Transcription
Note-taking apps are as much a part of the attention economy as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix. And I think Notion, as well as the notion of the digital second brain, are the biggest culprits of this. So, in this video, we're going to talk about how and why note-taking apps are such a lucrative part of the attention economy, as well [snorts] as the fallacy of the digital second brain. And lastly, how I handle taking notes as a professional geek, both with, you know, physical notebooks and things like that, as well as a combination of Neovim, Markdown, and SyncThing for more technical note-taking. So, let's get into it.
So, I've got a bit of a difficult task ahead of me, which is to convince you that note-taking can be part of the attention economy. Now, I don't think note-taking is inherently an attention economy thing. Just like watching a film can be engaging and artistic and interesting, or watching video lectures on the internet can also be a productive or interesting thing to do, note-taking can be a productive thing to do. However, these things can all be adapted. For example, watching films or TV shows you love adapted by Netflix to be this like autopilot consumptive thing. Same thing with YouTube and watching video lectures and interesting stuff on the internet. In the same way, I think Notion has taken the creative learning process that can be note-taking and turned it into a purely consumptive process where you're like hoarding information and facts and storing it in a database somewhere.
Okay, maybe that's a bit of a bold statement to start with. So, we're going to take a step back to the beginning. I think when we're evaluating any application for its attention economy, we should ask ourselves two questions, two red flags to look for. The first is where is the data stored? If it's stored externally, we might want to take a look deeper. Not because that's inherently problematic, but because it costs money to store data. There need to be servers and hard drives and things like that. And so they need to be getting their money to do that somehow. Step two is, is the product free? If the product is free and they have to pay for hard drives and servers, then you're probably the product. You're probably how the money is being made. And that is a good sign that some attention economy stuff is happening because for you to be the product, you have to be constantly using their service.
So, let's evaluate Notion. Notion has a pretty extensive, pretty good free plan. They do make quite a bit of money on their enterprise plans as well as the personal plans that can sort of extend the feature set, but I don't think it's quite enough to pay for all of those free users. Just like you can pay for extra Google Cloud stuff, the vast majority of users are taking up gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes of storage for free. Petabytes when you add them all up.
So, we dug deeper into the privacy policy that Notion shares with us. And by the way, if you're wary of attention economy stuff, if you get a whiff of free services, take a look at the privacy policy. That's where you're going to find this stuff. Notion tells us, "We provide information about your device and online browsing activities to third-party advertising providers for targeted advertising and related purposes." There's your smoking gun. That means that your data, your attention, because your attention is required to gather as much data as possible, that's what's being sold. You are the product. This is the attention economy.
So now the question is, how does Notion get you to spend more time and store more data in its proprietary database stored somewhere that's not your computer? What do they do? Notion pitches itself as the everything workspace. So, let's talk a little bit about that. Here we are at the Notion homepage. And the first thing it says is "One workspace." And I want to scroll down to one of their marketing things, which is this "Fewer tools. Bring all your tools and teams under one roof." Now, this is mostly pitched at teams, but we're starting to get this idea that you should put everything in Notion, your AI everything app. And AI is a whole other bit. But you can have mail, you can have your calendar, you can have all sorts of integrations, centralizing data around and in Notion.
Not [snorts] only that, Notion's got like a subculture that's been developing around these like life operating systems. Whoever decided to call these operating systems, by the way? Oh, operating systems make computers go, not people. Not people. Okay, there's my rant. But there are these life operating systems which essentially are methods of gathering everything you are about a person into facts and text you can store inside Notion. So over here we've got the "10 Best Notion Life Operating Systems," which include things like paid templates, action dashboards for action tracking, whatever an action is. Uh, it comes with journaling templates so you can store intimate details about yourself, built-in habit trackers, knowledge dashboards to build your second brain. And we are going to talk about second brains, ideas, projects, visions, and dashboards and goal subsystems, all of this stuff. And Notion is clearly built for you to store as much of yourself as possible.
