could work just as a private collection of notes and then you can start seeing how you can link today's journal entry page to a page for a journal entry you did for some day last week where you met the same person, so that person appears in both of those journal entries and they can, like constitute a link, and so that's like, now that's something that emerges from like two entries that you have there and if you, if you do this long enough, more and more links start appearing and obsidian like. One of the really cool things about obsidian is that being able to view all these things as a graph.
Speaker 2:You can see all the links between all these notes and I feel like that's where that seems to be where a lot of the stuff lands for people. It's like seeing the connections between all this and like the structure that emerges from all the different individual notes that you take and that's like that's before you even start publishing anything or getting really fancy with. You know quartz and Arweave and everything. I feel like that's that's a compelling way to get started, that it's also just like a nice therapeutic thing. You know journaling. I feel like that's therapeutic value there.
Speaker 1:I find that when I especially when I'm teaching people how to use the internet or use published websites for the first time, especially, I work with students at my old university and trying to get them to publish their own sites and that thing that you just talked about taylor with the being uncomfortable with pushing something out. That is actually the place when I used to build websites. I would get something where it's three quarters of the way there and then I'm like, all right, fuck it, we're going live. And when you go live, then you're in that weird place or you're like all right, it doesn't feel good. And there are some things that I would put live. I'm like, oh no, that's awful, take that back. And you don't feel that until you like expose it to the world. And you're like, nope, nope.
Speaker 1:And then other things. You're like, yeah, just go go into the world. And then you put it out there. You're like, okay, that's interesting, let's just let that be and let let people interact with it. And then that's how I got over that fear of what are people going to think when I publish this thing. And that takes a while to make that part of your mental model shift. But once you get there, and I think knowledge gardens are great for that, because you can just push and push and push content out, because it's a one button thing and then once it's out there, you have to live with the fact that it's public and then you can actually process is this me just being insecure or does this thing really suck and I need to bring it back? I mean, it could go either way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a muscle to develop, for sure no-transcript, and I actually think that's really compelling, because imagine a world where the researchers and thought leaders that you respect or have learned from, imagine if you were able to access the thought process that culminated in their more presentable works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would be wild.
Speaker 2:So I think there's something really compelling to at least striving to get to a point where you're comfortable sharing notes like that, and it could just be a way of framing it Like like in my case I just literally have a little disclaimer framing the following content as, like these are notes that like may or may not culminate into anything that's like coherent enough to publish as an article, but like they're here as kind of like it's like composting in a way. It's like you can kind of dig into the stuff that's like beneath what's growing maybe. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1:Didn't you also take? When you first started using Obsidian, didn't you take a bunch of publications and put them in Markdown format, like? You spent months doing that, didn't you? Yeah, like which ones did you do? These are like Federalist Papers, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean for a lot of and this gets into the Zettelkasten thing, if we have time to get into that at all.
Speaker 2:I can give a little bit of background on that. So Zettelkasten in German translates like note system or note box, and it's a term that's been used to refer to the last maybe few centuries' worth and it may even be older of very analog note-taking systems, and so one of the more famous examples was this German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann, who did a bunch of work and was really prolific, and was kind of famous for being prolific by virtue of his Zettelkasten system. So whenever he would read something, he would take all these index cards and write like a sentence or two note on how he understood this one point in this one text that he was reading, and he would, you know, write down all the information about the text and then apply like a, like an id, like a number to each card, and then, whenever he would think about how this card relates to some other note that he took, he would dig through his stack of other index cards and say, oh, this card references ID card 00198 or whatever.
Speaker 3:So he only had Obsidian. He was just ahead of his time.
Speaker 2:And it's also ahead of Obsidian, but also ahead.
Speaker 2:People have framed this as like an analog wiki or like an analog internet where, like it's essentially doing hyperlinks manually and there's been other I doubt he was the first person to do this, but he's kind of famous for it there's people like even centuries prior I mean, he was like what maybe early mid 20th century, but there's people even like prior centuries that are having these extensive written note systems that involve some kind of linking between them and with Obsidian it gets trivially easy to do a lot of this stuff and the idea there is you could take a lot of these texts, whatever the licensing option is.
