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bloops

[Louis Gleeson @aigleeson]

A German bureaucrat with no PhD, no grant, and no university affiliation built a system in the 1950s that produced 70 books and 400 papers, and the tool he used was a wooden box and one rule so simple it sounds like nothing.

His name was Niklas Luhmann. The system is called the Zettelkasten.

He was born in 1927 in Lüneburg, the son of a brewery owner. He studied law at Freiburg after the war, passed his exams, and entered the civil service. From 1954 to 1962 he worked as an administrative officer at the Ministry of Culture in Lower Saxony. Government files. Bureaucratic memos. Education reform paperwork.

Nobody was watching him. Nobody was funding him. There was no department, no lab, no dissertation committee waiting on his progress.

He started filling index cards anyway.

The rule was this: one idea per card, written in his own words, never copied from the source. Every card had to connect to at least one other card already in the box. No folders. No categories. No topic hierarchy of any kind. Just a flat web of linked ideas growing in every direction.

He called it his communication partner.

That phrase is not a metaphor. Luhmann believed the box genuinely surprised him. He would pull out a card he had written years earlier and find that it connected to something he had just added in a way he had never planned when he wrote either one. The system was producing relationships his conscious mind had never made. He was not retrieving stored information. He was discovering new ideas inside material he already owned.

Most people take notes to remember things. Luhmann built a system that thought for him.

In 1965, the sociologist Helmut Schelsky saw one of Luhmann's manuscripts. He was so astonished by the quality and depth of what a government clerk had produced without institutional support that he offered him a research position at the University of Münster on the spot. When Bielefeld University needed to qualify him formally for a professorship in 1966, they accepted two books he had already written from the box as his PhD thesis and habilitation simultaneously. He skipped the entire academic ladder. By 1968 he was the first full professor at the newly founded University of Bielefeld.

He held that chair for 25 years and never stopped filling cards.

By the time he died in 1998, the box contained 90,000 handwritten index cards organized across two separate slip boxes he had built over four decades. The cards covered law, economics, politics, religion, ecology, mass media, love, and the theory of modern society. They generated 70 published books and nearly 400 scholarly articles. He left 150 unfinished manuscripts in his estate when he died. At least one of them was 1,000 pages long.

The reason the output was possible is the reason most people's notes produce nothing.

Luhmann never took notes to file information. He took notes to force a connection. Every time he read something, his only job was to ask one question: what does this link to inside the box? Not what category does it belong to. Not what topic should I file it under. What does this idea touch, contradict, extend, or challenge inside the network that already exists.

The moment you file a note in a folder, you have decided in advance what it relates to. Which means you will never discover what else it might. Filing is the enemy of thinking. The box had no folders. Every idea had to earn its place by connecting to something else.

Over time the box stopped being storage. It became a record of every intellectual relationship Luhmann had ever noticed, and because the cards were physical and linked, he could walk through the network and find collisions between ideas he had written years apart without ever planning them. The box remembered what he had forgotten. It held conversations he had long since moved past. It was the only thinking partner he had that never forgot anything.

That is why he said, in an interview late in his career: "I don't think everything on my own. Mostly it happens in the slip box."

He was not being modest. He was being precise.

NotebookLM is the closest thing that exists today to what Luhmann built by hand. Not as a filing cabinet. Not as a search tool. As a network of connected material that can surface relationships between ideas you uploaded at different times without knowing they were related.

The people generating the most original thinking right now are not the ones reading the most. They are the ones connecting the best.

Luhmann proved that with 90,000 cards and a wooden box in a government office in Lower Saxony.

The box is now inside your browser. Most people are still using it like a highlighter.

[Samo Burja @SamoBurja]

I believe in this publication and concept. I will do everything I can to get it both fully funded and hire full time editors it deserves.

If you like my thinking, the articles this publication publishes, or the community of thinkers and doers it brings together please donate or subscribe.

