Scott P Scheper, page 18
This type of system is watered-down in the world of digital notetaking apps. Digital notetaking apps rarely retain a core structure. Their arms, legs, and feet (i.e., notes, directories, and tags) can be deleted on a whim. They have nothing to build on or stand on. Digital Zettelkasten systems end up looking like a massive interlinked graph of notes, with no personality.
The Antinet, on the other hand, does indeed retain a core structure. Its branches, stems of thoughts and notes are never deleted. They evolve and they grow with you throughout your life. They are real, they are physical, they are an extension of you, and they become a part of you. The Antinet becomes your second mind with whom you can communicate with. Again, this is something missing in digital notetaking apps.
The communication component of the Zettelkasten is critical. Luhmann believed this himself, which is why he titled his paper “Communication with Noteboxes.” As one of the inventors of systems theory, Luhmann said he regards both himself and his Zettelkasten as “systems” and joked that “no one will be surprised [by this].”294 He says this jokingly because he’s one of the first and major proponents of applying systems theory to the field of sociology. Yet, Luhmann goes on to explicitly say that “systems theory” is not his choice to begin explaining the Zettelkasten system. Rather, he chooses a “communication theory” to explain what his Zettelkasten actually is.
The idea of a notebox system emerging into an external instantiation of one’s own communication partner did not originate with Niklas Luhmann. Rather, “this idea actually dates back to a situation already described in 1805 by Heinrich von Kleist in his impressive analysis of the ‘midwifery of thought.’”295
If you’re going to create something valuable, it requires deep thought, sophisticated ideas, and deep connections. This type of thinking is achieved through writing. Period.
Since the hardest part is the actual writing (and thinking) it is useful to then transform the process into something that will grow and evolve forever. It also becomes worthwhile for your structure to grow and develop its own unique personality.
Writing this book on the Antinet Zettelkasten would be a much different experience and would yield different ideas if I were to write it using the same section of my notes ten years from now. In other words, due to the internal branching nature, my current Antinet will inevitably evolve and grow internally over the years. The Antinet, just like a person, grows in unique ways, and there’s so much richly packed knowledge that it will yield surprising ideas for years to come. This is exciting, as the Antinet presents itself as a goldmine of knowledge waiting to be stumbled upon and used some time in the future, whether that be a year from now or ten years from now.
As Luhmann observed, one of the greatest benefits of communication is that each partner can mutually surprise the other with unexpected insight.296 When you’re using an Antinet, you’re essentially having a conversation with it as you’re perusing its contents. After you look up the location of an idea in the index, you then embark upon the process of sifting through the cards in the area your index pointed you to. From there, you’re reading your own thoughts in your own handwriting and trying to decipher what that internal voice is saying. Along the way, you’re challenging one another. You come across a card and question its bold claims; yet, upon a closer look you actually realize that its claims are right and you’re wrong! This is like any high-yielding real-life communication experience. You debate one another and are sometimes proven wrong, which is a good thing!
In the several companies I’ve started, I’ve found some of the greatest innovations to come about through just random conversation. My former business partner and I would have lengthy and profound discussions. We would both end up revising and updating our initial perspectives and come up with truly brilliant ideas. This type of experience is something that seems to happen when using an analog Zettelkasten. It’s one of those incommunicable truths that one must experience for themselves to truly grasp.
What Luhmann meant by communication with noteboxes relates to having a conversation with one’s Antinet. This concept is similar to having a conversation with the author of a book that you read. As Mortimer Adler points out in his classic work titled How to Read a Book, reading a book is very much a communication experience. In the book Adler lays out an analogy of a pitcher and catcher in baseball.297 The pitcher (the book author) is throwing you a thought (which is the baseball). You, the reader, are the catcher. A baseball catcher is active, not passive. He’s actively anticipating the pitch, ready to adjust to it and adjusts in order to receive it. Communication is not a vegetative experience. The same holds true for reading. It’s not like sitting down on the couch, binge watching whatever is popular on Netflix. It’s a very alert process. This is what it’s like working with an Antinet.
Analog Captures One’s Consciousness Better Than Digital
Another instance of analog serving as a pro over digital revolves around capturing consciousness.
The Antinet Zettelkasten unlocks the type of communication relationship Luhmann referenced in “Communication with Noteboxes.” The Antinet Zettelkasten captures your own consciousness, your own past self, in a way that outshines digital Zettelkasten systems because it is truly a partner in a communication relationship between your current self and your past self.
Alberto Cevolini writes: “Compared with the rhetorical storehouse, the card index preserves a knowledge—we could also say, a past—that not only continually changes but also can be recalled in a highly selective manner.”298
When you go digital, you’re quite literally destroying the magic of the Antinet, stripping the system of the person and personality that lives inside it. When I read my handwritten notes from fifteen years ago, they feel much more real than any digital notes I took fifteen years ago (which, believe it or not, are harder for me to find than my physical notes). When I come across handwritten notes from fifteen years ago, I see myself in the handwriting. I see a different version of myself. A past version of myself. My mind is transported into that state, much like a song transports you into some state you were in when you first heard it.
