PKM
Information floods — through news feeds, advertising, notifications, algorithmic timelines. The attention economy — a term Herbert Simon introduced in 1971 to describe how an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention (Simon, 1971) — treats human attention as a scarce commodity to be captured, held, and monetised. Everything is optimised for engagement, which usually means: for reaction, entertainment, consumption; but less for reflection and easy digestion.
And yet: I feel compelled to write publicly, here in my notes garden. Not to compete. But because putting thoughts into words and leaving them somewhere so that others can stumble upon them feels like a countermovement worth making.
There’s a paradox in that impulse, though. The moment I think “someone might read this,” the pressure arrives. Perfectionism kicks in. Suddenly the half-formed idea that seemed worth sharing feels too rough, too obvious, too incomplete. The pressure machine starts working. The very act of imagining a public gaze triggers the same anxiety the attention economy profits from.
Like a mantra, I keep repeating to myself. A digital garden is a collection of evolving ideas — not a publication feed, which I usually write for. Notes aren’t organised strictly by date. They’re linked through association, through context, through the slow accumulation of thinking over time. The structure is topographical, not chronological: you wander through ideas rather than scroll through a timeline (Appleton, 2020).
That framing matters because it changes the contract with the reader — and with myself. Notes don’t have to be ready. They can be half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve, or quietly stay small. Less polished. Less performative. Less like the curated personal websites we’re used to seeing, and more like an open notebook.
This note, like most of the others here, is labelled 🌱 Seedling. That means: it’s a draft kept public — not because it’s finished, but because finishing isn’t the point. Not every seedling becomes a full note. Some just sit here, collecting context, waiting to be thought through further.
That’s intentional. It’s also uncomfortable, at least for me. There’s a persistent inner voice that says: publish only when it’s good enough. But “good enough” is a moving target shaped by comparison and performance anxiety — both of which the attention economy is very good at amplifying.
I don’t think the answer is to stop caring about quality, or to flood the garden with noise. The tension between wanting to write well and wanting to write freely is real — and probably productive. On the contrary, letting notes and ideas grow is the right concern about quality and sees quality as a process.
What I’m working toward is a simpler conviction: this practice doesn’t have to compete with the attention economy as mentioned above. It can be a deliberate alternative to it. Slower. Lower stakes. Honest about its own incompleteness.
Writing publicly, in a garden, without the pressure of going viral or being polished — that might be one of the quieter acts of resistance available to us right now.
Appleton, M. (2020). A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden: A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web [Personal Blog]. maggieappleton. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communication, and the public interest (pp. 37–72). Johns Hopkins Press. https://www.nmh-p.de/wp-content/uploads/Simon-H.A._Designing-organizations-for-an-information-rich-world.pdf
A note to myself, written in April 2026.