Zettelkasten is a method for creating "slow productivity" against a sea of information overload

Some of the framing goes back to using the card index as a means of overcoming the eternal problem of "information overload" [see A. Blair, Yale University Press, 2010]. I ran into an example the other day in David Blight's DeVane Lectures at Yale in which he simultaneously shrugged at the problem while talking about (perhaps unknown to him) the actual remedy: https://boffosocko.com/2024/09/16/paul-conkins-zettelkasten-advice/

It's also seen in Luhmann claiming he only worked on things he found easy/fun. The secret is that while you're doing this, your zettelkasten is functioning as a pawl against the ratchet of ideas so that as you proceed, you don't lose your place in your train of thought (folgezettel) even if it's months since you thought of something last. This allows you to always be building something of interest to you even (especially) if the pace is slow and you don't know where you're going as you proceed. It's definitely a form of advanced productivity, but not in the sort of "give-me-results-right-now" way that most have come to expect in a post-Industrial Revolution world. This distinction is what is usually lost on those coming from a productivity first perspective and causes friction because it's not the sort of productivity they've come to expect.

In reply to writingslowly and Bob Doto at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1285175583877103749<br /> Conversation/context not for direct attribution

some variations of the definition of "Industrial Revolution"

one must naturally be more careful in how one defines, treats, and uses the phrase which can bind together a great many things, particularly in non-technical contexts.

There's an interesting linkage going on here between the industrial revolution (and thus possibly Capitalism) with the creation and even litigation of "the poor" classes in Britain.

Did "the poor" exist in the same way they do today prior to the Industrial Revolution? What are the subtle differences? (Compare with Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97.)

Did it help that America was broadly formed during the start of the Industrial Revolution and at a time in which social mobility was dramatically different than the period of history which proceeded it?

And how much of this difference is split with the idea of the rise of (toxic) capitalism and the switch to "keeping up with the Jonses" which also tends to drive class distinctions?

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Transformation-Political-Economic-Origins/dp/080705643X

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.

from World Brain, double check with source

• for: Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now - critique - violence during Enlightenment, violence during Industrial Revolution

• for: three great separations, alienation, financial capital vs social capital, the great simplification, linked in post - social capital

• for: The Great Simplifcation, Nate Hagen, The Great Complexification, The Great Alienation, three great separations

• comment

  • Last night, I had a thought about Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" project. Seeing Annilina's post this morning made me think of a recent film I annotated on the isolated Jarawa people living on a once desolate island off the coast of India
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FNdvlO6bPG60%2F&group=world
  • Watching the events of modern Indians exploited the Jarawa is like watching colonialism unfold in realtime.
  • The Jarawa people interviewed said how they are happy with the life they have lived before modernity discovered them.
  • Progress, especially the Western flavored one beginning with Colonialism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution has set a trajectory for what we might call "The Great Complexification".
    • Remember when watches and clocks were all mechanical spring and windup? Now billions of them depend on batteries. Do we really need to modernize everything? It simply creates more waste and greater demands on nature for natural resources. Do we really need exponentially increase stuff with an Internet of Things?
  • Western influenced progress has led us into multiple progress traps, which now make up the many threads of the current polycrisis.
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap
  • Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
    • the agricultural revolution
    • the industrial revolution
    • the industrial agricultural revolution
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
  • These created successively more alienation. As progress marched towards modernity, we created more and more technology that broke apart community and making us dependent on transportation and communication technology to maintain it or some proxy of it. Today, we live in cities teeming with millions, yet there is widespread alienation in the mere act of walking or driving down a crowded street.
  • It is the irony of modernity that it packs so many people into small spaces, and yet we are all estranged to each other.

• for: Great Separations, Three Great Separations, alienation, alienation - industrial revolution, John Ikerd
• Title
  • The Three “Great Separations” that Unravelled Our Connection to Earth and Each Other
• Author
  • John Kkerd

Some of the benefits of multiple-choice tests.

Barzun misses the fact that these are not just easy for teachers to grade, but they're easier for mass grading by machines in a century dominated by standardization of knowledge in a world dominated by standardized mechanization for a mass-production oriented society.

Cross reference educational reforms of Eliot following the rise of Taylorism.

Interesting history and possible solutions.

Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?

Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

• Paraphrase
• Claim
  • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
• Evidence
• “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
  • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
• this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
• Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
• After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population

• This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

• time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

• assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)

• This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

  • Rebound effects
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
    • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
      • a concept (Shove 2018)
      • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
    • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.

  • Attitude-behavior gap

  • Behavior-impact gap

Third Transition: Industrial Revolution

Kenneth Pomeranz indicates that there was massive deforestation of most of Europe 1500 (30-40 percent coverage) to 1800 (scarcely over 10 percent coverage) during the early industrial age. Similarly there was a corresponding deforestation in China, but it was less marked because of the their size and distribution of technology.

Slavery and colonialism likely played the most outsized roles in global positioning for the United States and Europe, but how might we also comparatively measure these effects separately and also include other broad effects like the industrial revolution?

Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

John Taylor Gatto is one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative.

Notice the focus of turning education here toward servicing the industrial revolution.

Have we industrialized the humanity out of our society? Where is the space for creating identity, autonomy, and self-direction?

Josiah Wedgwood was apparently the first to institute a system of clocking-into work.

Speaking about transitions within societies and cultures can be problematic as they are complex and intertwined between individuals, families, and larger structures and institutions. The transition to industrialization is often seen as a foregone conclusion when, in fact, it was a gradual struggle over time. Glossing over these types of transition can trivialize analysis of the complex effects at play.

Note here that this analogy only goes so far. The sciences of medicine and agriculture have come leaps and bounds since the start of the industrial revolution and our outputs and expectations for both with respect to humanity have increased tremendously.

Not so with education. While we have dramatically increased the amount of information, there still seems to be a limit to how much an individual can learn.

César Hidalgo calls this limit the personbyte.

The perennial question for education technology is how might we get around this limit?

The only solution in some areas is new discoveries concatenating and compressing some of the knowledge by abstracting it to simpler spaces, as sometimes happens in physics, but generally this is relatively rare. (or is it? justify...)

This underlies the reason why the acceleration of the industrial revolution has applied to so many areas, but doesn't apply to the acceleration of learning.

Learning is a linear process.

Reminder to go back and read this.

[[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]

1790> Morris Town (built by John morris (1745-1819) - apparently the first purpose-built workers' village (a precursor to Levittowns in the United States and Puerto Rico)

This first phrase is the most telling of all the issues we deal with on the edtech front. Because the industrial revolution touched almost every aspect of life since its inception, everyone presumes that it must also affect education.

Sadly other than helping to make searching for and obtaining material much quicker, it still needs to be consumed, thought about, and digested by a student. The industrial revolution simply hasn't increased the bandwith of the common student's brain. It's unlikely that anything in the near future will expand it.

Recall the video we watch in class on education. We are about to the Enlightenment get mechanized.