building a better garden

It’s important that people—actual individuals—are doing the work for themselves to decide how exactly they want to group information together, because it’s this exercise that hones a person’s unique intuition. It’s personal intuition that gives a piece of information a unique shape to live in

on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.

it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,”

Digital gardens are not about creating utopias. Rather, they design towards the small and slow progress of protopias, as defined by futurist Kevin Kelly as “a state that is better today than yesterday.” We need protopias, alternatives, and the seeds of gardens. We need space to dream, and for that dreaming to connect to concrete action.

Not just reading more, but whom I read and how I read. Including authors in reading lists can be a mere “[indication] of engagement, but as such that ‘engagement’ can be a very superficial one, one which acknowledges the existence of a body of work through name-checking, but which fails to attend to, disseminate, reinforce, or critique the detail o