Now, why? Let's look at their examples first. Movie lists, recipes, travel plans, and yearly goals. All of these things are like a marketer's dream. If they can know all of your favorite movies, Netflix can start to build a database of what kinds of movies are enjoyable to this type of user demographic. Your recipes, they can market you books and cooking tutorial videos on YouTube. Your yearly goals, they can figure out what self-help books to provide you. And travel plans. They can tell you about how you should go to Italy and find yourself because you're 27 and you're feeling a little bit stuck in your career and you fit that demographic of live, laugh, love. This is built to gather as much of you as possible to develop a user model that can be marketed to.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with wanting to track your favorite movies and rate them and write little reviews for yourself or even share them with your friends. Of course, there's nothing wrong with keeping a list of your favorite recipes, or knowing where you want to see in the world and travel to, or keeping track of your yearly goals and your visions for your life. These are all natural, normal, healthy human behaviors, just like watching a film can be a natural, healthy engagement with art or learning something from a video on the internet. But they can also be adapted, used like hooks to pull you into the attention economy. That's why I think Notion is part of this attention economy thing. That's why I think more than just Notion, note-taking can be a part of this. And I think there's just something extra sinister about taking somebody's goals and visions for their future and life, a hopeful thing, and turning that into an ad product. That's just kind of sad. Maybe that's just me. So, there's your profit motive.
Now, I want to focus on the environments that are most conducive to the kind of like creative and self-reflective processes that a note-taking app should be. Let's take a look at Notion a little deeper. Now, first things first, I think the most important ingredient to any kind of creativity or self-reflection, once you've engaged with the environment to some degree, read something interesting or looked at some art or whatever it is, right? Whatever sparked your creativity, what you need is some solitude. You need to be free of external input so you can actually figure out what it is you think or feel and start to put that into the world somehow. Whether that be in your notes or on a canvas or whatever you're doing.
Notion doesn't give you that. Notion gives you ads. Notion gives you, from the ground up, this is your homepage, by the way, the one they give you by default. They give you Notion AI ads that you can try. They give you your calendar, which they got without asking me. They give you blogs that you can read. They give you featured templates that you can buy. A marketplace full of more things that you can buy. They give you notifications and new tags and all sorts of things when what I want, if I'm just creating something, right, is a blank page for me to put myself into my own thoughts, not to be inundated with the thoughts and products other people have already created. So in this way, I think Notion captures your attention to sell you things or keep you up to date with your team. Not inherently bad things, but maybe not conducive to the creative process.
So, I think we're starting to get a sense for how Notion and note-taking applications in general can take advantage of our creative and self-reflective drive and turn it into a consumptive drive. Just like with Instagram or TikTok, you're sent notifications about new things or co-workers or new products that have been released on Notion. Those ping you on your smartphone or your device or your email or something like that and bring you into the application. That's classic attention economy app behavior. Once you're there, you can be pitched new ads about Notion AI or marketplace solutions for your Life OS. All of that jazz is your usual attention economy pipeline.
But I think this is paired with the digital second brain movement that like Thiago Forte's book "Building a Second Brain" champions. I think that mindset, that philosophy is particularly good at taking that creative self-reflective instinct and turning it into a consumptive one. So let's talk about the digital second brain. If you haven't heard of the digital second brain stuff, it's sort of a philosophy that was really popular two to three years ago that goes kind of like this: You are constantly inundated by so much information that you can't possibly store it all from Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, and articles, and the news. And this, this forgetting of information is such a horrible fate that we should do anything we can to avoid it. And so what we should do is externalize that information. Anytime we come across anything that we find moderately interesting, we should find a way to store that for reference later. That storage, that database, which is very often Notion in like the productivity YouTube videos, that becomes your second brain because I forget, but my second brain can't.
But underpinning that, I think, is a fallacy. It's this notion that hoarding data and information and storing it somewhere is the same thing as learning, as cultivating wisdom, and as being creative. And I'm going to look through Thiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" website and marketing materials to show you this.
So, here we are at the "Building a Second Brain" website, "A proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential." I want to scroll down here and point out where I think this logical fallacy really is exemplified. Statement number one is that "Building a second brain is a way to cultivate a growing body of knowledge that is uniquely your own." So here we're talking about knowledge, the possession and hoarding of facts, right? Propositional knowledge. Over here we say, "You'll have access to the wisdom you need to make sound decisions and take the most effective actions." So, we're saying that if you have facts stored, then you'll be wise enough to make good decisions and productive enough to take action. I don't think that's true. Just because I know something, or even worse, have the knowledge stored external to me, does not mean that I've grown wise and can now make really good decisions. Do you know how many really smart people, like highly intelligent people who know lots of facts, make stupid decisions all the time or don't do anything productive? Like, it's a lot. This is not a one-to-one mapping.
