Hierarchical vs territorial writing. What’s the difference between both? The first is based on structure, the second one in relations. What I want it’s more territorial writing and a less hierarchical one?

In a hierarchical writing, I’m always thinking in an institutionalized mindset. Who am I writing to, why, how much… in some way, I start thinking under a structured box of writer and reader, sender and receptor, where I serve to the other.

Digital social networks are the extreme of a dynamic that always has existed in this hierarchical writing. …

In this digital era, what do you think is the life expectancy of technology like paper notepads? Do you dream of a future with a simple “Alexa, take note of this”? Or you are in the search of a frictionless way of taking notes or capturing text?

What if I tell you that the expected life expectancy of paper notepads in our daily lives is longer than an iPad, not to say “Alexa”.

iPads have been around in the face of the Earth for only a little more than ten years. Alexa is just a newborn in the tech world.

…

Roam Research embraces disorder. Disorder makes us creative, productive. Just look at the desks of creative and productive people. Einstein, Jobs, Twain, Edison, etc. They are always far away from minimalism and cleanness. Or look at the notebooks of Leonardo or Nietzsche. Disorder.

I know there is a lot of hype around Niklas Luhmann’s note-taking system—zettelkasten. The argument in favor is that he wrote a lot of books. But he was a prodigious thinker, not because of his note-taking system. …

In this installment of [[Roaming Writing]] newsletter, we talk about self-organized systems, antifragility, optionality, principles, and rules — with special appearances of ants, organs, gardens, jungles, desires, fishes, and baits. This diversity of topics — chaos? — is a consequence of writing on Roam.

«I myself, while writing these lines, try to avoid the tyranny of a precise and explicit plan, drawing from an opaque source inside me that gives me surprises.»
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Ants are better than organs

Ants are very captivating creatures. They can produce complex, apparently intelligent structures, without planning, control, or even direct communication between the ants. …

This is one of the most difficult preconceptions we must get rid of when using Roam Research: there is no structure or location where you put the text you write but phrases — blocks — that relate to other phrases or even phrases born from the relationship between others.

(I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with Roam Research and do not in any way profit from commissions or referrals to it. I’m just a regular user. Some ideas can be applied to apps like Roam Research.)

Traditional digital writing

When you start using Roam, you may have the temptation to…

I believe in a kind of writing that is rhizomatic, fractal, or in modern terms, antifragile. Writing as the doing of thinking. I believe that Roam is an ideal app for this kind of writing.

I want to talk about my experience in both — the antifragile writing and the app.

I’m not planning to get too technical or instructional. There are other sources for that. In the end, this is about writing and thinking.

But the thing is that these ideas and their final delivery are written mostly on Roam per se so I can’t promise rigid linear writing…

[…] does an incredible job as a note-taking, brainstorming, information-gathering tool, working much like your brain does to allow you to capture, link, and organize ideas in a flash. It really shines as an IA tool. It allows you to quickly prototype maps of information, establishing links between ideas (or pages or nodes), sites, or other files.*

Sounds good, right? Well, this description is not for Roam. It’s a review written in 2002 for a great app called Tinderbox. Yep, 2002. And everything in the review is true.

Roam Research is not the first app that tries to be the…