I feel at home here on Neocities in a lot of ways. The community and the vibes here are like a little autistic haven--collecting things, sharing facts, everyone making their own space and laying out their own rules, noncommercially taking our interests seriously, parallel play!! Web 1.0 owed its livelihood to webmasters that I feel a deep and abiding kinship with: people who were deeply interested in their subjects of choice, and ended up also becoming obsessed with communication and organization and design as a way of best beaming that directly into the brains of site visitors. Which is also much of what I've found here on neocities. So many of my favorite neocities blogs and sites also have a section on organizational philosophy, when and where and why they write things down, etc.

And I'm doing it, too! I've been organizing and reorganizing my digital files for years now, starting with annual overhauls of the file structure on my flashdrive or Windows XP desktop and building up to mass-migrations every few years from paper notes to word files to evernote to google drive to notes app to dropbox to emacs to Joplin on and on forever. From basically the moment I first typed up a one-page chapter intending to start my first novel in elementary school, I've believed that I need to hold onto old things I've written and made, even if I'm embarrassed of them. As a result, I own a lot of files full of many thousands of words that now feel both outdated and terrible, not to mention all the mediocre art and old photos of a kid in an ill-fitting gender. And I have now about a decade's worth of academic thoughts from reading and working in my chosen discipline and peeking my head over the divide into everyone else's, plus about half as much worth of half-decent scraps of poetry.

An ex once called me a digital hoarder, and now I'm starting to see what he means. It feels more and more like the major task of my life is just to try and hold all of the disparate pieces of myself at once, that if I could get them to talk to each other and share ideas then... well, I'm not sure exactly but it feels like it would be great.

And it's hard! It's hard to organize a disparate set of heavily knowledge-based, think-y, write-y, read-y interests in the information age. I remember being in high school and realizing for the first time that googling was a skill that required speaking a special computer dialect and translating your question into it. Speaking Computer fluently was a point of pride of mine for years until the AI-written flood of bad results completely submerged google, and it's still hard for me to summarize my ideas and keep track of them and where they came from and be able to find them later. I keep thinking about child prodigies, and specifically how much John Green used to talk about child prodigies in his videos and I didn't really get why. And now I'm like... oh, this one specific way I am neurodivergent was really useful for the cultural conditions when I was young, but now the world has changed and more people have learned how to do the things I was once exceptional at and I'm not young enough for it to be impressive anymore and I have to learn to do something else.

And the something else that is right there, that is a parallel to the stuff I've always been praised for, is knowledge-work. Taking what we know and summarizing it, distilling it down, linking it together and taking it a step farther. I've done it a lot in oldschool and newschool ways--I've written book chapters and edited books, I've blogged and taught classes and made websites and written up manuals and how-tos and I've coded all kinds of automated summarizers and keyword-extractors. There are so many things that someone has known or thought once and written down to save, and we haven't caught up in our systems to summarize it, not really. And then we develop AI to summarize and make connections without us having to hold it all in our head long enough to make hard decisions about relevance, and it gets sold to the world as the solution to thinking forever. As if it isn't only, at best, the second half of the process of Thinking. You must, at some point, make new observations of the world to learn about the world. To have new things to think.

I've worked in this kind of text-knowledge AI. It seems less and less like something our world needs more of right now. I'm dreaming of a system that actually balances storage with recall, that actually prunes itself, that will hold itself near enough equilibrium or have a plan for what to do when the system drifts. I'm dreaming of a way off the pendulum.

I think the people who get paid to do this are librarians. Or archivists, maybe, and sometimes some very lucky writers and software developers. But I also think it's something most people are dealing with, on some level, trying to find their own way in this world full of nothing but barely-structured information.

I do find myself wondering, though, how much time other people spend thinking about their notes and organizational systems and how to best find the answers to the questions they need. Our circles are filters for other people like us, especially on the internet, so obviously I'm happy here with all of the other note-taking, journaling, artistic weirdos trying to make sense of the world with a return to a more DIY system. Most people are almost certainly not spending their free time dreaming up how to program their own custom all-in-one notes & file storage solution from scratch (a task I've started and abandoned at least a half-dozen times since I started college).

I've also become increasingly of the opinion, though, that the singularly competent and effortless neurotypical person does not exist. Certain things come easier to certain people, but I think the force of feelling like we should be able to easily do the normative life leads to a lot of people feeling like it's at least a little bit harder for them than it is for everybody else and shoving all the (metaphorical or literal) dirty clothes and clutter into one room so they don't have to admit the percieved weakness--this is masking. This is keeping up with the Joneses. This is the social construction of norms like neurotypicality. A sizeable percentage of the world and most of the people I interact with on a daily basis, now, are dealing with the same constant firehose of information as I am, all of varying relevance and credibility and ease of tracking down sources for. Maybe they can be more casual about organization and the origins of their ideas because their job and hobbies involve different kinds of labor. Maybe they just find people they trust to do a lot of the work for them. Definitely you can spend less time thinking about it if you're more willing to trust an algorithm.

And also, all of this feels so very in my own head, so far from the real world. The part of me that is my hands chopping tomatoes feels so far beyond the reach of my abstracting organizational brain--how am I ever supposed to bridge that gap? Even though the leaky, imperfect storage system that is my brain clearly already has.

I think I'd like to be a librarian.


PS- While writing this out, I came to wonder what the etymology of "organization" is, because looking at it I can guess that it's probably related to "organism" somehow, presumably involving a metaphor of building up discrete organs into a living system that can do things beyond the individual parts, but I wanted to look it up. I like looking up etymologies of words that I keep thinking about because it gives hints as to what people in the past were thinking about when they came to be. A little metaphor that we can rediscover.

It turns out I was basically backwards: start with a Greek word for "work" (ultimately ported several languages over relatively unchanged), split off into a Greek noun "organon" referring to tools, including musical instruments, and import it from Greek to French to English as "organ" in the 12th century to describe instruments. Though I found some sources, like the one linked above, that credit this as the etymology of organization, they don't give much detail about how a pipe organ would be a useful enough metaphor for the process of organizing for that word to stick. Etymology Online posits that all of the non-musical senses of organ, organize, and organization were later imported from several Latin words derived from "organon", with the multiple meanings of as "made up of interrelated parts", "tool for doing work", and "built up or resulting from work" already existing in Latin and imported into English in rapid succession in the early-mid 15th century. "Organism" and "organic" in the senses of "having organs" or "relating to life" actually came much later. The important thing about organs as a metaphor for organization, originally, seems to be that they are tools for getting work done that can, often, get more done by working in an interrelated way.

Which, if we're talking about organizing information, is very Zettelkasten.

PPS- I've already started writing up another essay on jargon to stop this from having one more line of thought crammed into it, so watch this space.