[R.Сам 🦋🐏 @Logo_Daedalus]

Hudson:
“We need an appropriate vocabulary to describe these phenomena, and also to characterize their attempt at self-justification by promoting today’s neoliberal ideology. I suggest the following two words:
Geopathology: the abusive conduct of international relations in an exploitative manner that injures and victimizes other countries by imposing a unilateral double standard of behavior. All imperialism aspiring to empire building is characterized by such geopathology.
Econopathology: the doctrine to defend the absence of social empathy. Its core is today’s libertarian “greed is good” individualism advocating unlimited self-interest and rejecting any government constraint or regulation to protect the basic social principle of reciprocity and mutual aid that provided the foundation for civilization’s takeoff.”

[Jacobin @jacobin]

The Palm Springs School for Social Research wants to revitalize historical materialism, revive ideology critique, and ask big questions about social life.

We talked to one of its founders, Catherine Liu, about gangster capitalism and the future of socialism. https://t.co/X6RMLG17z7

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

A key idea in Chinese statecraft since ancient times is that the state has a responsibility to stabilize inherently unstable markets for essential commodities (see How China Escaped Shock Therapy). Public stockholdings like the ever normal granary participated in the market buying when prices are low and selling when prices are high for centuries with the goal of stabilizing supply and demand, prices and ultimately the value of money.

Now China is doing just that with the global oil market: It has drastically reduced its imports, hence pushing down demand in a time of global supply shortages. This is possible thanks to massive public reserves and strategic redundancy (some like to call this “overcapacity”). @JavierBlas finds that the number one reason why oil prices have not shot above USD 100 is China, China and China.

Imagine how much more stability the world could enjoy, if all countries engaged in such buffer stock stabilization for essentials such as grain. I have been calling for this at the G20 food security task force last year (see link below).

[Stephen Pimentel @StephenPiment]

My article on AI automating research for Blaze:

AI research agents compress knowledge. That makes scholarship faster, but also hides the friction where judgment forms: failed searches, tacit context, bad sources, dead ends. The question is what gets lost in the compression.
https://t.co/fj5aKsYN4c

[Matías Vernengo @NakedKeynes]

Agreed. More economists should read it

[andrianaシ @BOTTEGAHOENETA]

rest in peace to the icon, the legend david hockney.

[R.Сам 🦋🐏 @Logo_Daedalus]

My great aunt lived here until she died. She had the cheapest (controlled) rent of anyone I knew & the most beautiful apartment. I used to bring her the whole foods meatloaf (her favorite) & she’d give me some of her deceased husband’s rare books.

[Zoso 🇺🇳(🇮🇶) @MesoAnglic]

In case you thought I wasn't already going on enough side quests:

Yesterday, I had someone (@cth103) go by train to source important French financial documents for me.

He scanned 1121 pages total.

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

Shenzhen’s success was not because of Hong Kong, actually. Hong Kong is not in fact a technology heavy weight, never was, and Shenzhen’s talent pool was drawn from across China, not from HK or the West. You don’t know bumfuck about Shenzhen 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

@PiratePareto @fredsoda Marxism is a body of analysis for political economy with some programmatic objectives and not a cult and I wish you groupie fan club types would stop treating it like one 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

One’s body of elites were composed largely of colonial management holdovers and the other basically did a full rotation of social groups and interests over the span of a half century of civil conflicts.

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

In capitalistic Western economies they let the market make the material outcomes but in the socialistic Chinese economy they drive the material outcomes to make the market.

[scientism @mr_scientism]

The real consequence of Veblen is not ’leadership by engineers‘ but a kind of ‘political materialism‘ that emphasizes the role of knowledge of the physical world in political/economic organization and has a more expansive view of what counts as ‘political fantasy’ than realism.

[scientism @mr_scientism]

Modern philosophy made a premature leap to the political without properly accounting for the role the manipulation of matter plays in human life. This created the idea that political freedom safeguards scientific and technological progress, when it should be the other way around.

[Marko Jukic @mmjukic]

A true modern classic of sociology and political science of the 2010s/2020s, still widely underrated, under-read, and understudied!

[Lei Gong @gonglei89]

Thing is the Qing Dynasty understood it needed to industrialize urgently but the imperial court was unable and unwilling to sacrifice elite interests to ensure successful reform (they would have had to empower groups and interests that they thought would weaken their authority).

[risent @risent]

这个无损全自动书籍扫描仪后面衍生除了个开源项目 https://t.co/HdFaUGYTu4