Core Claim

When your knowledge lives in platforms you don't control, you don't own it—you're renting access to your own thinking. The solution isn't finding a better platform. It's building infrastructure where ideas can accumulate, connect, and compound rather than disappearing into chronological feeds.

A newsletter is a stream. What I needed was a web.

The Problem: Platform Capture

Over years of publishing a newsletter, content lived in platform-dependent formats—MailChimp, then WordPress via MailPoet. Each platform offered convenience at the cost of control. The content was technically "mine," but:

• It existed in proprietary formats
• It was locked behind interfaces I didn't control
• Old ideas sank out of sight as new ones piled on top
• Nothing connected

The limitation became clear when someone asked: "Do you have a knowledge base behind the newsletter?"

I didn't. I had a stream.

Newsletters deliver ideas in the moment. They're terrible at helping ideas grow over time. I couldn't link themes across years. I couldn't surface recurring ideas. I couldn't build explainers connecting insights from 2018 to reflections from 2024.

Stream vs. Garden

Digital gardens offer a different model. As Tom Critchlow and Mike Caulfield articulate: streams are fleeting, gardens are topology—the web as space, as an arrangement and rearrangement of ideas in relation to each other.

The Solution: Technical Liberation

Plain Text as Preservation

The first step was extraction: downloading every newsletter archive, then converting everything to Markdown using Python (with AI assistance to compress weeks of work into days).

Why Markdown? Because plain text is the closest thing we have to a format that will outlast any platform.

• Human-readable without special software
• Versionable in Git
• Portable across any system

When platforms die—and they will—plain text survives.

Structure That Creates Pathways

In Obsidian, each issue gets frontmatter: title, date, tags, categories, connections to related concepts. This is where the garden metaphor becomes literal—you're not just organizing files, you're creating pathways through ideas.

The hyperlinks matter most. Obsidian lets you link to pages that don't exist yet. These "ghost pages" become placeholders for concepts you know you'll need to explore. When tagging an issue with "surveillance capitalism" or "digital autonomy," I could link to a page that would eventually explain that concept—even if that page didn't exist yet.

The Integration Vision

For years, friends asked about doing thematic analysis across the newsletter. I kept imagining a space that could hold ideas side-by-side instead of stacking them in a line. Something wiki-like—not encyclopedic, but showing how thinking evolves.

Then it clicked: what if the newsletter was just one input?

• Newsletter issues
• Blog posts
• Reading notes
• Presentation materials
• The connections between them

Share not just polished outputs, but the notes, the half-formed ideas—let people see how the dots got connected.

The Voice Problem

AI is extraordinarily helpful for streamlining work—cleaning up YAML, standardizing formatting, identifying connections. But AI also wants to smooth out rough edges, make everything consistent in ways that erase personality.

I spent as much time fighting AI's suggestions as implementing them. Every time the AI offered to "improve" phrasing or restructure a paragraph, I had to ask: Is this still my voice?

This tension mirrors a larger pattern in our AI-saturated moment. These tools promise to make everything better—cleaner, faster, more professional. But "better" often means "more generic." The useful friction of your particular way of saying things gets stripped away in pursuit of optimization.

The Practice I Developed

Let AI handle structure and mechanics. Never let it rewrite sentences that carry weight.

Use it for the scaffolding, not the substance. The computer can help organize thoughts; it shouldn't be doing the thinking.

The challenge is maintaining this boundary consistently. It's easy to accept AI's version when tired or when the suggestion sounds "good enough." But good enough isn't the point. The value comes from a particular perspective, a specific way of connecting ideas. Lose that, and you're just producing content.

The Annotation Trap

I also had to resist adding too much context in retrospect. While connecting issues and adding metadata, the temptation was to over-explain—make everything perfectly clear and comprehensive. But that creates its own mess: too much scaffolding obscuring the original work.

The goal was connection, not annotation.

What the Garden Enables

With archives live in the digital garden, something new becomes possible: tracing patterns across time.

• How thinking about AI evolved from curiosity to critical skepticism
• Threads of surveillance capitalism or digital literacy principles developing across years
• The arc of the newsletter itself—not just what was written, but how the approach changed

Each issue now includes "Connected Concepts"—links to vault pages providing deeper context. Quotes connect to quote notes and notes about the people who said them.

This isn't just organization. It's creating a space where ideas can compound. Where insights from different moments can speak to each other. Where readers follow their own curiosity trails rather than being locked into chronological consumption.

Why This Matters

In an Age of AI Slop

As we move deeper into a moment flooded with AI-generated content—perfectly smooth, perfectly forgettable, disconnected from any real thinking process—a digital garden becomes an interesting alternative.

It shows work. It shows evolution. It shows a human thinking over time.

The Principles Made Visible

This work represents a commitment to digital autonomy that mirrors what I write about:

• Plain text over proprietary formats
• Git version control over platform databases
• Self-hosted over vendor-locked
• Resistance to extraction
• Preservation of agency
• Building for durability rather than convenience

The digital garden isn't finished. Gardens never are. But it's now possible to see the shape of ideas across time—to trace the evolution of thinking, to build understanding through connection rather than just chronology.

Open Questions

• How do you maintain the garden without it becoming a full-time job?
• What's the right balance between connection and noise—when does linking become clutter?
• How do you invite readers into a garden without overwhelming them with structure they didn't ask for?
• If platforms fail "when, not if"—what's the preservation strategy beyond plain text and Git?

Key Formulations (Preserve These)

"I didn't have a knowledge base. I had a stream."

"I needed the newsletter to be a web, not a feed."

"Streams are fleeting, gardens are topology—the web as space, as an arrangement and rearrangement of ideas in relation to each other."

"Let AI handle structure and mechanics. Never let it rewrite sentences that carry weight."

"The goal was connection, not annotation."

"When platforms die—and they will—plain text survives."