For instance, take the album by Coldplay titled X&Y (yes, I admit, I once listened to Coldplay). Anyway, when I hear a song from the album today, it transports me to the summer of 2005 when I was listening to it on vacation with my family in Hawaii. A similar phenomenon happens when you interact with handwritten notes. You’re transported to the time and place you first read the book and took the note. With each handwritten note, you also transcribe a piece of your own consciousness—your own state and self-awareness—onto the card. This does not seem to happen in the same way with digital systems.
This argument may sound like woo-woo mysticism, but I assure you it’s not. Scholars are familiar with this notion and Luhmann himself certainly felt this was true.299 This is noteworthy since Luhmann’s “Communication with Noteboxes” is heralded as “the most advanced result of a long-lasting reflection performed by modern society.”300
In a thorough and deeply cogent paper on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, Johannes Schmidt “investigates the origins and development of Luhmann’s filing technique in detail, also availing himself of first-hand information about the content of this exceptional filing cabinet.”301 From this paper, Alberto Cevolini concludes that Schmidt’s paper “demonstrates that Luhmann did not regard his filing cabinet as a simple slip box, rather he interacted with it as if it were a true communication partner.”302
The reason handwritten notes produce the ghost in the box effect (that is, preserving your past self) seems to emanate from one thing: consciousness. Handwritten notes capture your own experience, sentiments, and sentience at the time you wrote your thoughts on the card.
Knowledge = meaning x information. Knowledge is dependent on internal dialogue between you and your past self. That is, knowledge deepens during the intrapersonal communication process with your past self’s consciousness. When you read your old notes, in your own handwriting, oftentimes there is meaning that is communicated through the notes that only you, its creator, can understand. This transitions the note from being just information to being a unit of knowledge (information combined with meaning). Analog systems with handwritten notes seem to retain their meaning better than commoditized, non-unique digital typefaces. With digital systems, you can never be 100% absolutely certain that it was indeed you who wrote the text. After all, the content could have been copied and pasted. With your own longhand handwriting, the spirit of your past self is much harder to spoof.
Analog Transforms the Zettelkasten into a Thinking Tool (Both Short-Term and Long-Term)
[Luhmann’s Zettelkasten] served him as a thinking tool. This is not only true in terms of the proposition that the file acted as a communication partner in the research process but also in regard to the fact that in Luhmann’s mind the process of writing things down enables disciplined thinking in the first place: “Underlying the filing technique is the experience that without writing, there is no thinking.”
—Johannes Schmidt in Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine
Johannes Schmidt regards Luhmann’s Zettelkasten as a thinking tool.303 There are really two components to this thinking tool: (1) it enhances immediate short-term thinking, and (2) it helps thoughts evolve over the long term.
The tool enhances thoughts in the short term through the process of forcing one to think by writing by hand. As Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “you have to work on paper.”304 Or take Alexander Grothendieck, a leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. In watching Grothendieck work, one person observed, “[Grothendieck] was improvising, in his fast and elegant handwriting. He said that he couldn’t think without writing.”305
In the long term, the Antinet (the thinking tool) grows by way of its tree-like internal branching structure, with more and more handwritten thoughts linking together and creating new related stems. As mentioned, this essentially transforms the Antinet into a new entity altogether—a second mind.
Both the short term component of the thinking tool, and the long-term component of the thinking tool rely on the analog nature of the Antinet.
Notecards’ Limited Space Force Unlimited Combinations of Thought
I’m not a fan of synthetic atomicity. Take for instance, the previously mentioned atomic design methodology which entails thinking of website components as atoms, molecules, organisms, etc.306 Such a paradigm overcomplicates the already overcomplicated field of web development. Digital Zettelkasten workflow warriors have jumped on this bandwagon, with people synthetically trying to make their notes atomic by arbitrarily breaking them into smaller parts. However, with most digital Zettelkasten systems, there’s no actual size constraint, such as a character limit, like one would find in Twitter.
For instance, Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes writes, “I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited… Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.”307 The problem with such advice is that, after some time, it’s too easy to forget to follow it.
Notecards are different. There is an actual, physically limited, space into which one must condense thoughts. The limited notecard space forces true atomicity, unlike inadequately implemented digital notetaking apps.