Speaker 2:Some of these are public domain now and there's this one great github repository that has all of these classic works in in markdown, so you can, you could take one of those and put it into obsidian and then all of your notes now can like reference specific passages in that markdown file. It's like the nerdiest thing ever. But then you can see like all of all of your individual note files connected to the main source text node and you can see oh, wow, there's like it would be so cool to see Niklas Luhmann's 90,000 note Zettelkasten visualized as a graph like that. So the Zettelkasten movement really seamlessly weaves into this whole digital garden thing because, like markdown is such a robust kind of primitive format for a lot of this. You can have a, you can have a system of notes that you've taken on whatever, whatever you're reading or whatever you're watching or whatever you're thinking. It doesn't even have a, doesn't need to have a reference text. That can all be part of this digital garden.
Speaker 1:I feel like, too, this is something we're going to incorporate into our garden eventually is once you put AI in the back end of that and then you've put these old texts in there, and then you've got your writing in there, and then you have AI in there as well. There's a co-creation process that you can really get creative with. That is. There aren't many people that I know of that are doing that, and I think that is the one of the evolutions of knowledge gardens.
Speaker 3:I'm really excited to see, because then the sky's the limit at that point yeah, then then you're, then you're playing god with the soil that you're ultimately growing your garden from which, yeah, but it's, but it's also. This is the uh, I think that's. Yeah, it's like exciting to know that you can do that in a space where you still feel like you understand all the edges right yeah I think that's the trouble right now and we're going to have an exciting chat tonight.
Speaker 3:I think, uh, for the future web3 stuff that Spencer is going to sort of be the appetizer for. But I think that's the frontier. It's not. There is the frontier of AI and it's hard to see that stopping or slowing down, but there's also this frontier of leveraging it in a way that ultimately feeds into very individually relevant. There's also this frontier of like, leveraging it in a way that ultimately feeds into you know, very individually relevant, you know, databases of knowledge that ultimately serve you and like, or your community. You know the community garden idea to me is just like, still so resonant. I'm a member of Denver Urban Gardens and, like I have my local spot, I love to go there with you know. I know the five or six people that, like put time into. I have my local spot. I love to go there with you know.
Speaker 1:I know the five or six people that, like, put time into you know, tending to that garden that ultimately feeds and supports a community. Nice, I think too with this concept. If the knowledge garden is big enough, you can bring it back to the local level, kind of like what you're talking about. You can put the garden rails on the AI.
Speaker 1:if it's within your garden, then you can say, just pull from this, just pull from that, and then you can limit whatever api calls from external models if you have a large enough, robust enough knowledge garden, you can actually keep the llm relatively local, and that, to me, is where it gets really, really interesting, because then you're just pulling from the collective knowledge of your community. You're not bringing in these externalities that you can't control, and I feel like once we get there we're I think we're still a little bit farther. We need more people doing this at scale. Once that hits, then that becomes an alternative, but then you could also introduce one of the larger models into that and then you're training that larger model on an existing communal conversation and base of knowledge. That then can train that larger model. From this perspective. I feel like that's where the lines get really, really blurry. Yeah, but exciting.
Speaker 2:I mean the AI point I think is really interesting, whether it's a community or an individual local knowledge base, because then, like you know, for the note-taking example, it could be something where, if you have the, the source text in markdown and you're trying to understand some of it or like understand whether or not your understanding of it is accurate, you can, you can ask the, the AI assistant I've given my notes I where can I look in this text to better understand this?
Speaker 2:This question or like is this is my paraphrasing of this point accurate relative to the source text? And I feel like it's it's like a perfect use case for for what ai seems to be good at at this stage. And your point about local communities too like if you have a community of people of, whether it's in a given locale or within a given industry, that has some kind of specialized knowledge base or something that can be pulled from, then just like limiting, limiting a question to that sphere of information is like a highly curated, you can get a highly curated answer without a lot of the corporate stuff involved. Yeah, so I think a lot of that's really really compelling so far, yeah.
