Trails

You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing.

• Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographist spawns horizontally scrollable panes.
• Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured outline of your browsing.
• Instead of always starting fresh, Cartographist can save, and load "trails" — the exact state of the session you've left — supporting researching topics over long periods of time.

We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.

When I'm on a journey through a dark swamp of information, I want that same sense of reassurance that flight map gives me. I want to know:

• Where I am right now
• Where I'm going (and how long it's going to take to get there)
• Where I've been and how I got here

Most interfaces are decent at the first two...but very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here. We can do it at small scales. Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.

I’m working on a spatial model through various user interactions and animations. This should help users better understand what’s going on and how to navigate the web most effectively.

Users have developed certain behaviors and expectations we want to build upon. Instead of replacing existing workflows, we want to enhance them.

• Horizontal movement — going back / forward
• Vertical movement — switching trail

[As We May Think] is often described as presaging the internet. The design Bush sketched for the memex inspired generations of computer engineers, influencing the inventors of things like the computer mouse and hypertext. But what fascinates me about this essay is that the device he describes does not resemble the internet or anything I’ve ever found on it. And the problem Bush imagines the machine as solving — supplementing human memory — hasn’t been aided by the internet so much as worsened by it. (Cue Phaedrus: “You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding.”)

The internet is an exploration machine; there’s a reason we call our portals to it “browsers.” What Bush was describing sounds to me like what you might get if you turned a browser history — the most neglected piece of the software — into a robust and fully featured machine of its own. It would help you map the path you charted through a web of knowledge, refine those maps, order them, and share them.

I don’t think anything like this exists. So Bush’s essay still transfixes me.

But the piece of Bush’s vision that dwells with me the most is the career he describes coming into being after his machine is commonplace. I’ve often called it the most beautiful definition of a journalist in the 21st Century I can think of:

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

There's more room for spatial concepts to become part of our web browsing experience.

One example is an idea I call "trails." It's based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web?

A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you're done, that sequential "trail of breadcrumbs" would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate "forward" and "backward" through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.

Sometimes life presents you with a choice. Or does it? There’s a lesson to be learned here. Maybe not all decisions are important and sometimes what matters is to keep moving forward.

So clearly, there’s some directed-ness to the way our minds are navigating our internal webs of ideas – good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.

If thinking is navigating the idea maze, then good ideas may be interesting paths through the maze. This very essay you’re reading is a kind of a purposeful wandering hike through my own idea maze, laid out in a way that’ll hopefully plant some new seeds in your own garden of ideas. Ideas are paths through idea mazes, and writing is a way to chart those paths for others to follow.

...It seems to me that if we want to model our minds as “graphs of ideas”, which a lot of thinking tools do these days, we should think of “thinking” as a purposeful pathfinding process through this graph, where we wander in search of satisfying latent connections with high explanatory power or aesthetic value.

Can we use GPT-3 (or its coming descendants) to relieve people of the burden of communicating their ideas, so that they can invest more energy in producing them?

...What I am doing right now, writing this essay, is, technically, a linear walk through the network of my ideas.

That is what writing is: turning a net into a line. But it is also very concretely what I do, since I have externalized my ideas in a note-taking system where the thoughts are linked with hyperlinks. My notes are a knowledge graph, a net of notes. When I sit down to write, I simply choose a thought that strikes me as interesting and use that as my starting point. Then I click my way, linearly, from one note to the next until I have reached the logical endpoint of the thought-line I want to communicate.

...A reader-generated essay is what you get when you can go into someone else’s knowledge graph and make a linear journey through the network, while GPT-5 generates a just-in-time essay that is human-readable. It would be like going on a Wikipedia spree, except that the posts are written the moment you read them, based on facts encoded in a knowledge graph, and the user interface makes it look like you are reading a single, very long, and meandering essay.