Curation and Editorial Policies: Useful and Are Net Positives
July 8, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zillennials.
The write up “I Deleted My Second Brain.” The author is Joan Westenberg. I had to look her up. She is writer and entrepreneur. She sells subscriptions to certain essays. Okay, that’s the who. Now what does the essay address?
It takes a moment to convert “Zettelkasten slip” into a physical notecard, but I remembered learning this from the fellows who were pitching a note card retrieval system via a company called Remac. (No, I have no idea what happened to that firm. But I understand note cards. My high school debate coach in 1958 explained the concept to me.)
Ms. Westenberg says:
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. And so… Well, I killed the whole thing.
I assume Ms. Westenberg is not engaged in a legal matter. The intentional deletion could lead to some interesting questions. On the other hand, for a person who does public relations and product positioning, deletion may not present a problem.
I liked the reference to Jorge Luis Borges (1899 to 1986) , a writer with some interesting views about the nature of reality. As Ms. Westenberg notes:
But Borges understood the cost of total systems. In “The Library of Babel,” he imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory. PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it – and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away. Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.
I think the idea of too much information causing mental torpor is interesting for two reasons: [a] digital information has a mass of sorts and [b] information can disrupt the functioning of an information processing organ; that is, the human brain.
The fix? Just delete everything. Ms. Westenberg calls this “destruction by design.” She is now (presumably) lighter and more interested in taking notes. I think this is the modern equivalent of throwing out junk from the garage. My mother would say, after piling my ball bat, scuffed shoes, and fossils into the garbage can, “There. That feels better.” I would think because I did not want to suffer the wrath of mom, “No, mother, you are destroying objects which are meaningful to me. You are trashing a chunk of my self with each spring cleaning.” Destruction by design may harm other people. In the case of a legal matter, destruction by design can cost the person hitting delete big time.
What’s interesting is that the essay reveals something about Ms. Westenberg; for example, [a] A person who can destroy information can destroy other intangible “stuff” as well. How does that work in an organization? [b] The sudden realization that one has created a problem leads to a knee jerk reaction. What does that say about measured judgment? [c] The psychological boost from hitting the delete key clears the path to begin the collecting again. Is hoarding an addiction? What’s the recidivism rate for an addict who does the rehabilitation journey?
My major takeaway may surprise you. Here it is: Ms. Westenberg learned by trial and error over many years that curation is a key activity in knowledge work. Google began taking steps to winnow non-compliant Web sites from its advertising program. The decision reduces lousy content and advances Google’s agenda to control in digital Gutenberg machines. Like Ms. Westenberg, Google is realizing that indexing and saving “everything” is a bubbling volcano of problems.
Librarians know about curation. Entities like Ms. Westenberg and Google are just now realizing why informed editorial policies are helpful. I suppose it is good news that Ms. Westenberg and Google have come to the same conclusion. Too bad it took years to accept something one could learn at any library in five minutes.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2025
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