Speaker 1:And also like a lot of the stuff that you talk about, like just for the past few years in journal Dow, like I have to go Google that shit. Like so many things like they're so brilliant and so like articulate, but my brain's like I have no idea. Like I get the context of what he's saying but I don't understand that word like front matter. I'm like, oh my God. Like in context, I'm like all right, he means the front of the story, like front matter. But then I'm like, wait, what does it mean? So then I have to go to a model and have it explain it to me if you're not around. And then I'm like, oh, but is that accurate? Is that what he actually meant? So if the model, your knowledge garden and you have very complex philosophical things that are foreign to me, I can query it within your context and know that ChatGPT isn't bringing in some other random shit from some dude that used that same term for some weird reason.
Speaker 2:Interesting yeah, and imagine a world where all of the writers and thinkers that you like have some kind of arrangement like this you can query their second brain that's one of the other terms. That's kind of in between Digital Garden and Zettelkasten. You can have a second brain where you publish the notes or resources that you like that are connected in interesting ways and kind of being able to show to an extent the source code for how you think in certain ways. I think that's really cool. You can limit a query to like I want to understand why Taylor is making this argument in this one piece and like if he has some body of notes or anything that get into elaborating on things or that are like inter-similar semantic territory, then that's like could make it easier for me to understand like the source or the inspiration or any kind of underlying logic for any kind of argument that he's making or whatnot.
Speaker 3:Bring value to the human layer. That is what the hope is, to find means of intersecting these things in a way that clearly is still giving credit to what we bring the human brain and the digital brain united. It can be an exciting future. It can be, I mean right now, certainly.
Speaker 1:It also scares the shit out of me on a weekly basis. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:But I can still. You know, what we're doing is painting a really optimistic, hopeful picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's a razor edge and I do think a lot of this stuff is like is really feasible. Now I think the main barrier is just how, how complex it seems. So like I think and that could just be a matter of education or presenting it or like making you can make tools that make it easier for people to use this without just falling into the same pitfalls of, of you know, web two, sas and shitification, um, but like again, again, like I really do think all the tools are here pretty much and we can add other bells and whistles, but like what people, what everything we're describing is like doable with the tools that we have.
Speaker 1:it's just the, the getting people comfortable using these things yeah, and that's what I love about the localism movement, because when you go to a location or community, every community is going to use this technology differently to serve their needs. So when you have enough communities doing it, you can see all the different ways they've done it, and then you can come back together and say, oh wow, y'all did this over here because X, y, z, we did this over here because this is what we need. And then you merge the two together and then that's where it really begins to take on a life of its own and replace things like you know, mass media and the journalism holes and news deserts and all the things we need to replace with with valid information sources.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when you said news deserts I was like I know the food desert reality. That's a whole nother podcast altogether. But that's another interesting layer of the metaphor and it actually does does map.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, yeah the news deserts of the metaphor and it actually does map. It's interesting. Yeah, the news deserts We'll have to bring the rest of the Journal of Dow Crew into this, because that's definitely a much bigger topic that we have been trying to figure out for a long time. Yeah, but I feel like we're at a good wrapping it up point. Spencer. Is there anything else you want to add?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess I would try to reiterate that a lot of the things we touched on are technically complex and some of it's kind of speculative in terms of the value it can have. But I would recommend, if anyone is interested in this and just wants a place to start, just download Obsidian or even regardless of that, just start taking notes and storing notes and just see how that changes how you think about engaging with whatever it is you're reflecting on, um, and I do think these tools, a lot of these tools, like obsidian, make it easier to do that. Um. And again, it's free. You don't need to pay for anything. Um. Yeah, I would just recommend people get started with all that Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very easy. It's's user-friendly. I could give that to any non-technical person and they could do it. So yeah, and if you do want to go there, hire spencer to build your knowledge garden that's.
Speaker 1:I'm going to shill for you please his information will be in the you know show notes or whatever. But he's brilliant at setting up knowledge gardens so he can get you started because you do want a good, solid architecture in there. And then you build on top of the architecture and let it reflect the community and how they use it yeah, and then, and it's all, it's all yours.
Speaker 2:That's the cool part about it, so you don't have to keep paying for any kind of service or anything. Yeah, a local first, yeah super grateful.
Speaker 3:You are a bridge builder. It's amazing to have those that know it but are also willing to bring everybody else along for the ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very cool, and we're going to wrap it up here because he's going to take the whole future of Web3 along for the ride in about an hour or two.
Speaker 2:So yay, awesome.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thanks, Spencer. Thank you both for having me. Absolutely Yay.
