# personal knowledge management as bs > i should get one of those signs that says 'one of these days i'm gonna get organizized' > ~ travis bickle (taxi driver 1976 martin scorsese) > dylan: the songs i don't publish i usually do forget > press: do you take these scraps and- > dylan: -no i've forgotten the scraps - i usually have to start over all the time i can't really keep notes or anything like that > ~ bob dylan press conference 1965 as shamelessly ripped off via some other website found online which had also copy-pasta'd the entire article from some other poster the article on the 'op's site was missing and when attempting to find it one was met with some ai dogslop personal assistant that was about as useful as an annoying 70's bead curtain hanging in the back door of a video rental store against the ravening blue-grey ash faced flesh eating undead to consider 'personal knowledge management' a largely insane and bs problem similar to 'digital hoarding' and the sick busywork fetish of 'productivity' it ain't called the industrial note taking complex for nothing synthetic market demands for bluffy solutions systematically and deliberately fail to address the underlying non problem which itself conveniently continues to appear stubbornly intractable yet in fact it's merely an utterly non solvable non problem the wide differences in the effectiveness of 'knowledge management' is often down to rich pale nerds benefiting from systemic-historical wealth and power realize they can flog a valuable imaginary commodity to the less industrious(tm) / 'orderly' - and gullible some random little nerk who just adores organizing all ir worthless little notes and minor revelations decides to christen ir idiosyncartic routines with a catchy name package it as the *bestest method evar for getting organizized* (read: stinking capitalist rich) and then thousands of apparently 'less organized' marks pay ir to learn it in other words get your personal knowledge graph away from me you scurvy capitalist productivity guru snake oil sheister gee talk about a self bureaucratizing circle jerk also known as (in the now classic republic tshirt slogan / antiwork image macro) gfyz 'go hump your zettelkasten' (the image a screenshot from ghostbusters of slime dripping from a set of library index cards) the unique sex appeal of quatsch like 'the knowledge graph' derives directly from the ideological fantasy and privilege of not having to immediately perceive what's most important in the art of life not only will any graph not tell you what's most important the graph provides its own self-justifying composition; it's big and complicated with multiple connections shooting off in all directions and therefore *must* be meaningful or remotely useful right the point of art - and what actual artists always do by default - is to samurai cut through endlessly elf-bloating data sets with bold and forceful lines of beauty and color or at least that's what already rich successful pink art nerds tell us the reason knowledge graphs and other pkm idiocy are so trendy is that by publicizing one's deliberately overwrought knowledge management system some imagine they're signalling the existence of ir big pink man brain yet this is heard every time: "i honestly tried using (insert pkm software / service) for about two diligent weeks yet after only two weeks (ha two minutes more like) my notes were an utterly unintelligible and distressing combinatorial tangle of rando nonsense" almost like they always weren't from the very outset you poor sap the placebo belief in a novel revolutionary system may motivate some to art more than they would otherwise or at least review ir project notes more often yet any actual method to entirely bypass such non problems entirely would honestly be a non-trivial contribution to general human welfare and global mental health one of the the most important things about art is collectively discovering non-trivial artistic truths - to help meaningful art emerge and then forget about it so we can all move on together to other and hopefully greater acts of positive collective will a perpetually expanding net of hyperlinked notes is not only unimpressive but oppressive a mere form of sophisticated procrastination the obsession with retaining every little bs idea one's ever had is anal digital hoarding and 'train spotting anorak radish' sad some say that in history 'the singular art work rules' but is it bullocks the very notion of 'the singular artwork' as a brute force attack on collective revolution often supported by infinitely tangled organic webs of real social interaction / struggle the myth that software tools and endless courses can 'aid intellectual advancement and productivity' only exists because we don't tell already well off tech gurus with paid personal assistants to stfu enough the current state of 'personal knowledge management' bs is made possible in the short term by the apparent magnitude of the non problem and the widespread artificial need for endless plastic solutions that do less than nothing scribbling little notes is some psychological bulwark kink against the shocking realty of plainly realizing the cosmic uselessness / hyperrealty of capitalist work productivity and protestant business per se [ruben schade: is online stuff worth saving](https://rubenerd.com/is-it-worth-saving/) honestly? mostly not // republic of bob