The second thing I want to point out here is the process you're being walked through. It's the CODE process: Capture information from the outside world. Organize it in a way that lets you easily find it. Distill it, which means summarize. And then Expressing your unique ideas through your own unique voice, writing, speaking, designing, or teaching. I think there's a missing step here, which is thinking about and processing this information. The first three steps don't actually require you to learn anything. It's an acquisition, a consumption of information. All you get to do by the end of step three is have a bunch of summarized things. But when do you let that information transform you? Because that process of transformation, that's learning. When you go from thinking about something one way to a new way, that's learning. That's the cultivation of wisdom to some extent. And you need to do that to have any sort of unique idea. By the end of step three, you don't have unique ideas yet. You have a lot of other people's ideas expressed succinctly. That's not enough. That's not creativity.
But if you do accept this fallacy, if you do accept that having knowledge stored is the same thing as learning or growing wise or expressing unique and interesting and novel thoughts, then that process of creativity can be replaced with consuming and hoarding and storing information, probably into Notion, which is then used by Notion and their third-party services to whom they're sharing your data to create a more accurate user model of you to be able to target you more effectively with ads and to be able to keep your attention longer. Everything you read and watch and consume used to target you better with ads instead of, I don't know, writing an article yourself.
So there you have it. That's [snorts] why I think note-taking is part of the attention economy, or at least it can be. But in the same way that we can watch movies without being taken advantage of by Netflix, or we can watch a video lecture without being taken advantage of by YouTube, we can take notes. I, I don't want to try to remember everything. I don't have a perfect memory. I still need a way to store some information or to use note-taking as a creative and self-reflective process. This is not too hard.
So, let's talk about the two ways that I take two different kinds of notes. The first kind of note that I like to take is what I call a process note. Process notes are discardable. I use them to process information, to think about something. I like to lean on this book by William Zinsser called "Writing to Learn." Uh, it's a great sort of walkthrough of how you can use writing to externalize your thought and look at it more rigorously. Find out what you mean to say, or what you feel, or what you think about something by putting it on the page. That whole process just makes your thought a little bit more rigorous. And I do this not through an app, but through a variety of little notebooks and things. I keep these pocket notebooks. My wallet itself has a little notebook in it. I keep a journal. I also have the notes for this video taken by hand with fancy little pens.
Why do I do this? Well, one, because there's a lot of research that demonstrates that writing by hand, because of the multi-sensory nature of it, helps us remember and process better. But like, to be completely honest with you, I just like the aesthetic of it. It feels really nice to write by hand. I like that process. I like my leather-bound notebook. It's a little bit pretentious, maybe, but screw you. It's fun. But I like it, and that's why I do it. It feels better to me to process by hand with all of the aesthetic stuff sort of bundled in with that than to write out process notes typing. Now, that's just my preference. You can do it however the heck you like. If you want to do it in a .txt file with your like fancy keyboard or whatever it is that you want to do, or you have a typewriter, whatever your thing is, just kind of make it fun. That's how I think about process notes. And when these are done, I don't need them. I don't need my YouTube script ideas after this video goes out. They're just there. They were there to process. So, I don't need to store them in a database or anything like that. I can just have them in the notebook, put the notebook away, throw out the notebook, whatever.
The second category of note I take, I call stateful notes. Now, this is primarily a home labbing and attention economy channel. So, I take stateful notes about the state of my home lab. But anytime I install an application on like a Debian server, I take note of the fact that I did that so that I know the configuration, the state of that machine. But the same can be done for less technical things, right? If you're working on a project for a hobby or maybe with a client, knowing the state, tracking the state of that project is probably useful. What makes a stateful note different from a process note is that actually storing and maintaining the propositional knowledge, the facts of it, is useful. And so this is the actual use case of keeping some sort of digital second brain.
I do this with Neovim and Markdown files, which is just a plain text file, right? You can do this with a Google Doc or a Word document or a .txt file in Notepad on Windows or the Notes application in your Apple product, whatever the heck it is. But because I'm a huge nerd and I want to talk about Linux, Neoim, and Markdown files, we're going to walk through how I handle my digital second brain, the stateful notes part of this.
