A historical paradox I love telling my students: the marker of their status is the credential that comes from reading and discussing the content of books without regard to the physical container of those books, often just a cheap perfect-bound anthology. The earliest markets for books, however, celebrated them as physical representations of status that would be more intellectually nourishing to the owners if they were simply eaten. Students write papers about the contents of a book; back in the day all you had to do was build a bookshelf to display them.

One of the enduring legacies of Sonke Ahrens' work has to be the tools he has given to those people utterly desperate to appear intelligent. Whether they're intelligent or not is a separate question; the "knowledge graph" is a great example of one of those visual affordances that does very little except display in its depth and complexity the owner's collection of markdown files. The challenge for "linking your thinking" types was always one of display: nobody cares if I just screenshot a pic of my Finder window with a bunch of zk'd filenames. But this "knowledge graph" - that's a marker of status you can't deny.

It's difficult to make sense of a single thing in the linked post, but this bit I think indicates a truth about the epistemic commitments of people who can't really decide if computers should be human or humans should be computers:

>knowledge = code?

>i realized: knowledge bases and codebases have a lot in common >theyre both folders of text files with relationships between them, they both have conventions >and patterns, and they both benefit from agents that can navigate and operate them

This displays such a deep distrust of writing (as a technology and a personal practice) that it's hard to see the future of these writing tools as anything outside a convenient and casual container for display.