There are certified Notion consultants who work to help businesses and people organize their lives using the app. On massive Facebook groups, fans who identify as “Notioneers” trade templates they’ve built on the platform: customized tables like “Plants Manager” or “Pokémon Collection Tracker” that others can download. Enthusiastic Roam users call themselves the Roamcult, and the Obsidian Discord server has nearly 50,000 members. These platforms have fostered thriving subcultures of devotees. Srinivas Rao, an author and podcast host who uses Mem, once described the app as “the closest thing I’ve seen to being able to upload your brain to the internet.”
“Our thinking is, If a thought can’t be retrieved, then it’s not a useful thought,” said Kevin Moody, the 26-year-old former Google employee who co-founded Mem, which recently raised $5.6 million in venture capital. Instead of tabs and folders, they allow us to sort our archives into customizable, easy-to-navigate tables - and, in the case of Mem and Obsidian, can even show us how one piece of information (say, your to-do list) is related to another (notes from a recent meeting).
Like the filing cabinet for the pre-digital era, these apps are designed not only to store everything that our brains can’t hold - grocery lists, passwords, meditation schedules, work tasks - but also to make us better at retrieving the information in them. There is Roam Research, founded in 2017, and Obsidian, founded in 2020, and Mem, which is in public beta. They are sometimes referred to as “knowledge-management systems” or “personal-knowledge bases,” though many users refer to them as simply “second brains.” The best known is Notion, which was released in 2016 and has grown from 1 million to more than 20 million users in the past two years (and was recently valued at $10 billion). If a thought can’t be retrieved, then it’s not a useful thought.Īmid this flood of data, a new category of app has emerged, one that promises to collect all the digital material we generate into one single, seamless interface. But the contents of our digital memories have themselves grown unwieldy, fractured across multiple devices and accounts, impossible to process. By now, we may even rely on our devices’ memories so completely that we’ve lost our ability to recall things without them. This compendium of self-knowledge seems only to expand, prompting our devices to expand along with it: The first iPhone’s maximum storage space was 16 gigabytes, while the newest release offers a terabyte. I could tell you with a glance at my iPhone exactly where I was on October 24, 2015, or how many hours of sleep I got last night. We are constantly turning our lives into data, much of it nonphysical: photographs and screenshots and stray notes, reams of text messages and bookmarked tabs and other digital detritus. Nearly a century later, Moses’s anxiety has become our reality.
Moses was wary of how filing cabinets externalized personal memory: What would be the consequences of trying to turn every aspect of your life into “information” to be hoarded for later? “You can’t expect yourself to say, when you give your wife the first kiss, ‘File that, my dear, for future reference,’ ” he wrote in 1930. Not everyone was happy with the invention.
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One 1918 advertisement described the filing cabinet as “oracle-like” with a “great gigantic memory”: “It is only a bit o’ steel, yet no brain was ever made / That could wholly supersede it with the busy business man.” The filing cabinet, then, was better than a human brain - it could hold and organize the entire contents of one’s professional and domestic life, broken down into discrete bits of information and made retrievable at will. As these archives ballooned, a new technology rose in popularity: the filing cabinet, whose history the scholar Craig Robertson documents in The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. This “paperization” eventually spilled into the home, where a rise in personal documentation meant that houses were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, recipes clipped from magazines. As American businesses expanded in both number and scale in the wake of the Civil War, so did their printed material there were graphs, memos, charts, forms, and more correspondence than ever. The 20th century brought with it a deluge of paper.
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