So, here is how I handle stateful notes in my digital brain. [snorts] I have a folder in my home directory called `db`. If we `cd` into that and then `ls`, it's just a bunch of Markdown files, and I can open these with Neoim. I usually go to `index.md`, which is like the homepage. Here you can see I've got "home lab," "home assistant," "videos," a bunch of stuff. These are links to other files. I kind of treat this web of Markdown files as a personal wiki. If I press `GF` over here, it goes to the file, and I can kind of trace this through down to Jellyfin, which is a service I run in my home lab. Jellyfin #runs on, right? I use these tags so that I can search through things. I also tag services or machines and things like that. And then again, Jellyfin runs on Professor X, which is a little mini PC I've got. And then Jellylexc. So if we look over to `jellylexc`, this file, this Markdown file just keeps a list of useful state tracking things about the Lex that's running Jellyfin. It keeps a list of the resources I read through as I was building this, keeps some tags so I can search, and then `process` just goes through all the things that I did. I ran `apt install vim` and `vi info` and `intel-gpu-tools` and so on and so forth, so that if I'm ever curious about what state my home lab is in, I can look at the machine's Markdown file and know what's been done to it.
Now, these Markdown files are all stored locally. And I used to work on multiple machines. These days, I don't, but when I did, I used SyncThing. SyncThing is this great open-source application that lets you sync two directories on two different, well, N different machines. So, I can take that `db` folder full of Markdown files and sync it onto, let's say, my MacBook, which is my laptop of choice right now. Uh, I really want to try a Framework, but I don't have the money to just buy a new laptop. [laughter] But this makes it so that if I write changes on my laptop, they get synced to my workstation here, which is what I'm recording on. And vice versa. We can add a third or fourth or fifth node as well, all of which get synced together. So my digital brain, if you want to call it that, is wherever I need it to be. SyncThing is awesome.
Even better, if you, let's say, I take my laptop outside of my house, then there's this problem because SyncThing only works on your local network. All of the machines have to be on the same network. Well, to solve that, you can use Tailscale. This is what I was using for a long time. Again, I'm not really keeping my notes on my MacBook anymore. I just back them up to my .naz. I can connect all of the nodes to the Tailscale. This is basically like a VPN. And no matter where I take those nodes, they're connected to the Tailscale, and they can sync no matter if we're on the same local network or not. This combination basically gets you the same thing as like Obsidian plus Obsidian Vault sync stuff, but it's completely free, open-source, and controlled by you, which I think is fun. I also get to use Neoim, which makes me happy. So, that's how I handle stateful notes for me.
Now, I can already hear a couple of people saying, "Have you tried Org mode for Emacs? Have you tried Obsidian?" Yes, I think they're awesome. They're full of really cool features, and Emacs is a whole beast that I haven't had the full time to explore yet. I have tried Obsidian to a fair extent. Um, and it does solve the problem of reading Markdown files on a phone, but well, you, you all know me, my phone does nothing. I don't want my notes on my phone. I have a little notebook and a pen that I use for notes on the go. I don't need to track stateful notes while I'm on the go. I need to track process notes while I'm on the go. And so this is perfect. If you do use Org mode or Obsidian or some other note-taking thing that you think is one, away from the attention economy, and two, awesome, I would love to hear about it in the comments below. I'm unlikely to migrate because this works for me. I can put it on Git. I can Tailscale it, SyncThing it. It's Markdown files that I own, so they're super portable. I love this system for me for its simplicity, but you're not me. You probably got your own thing going on, and I'd love to hear about that.
So, there you have it. I think note-taking can be, and unfortunately is, a very real victim of the attention economy. I think Notion and the digital second brain movements, those things sit together to replace creativity and self-reflection with consumption, just like Netflix replaces engagement with film and art with consumption of "Friends" for the 16th time, if "Friends" is available in your region at that time. [snorts]
But there are awesome ways to reclaim our note-taking so that it gives us the solitude we need to think reflectively and be creative. Whether that's writing just plain Notepad .txt files or something as elaborate as Org mode or my Neoim Markdown thing, whatever it is, there's ways to reclaim this. And so I would ask you, do you feel that your note-taking apps, if you take a lot of notes, do you feel that that supports you in being creative? If so, let me know about that process. And if it doesn't, let me know about that, too, because I would love to hear about the ways that we can foster creativity and self-reflection with our notes, and how that process can be undermined and turned into sort of a consumptive thing, so we can all gain a better understanding of how to direct our attention to creativity, to self-reflection, and use our note-taking to benefit us instead of add conglomeration things.
Anyways, thanks for your time and attention. I know how valuable it is, and I'll catch you in the next one. See you.