Garden as (Re)clamation

Some Primers on the Digital Garden

• Chuck Grimett - What are digital gardens?
• Maggie Appleton - A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• Mike Caulfield - The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

This Garden

I: Apologia

I begin reclaiming this personal place on the internet at a time where it feels too late. Social media streams have long been established as the dominant mode of media consumption and online interaction. LLMs have gone from wild, hilarious Benny the Blue Whale-type chaos to being actively used to generate all manner of content. On LinkedIn, text invariably takes on a didactic, it's-not-this-it's-that, here's-why-my-interpretation-is-superior tone. On Instagram, semi-serious influencers (think: non-experts giving health advice) speak the same way, while AI-generated Pomeranians bake cakes, work at Sephora and speak with a human voice. The stream—not one stream but every tributary—rushes into the time-bound, dopamine-filled river. I can't tell if I'm rafting this giddying mess or drowning.

User-generated content was once seen as more authentic; people just gave their take on things. Now we live the conscious reality that all content is branding. Leslie no longer has one social media account where they tell you about their whole lives. They have the rock-climbing account, the film photography handle, the fitspo display. I don't think Leslie hopes any of these hobbies catapults them into paid engagements and financial freedom. I do think Leslie senses that neat, boxed selves are easier to handle. That maybe not everyone is interested in film-grained cityscapes with questionable composition, or their fifth video sending a soft V2 problem this week. So maybe we leave this part out. We park it in a different corner so we can still be enthusiastic about it, but it has no impact on people's view of us.

Enter the garden: the digital garden as a personal, non-linear environment, one that changes and grows with us, that is at once playground and photo album. I am nostalgic, for sure. In perusing other gardens, I find words that make and feel like brand new sentences. Later, I stumble upon webrings, neocities and nekoweb, sites with animated backgrounds, blinkies, shrines. And I think back to when I was ten and I wanted to set up a Charmed-themed guild on Neopets but hadn't learnt how people got photos from their computer to show up onto the internet. Or when I was eleven and got a bootleg version of Photoshop for the express purpose of making a gif with pixel Winnie the Pooh that flashed the letters of my name in alternating colors. Or the years spent tinkering with Blogger layouts in HTML/CSS/Javascript so I could make a thing exactly mine...

You see, there is the ethos of the digital garden—the learning in public, the tinkering, the shifting of focus from presenting a perfect product to thoughts-in-progress, from framing ideas chronologically to topologically, the ability to digitally place oneself in the larger context of one's mind—that appeals to me. And there is also a rope. A rope that wends its way through the streams of productivity-driven, LLM-fueled content that is indistinguishably filling and filler. If I trace the fibers of this rope, it takes me back to when making felt like an offshoot of myself, a burgeoning into being.

II: What to Expect

Just like physical gardens, digital gardens are a continuous work-in-progress. As such, it's common for gardeners to mark each note with an icon to indicate its level of maturity/development. These are the icons I'll be using:

General

( - the signpost) These are for orientation. They indicate notes used to explain how the site or some of its sections work.
( - the notebook) For record-keeping. Reading notes and journal entries fall into this category. These notes primarily serve to document experiences and preliminary thoughts.

Making Connections

The following are used to mark notes where I develop ideas.
( - the seedling) This indicates something in the early stages of development: shower bathtub rumination, long-run butter churning-type writings. High probability of anecdotal evidence.
( - the sapling) These will be backed up by some research and you can expect external references to play a part.
( - the tree) The above, plus I will have discussed these ideas in some detail with others.
( - the sunset) Outdated ideas; I no longer put stock in them. They remain here as record and for reference.

For sanity’s sake, I’m building this garden up from the present. I will add new notes from books I read, or things I do from this point forth. I may add additional notes from things I’ve encountered in the past that I find especially relevant. What I won’t do is attempt to reconstruct my entire perspective on any given subject from memory, for the sake of completeness.

Below is an overview the topics that have appeared in this garden: