Let’s not kid ourselves: the human mind’s an imaginative bit of kit, but it’s no Turing-complete von Neumann machine (a.k.a a computer). And that’s hardly the first tech comparison to ever be made – not even a hundred years ago, Freud’s metaphor of choice was the steam engine; Descartes’ famous ‘broken clock’ model gained prominence during the industrial revolution, and quickly overtook the four humours as the go-to heuristic for assessing bodily health (for better AND for worse).

Today’s comparisons to computers didn’t come from nowhere. They’ve augmented our ability to access and process information on a scale no technology, to my knowledge, has done before. They are, as Tiago Forte affectionately described in the title of his 2022 book, a ‘second brain.’ A NYT article from 15 years ago takes this backported comparison to its limit – Americans consume up to 34GBs of data *every day*:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/10data.html

Whatever that 34 gigs looks like, Homo sapiens hasn’t physically changed much. That number applies to us today as much as it did to those alive 15, 150, or 150,000 years ago. If nothing else, it is a statement that says there’s only so much we can manage in one day. What has changed are the computers we use*, the volume of information we have access to, and the speeds at which we can access it.

Now, more than ever, it pays to have a system not just for curating the links you come across online, but also makes them easy to access, process, and create something new of it. That’s a big ask, and no-one can give you an instruction manual on how to do this, least of all *me:*

https://brologue.net/2023/11/03/prologue/

https://brologue.net/2023/11/04/zettelkasten-an-antidote-for-boring-notes/

https://brologue.net/2023/12/26/my-spines-as-stiff-as-a-prosthetic-leg/

My method is a coalition of tech-based solutions (blogging, Zettelkasten, Obsidian) as well as good ol’ fashioned pen and paper (a journal). It’s an ad-hoc attempt at being more deliberate about keeping the words coming; three children in a trenchcoat who don’t always agree who’s on top.

(Though, last I checked, Moore's law has hit its limit, and quantum computing, while a neat idea, is likely to be the next big grift after the AI bubble pops, so this may be as good as it gets for processing power.)