Here’s why this is important: scholars studying the field of knowledge argue that atomic knowledge (“dismembered” into notecards) creates combinatory power by way of “links and cross-references” that allow users to “shift their cognitive energies (newly relieved of the burden of memorization) to processing information.”308
The shift in cognitive energies does not happen because one is completely relieved of having to memorize anything (as in the case of storing thoughts in a digital notetaking app). Rather, with analog systems, the shift happens because you’ve actually stamped the knowledge into your mind by way of neuroimprinting the knowledge on your mind. This provides you with a working memory of knowledge you can carry with you as you read more material. The name of the game isn’t about offloading thoughts; it’s about neuroimprinting thoughts. This feature, combined with the character limits of notecards, is a great advantage of analog systems.
It’s a paradox. The slower pace required to use an analog Zettelkasten results in a decrease in the number of items put into the system; it simply takes longer to add the same amount of information one might add to a digital system. The same applies to the processing of the information put into each system. With the analog system, more time is required to convert the material you read into knowledge by adding your own reformulations and reflections—something not commonly undertaken in the digital versions.
Yet here’s where the paradox emerges. The workflow of the analog system (which takes more time to consume and process less information), actually results in producing a greater quantity of output in less time, compared with digital systems. Also, the quality of the output outshines output produced by digital notetaking systems.
There are two key factors that enable the paradoxical occurrence of greater work output from an analog system that slows work down: (1) neuroimprinting enables a more robust working memory when writing and creating output, and (2) the character limit of analog systems enable combinatorial possibilities in perpetuity that thereby enable more content to be generated from the same units of knowledge (namely, from the same notecards).
Analog Prevents Hyper-Selection of Irrelevant Material While Reading
The most critical aspect of notetaking is not what to select from the material you read; it’s what not to select from the material you read. According to Fiona McPherson, a cognitive scientist specializing in the study of Note- taking, the “most crucial” part of the entire process revolves around selection. By selection she is referring to determining what information is important, and just as critically, not selecting information that is not important.309
For this reason, tools that help you to not select irrelevant information prove advantageous. The Antinet shines in this respect due to the time and effort required to select material by writing it down by hand (in the process of extracting worthwhile notes and writing them down on a bibcard). This takes much more effort than merely highlighting somewhat interesting passages on a Kindle (something I did before discovering the Antinet). This extraction and selection process ends up increasing your focus while reading, so that you soon adopt a habit of selecting only the most truly meaningful ideas from the material you read.
Analog systems are “highly selective,” as the scholar Alberto Cevolini points out. Its selectivity is a feature, not a bug. Handwriting text is harder than typing text. It takes longer. It forces “selectivity” in the system. “It would be meaningless to move the whole content of a book into [a Zettelkasten],” writes Cevolini.310
With digital systems, it’s trivial to extract and store information from the
material you read. This is not a good thing. Very quickly you accumulate and collect way too much information. Before you know it, you’re drowning. The bad information crowds out the good. This is another reason analog systems outshine digital.
Analog Enables One to Compare, Contrast, and Organize Thoughts Better Than Digital
As Sönke Ahrens observes, “to have concrete notes in front of our eyes and be able to compare them directly makes differences, even small ones, much easier to spot.”311
I couldn’t have written this book without the aid of laying out all of the different sections on my desk. I created a hub of cards that had collective cardlinks on them. Each card was organized by topic and contained subtopics that pointed me to various card addresses in my Antinet. I then moved them around a large table to create the perfect logical layout for this book. Here’s a picture of it:
To write the book, I simply proceeded card-by-card and column-by-column. Each card contained its own numeric-alpha address in the top-right corner so that they could later be refiled in my Antinet. Here’s a closer look:
In the past, I’ve used analogous digital tools like Trello, Scrivener and others to organize information. None came close to my experience of physically working with knowledge. By moving around the individual units on a table, writing my book became a much easier task. This is but another overlooked advantage of analog knowledge systems.
Analog Forces One to Follow Best Practices
One of the other benefits of an analog system centers on the fact that it forces one to follow best practices and guidelines brought forth by digital Zettelkasten teachers. For instance, one author teaching digital Zettelkasten recommends linking and rewriting notes in order to make notetaking less boring.312 This advice is a recommendation for digital Zettelkasten users. For analog Zettelkasten users, it’s a requirement. There’s no other choice. There seems to be confusion among digital Zettelkasten practitioners about this. Every single time you install a card in the Antinet, you’re effectively linking it to all other cards in the system. You give it a numeric-alpha address that provides it with a chained location in your tree of knowledge. It’s essentially linked to its closest neighbors, and their closest neighbors, and their closest neighbors, and on and on.
With digital Zettelkasten systems, developers devise synthetic rules and methodologies to improvise for their own best practices. Digital Zettelkasten systems have jury-rigged guidelines and principles that are all but impossible to follow because they require near-perfect self-discipline to stick with. With the Antinet, no self-discipline is required. The best practices of linking every note and rewriting and rephrasing ideas is built into the core protocol of analog systems.
