A personal memex is a personal wiki. A personal wiki is a personal digital garden. A personal digital garden is not a garden. I prefer to term it as a memex. A memex is utterly your responsibility. Should you want to surf the longevity escape velocity towards at least a textual future, you should treat your memex well. To preserve and maintain your intellect, and knowledge on the internet and what will come beyond and through it, you need to do some prepping starting from today. It’s not easy but meditative. It’s costly but not hard. All you need is some self-respect and the momentum it brings forth into your life. In this series, I document my daily practice of building a memex that I want to outlast by one day ingesting it into my synthetic wetware addenda.
Intellectual output is an investment in itself. Unless you are a prolifically publishing author with an assistant, you will need to treat yourself as a knowledge node of both anthropomorphic and non-human features. Some will tell you free open source software should be your only means. Others will decry the former’s arguments into software and products and apps that die in no time. Never mind other’s noise. You just need a continuous maintenance rails, rather a small budget, and curiosity leveraged by practical implementation of your hobbies into a database with a frontend with accessibility-first design standards.
I am a power user of any interesting social media platform, emergent infrastructure apps in any domain such as large language models (LLMs) or decentralized finance (DeFi) by any protocol or operating system. What can I say? I like a good movie.
Over the years, I have witnessed people preferring one app, platform or any other product to another because one of them was by a team who accentuate privacy by design, data sovereignty, decentralized social graph, ownership economy, and all that jazz. I also bought majority of these fads. I paid stupid amounts in subscription fees in foreign currencies or volatile emergent assets. I ran into a myriad of open source software products claiming to be freely available yet priced ten times more expensive than the average standard.
I listened to the Sunday sermon by the priest and priestess of the Decentralization Theater only to erode what’s left of the Sistine Chapel on a Monday morning. They wanted us to store value, store data, store files in currently inaccessible products. Today, you need certain expertise to fetch data from some previous product versions of constantly pivoting teams. I am encountering this issue while trying to read from Zora protocol’s earlier iterations with my rich media conceptual art works or essays that I wrote in HackMD, published on Zora, and backed up via the former’s Arweave integration.
I spent more than 18 months constantly on the sufficiently decentralized social media platform and protocol Farcaster only to see what’s left of my network there to go either full fediverse, Bluesky or feed-only-Substack. Today, it’s a phone book for me if I ever visit NYC, LA, Berlin or Thailand and I know for a reason each group chat there has a more active Telegram counterpart behind a pass.
I’ve been blogging and sending newsletters on X articles, Substack, Medium, Paragraph, Mirror, and some Lens protocol clients and platforms only to reach incorrigibly “distributed” networks now.
If you are generalist right now, honing a few Ts, and like to hop across all the cultural, political and artistic spectra, and I am not even talking about your business inquiries, angel investments, venture capital dreams; you have two options:
Either spend unreasonably long time periods to circulate your knowledge across all of these social media platforms, newsletter apps, and the like, all of which act the same as a wanna-be everything-app
or, just focus on a few like I am about to do and automate the rest. However, automating the rest can be a pain in the neck that require funds either to set up an automation pipeline or run a local model on a spare Mac mini, Beelink, or a dedicated server on the cloud.
The latter to me is now preferable, and I am hence building a memex as the central hub which I will turn into a practical memex that will be partially public. In this process, I will have gotten rid of many archival, note-taking, hosting, sharing, bookmarking, workspace apps, and will only be spending towards a constantly maintained extra mind that I want to be nuclear-blast proof and have leaked into long term archival beacons.
Invest in yourself wisely. This is the introductory post. More will follow soon.
Gökhan Turhan
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