Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
"...the site attracts a lot of futurists, dreamers, and builders who are excited to tinker with ideas together. giving them the tools they need to idea garden together would be so powerful and interesting." Idea gardeners in need of the proper tools. Yes. That framing brings to mind the concept of a "memex" (portmanteau of memory + index) and the related theory of conceptual labor by Ním Daghlian (see comments for sources). Daghlian describes a memex as "an extension of an individual’s memory and curiosity that was designed not just to store information, but to help them recall and link things they stored in a meaningful way." and "...a sort of mental storehouse, made as digitally sustainable as possible – built on open source standards and software, simple enough that I can just get it out the door and use it, but... resistant to being remotely shut off by a billionaire." So a memex is like a digital garden, but oriented more toward concept stewardship. Daghlian defines conceptual labor as "the experience of doing work that redefines itself as you do it." I've been quietly working on building my own memex (in Obsidian) with a focus on layers of nascent ideas and related concepts. I've definitely been wishing for better tools to connect the fruits of that labor with others on the purple app who are working on similar or overlapping ideas.
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Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
Sources: https://www.mmmx.cloud/what-is-a-memex https://www.conceptuallabor.com/
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