Imagine a notebook
Length: • 1 min
Annotated by John Borthwick
Imagine a notebook. It lives on your computer, and is encrypted with keys only you have access to. This notebook is designed to last decades. It’s your diary, your art practice, your novel, your scrapbook, your thesis, your stray ideas... maybe your lifework? Your second brain. Every, idea, memory, scrap, sketch, file you put into it is yours, forever.
What if this notebook is enchanted? Inhabited by little AI spirits who think with you? They find related thoughts, and help you forge new connections. They collide unrelated thoughts, and help you see new relationships. They provoke creative breakthroughs with generative AI prompts. They go out exploring, bringing back new ideas you might be interested in. Every time you add a page to this magic notebook, it gets a little bit smarter.
What if everyone has an enchanted notebook? What if you can follow others? Every follow, a new synapse in your second brain. And when you write a note, you can see related thoughts from follows. Collective intelligence. We could build little communal note graphs, forking and merging ideas to create shared understandings. A fan wiki. A lab notebook. A shared history for our D&D campaign. A digital garden. Spaces for thinking together. Shared worlds. Intersubjectivities. A commons.
What if we stitch these graphs together into a worldwide network? A tapestry of shared public and private graphs? What if this infrastructure for thinking is open? A peer-to-peer protocol. Owned by nobody. Belonging to everybody.