The fundamental principle that knowledge exchange should be done by updating a pulled, moment-in-time copy of someone’s knowledge (a KEG site, like git repos) seems fundamentally flawed in a world that chooses—often deliberately—to use outdated versions of that knowledge. Perhaps it is better to provide only a singular source of that knowledge and make it as difficult as possible to copy it, tracking all copies if possible. This includes blocking all archiving mechanisms and AI bot consumption.
I’m considering getting rid of my zettelkasten as a git repo and instead adding password access to it associated with a verifiable email address. I want to know who’s looking at it and when so I can thwart abuse.
Recently I had to deal with people using my outdated KEG content in my zettelkasten and blog posts to misrepresent me. This is the danger of making any thoughts or ideas public in writing. Once it is on the Internet it lives on forever. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but very often it is horrible.
Imagine if people judged me by what I wrote in my private journals when I was nine years old, or even my zettelkasten entries made in a moment of passion not even a year ago. I don’t feel that way today. So is there value in understanding how I felt in that moment and why? I believe there is. But it comes with a very dangerous risk.
These days people don’t care about properly representing facts of any kind. They pick and choose whatever they want to make their case and have no problem at all throwing people (like me) under the bus to justify their conclusions. The debate about whether humans have always lacked the required civil respect for differing opinions during the era or correspondence but it was just not as readily apparent because we don’t have examples of it now is something we can do another day. (Spoiler alert: humans have always been horrible, biased, monsters.)
In what is turning out to be an example of the dynamic nature of zettelkasten content, I have considered alternatives to not allowing anyone to git clone my zettelkasten content. In fact, this section didn’t exist in this original zettel. I added it after reading morngrar’s very good informative Discord post lamenting the death of KEG and losing the ability to “grep [my] zettelkasten” for answers to questions. I realized that not allowing verbatim copies of this repo would stop that from being a possibility. It really made me consider my reaction to being abused and the content of this very zettel.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of putting any messy knowledge base like a zettelkasten out there isn’t so much about having people copy outdated stuff that no longer represents my views on things, but in the way that I maintain the content in the knowledge base itself. As I consider my personal knowledge management practices I realize that if I were to follow Luhmann’s method more closely there wouldn’t be as much knowledge here that is inaccurate or outdated. In fact, the daily time spent in curating and culling knowledge is part of the process of reminding the knowledge owner what they thought and think on a given topic. The “second brain” value of a zettelkasten does not come into play unless that zettelkasten is properly maintained and edited at weekly or daily intervals. So could the entire problem simple be that I’m not following the zettelkasten method properly? Looks like it is. If I’m going to commit to having a zettelkasten at all—especially a public-facing one—then I equally commit to going through it at least once a week fully to update and delete stuff that has changed. This makes the easy-to-edit markdown file requirement an absolute must. It also makes the organization of zettels that much more valuable with the use of indexed integer identifiers because I can completely change the titles. That would destroy any blog engine in existence currently.