On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity

Most of us walk with the internet every day, through the internet computer in our pockets. We know how to use it to listen to music louder than our surroundings, get traffic updates and navigational advice, and keep up with the latest news from around the world. But if you find yourself craving a more balanced experience, the field computer can hel... See more

The internet, or “the information superhighway” as we Germans like to call it 🫠 is overwhelming people while making them addicted to it. In the piece below, Kyle Chayka frames curation as a way to slow down that information autobahn. By slowing down, curation offers people time to breathe and fully take in a piece of “content” instead of mindlessl... See more

The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.

One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation. The overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping millions of people together into decontextualised social spaces is a shit show.

I understand digital gardens as online spaces where many people are coming together to tend to seeds, which can be understood as content. The container that digital gardens are held in is a commitment to sustainability, pluralism, and cyclical growth. It entails adaptation and a culture of learning.