Breadcrumbs & Rabbit Holes with Roam

Roam is a potent example of technology for Augmenting Human Intelligence. Similar-but-different to Artificial Intelligence, AHI tools focus on turbocharging your brain, rather than replacing it with some fancy algorithm. Oft-mentioned, but the power in Roam is how it enables you to make connections between topics as you read, research, think & write, and develop notes into real creative output.

As someone who both struggles-with and prospers-from ADHD, Roam is the only tool I've found that fits my brain like a glove: enabling me to capture as fast as I can think, and to leave breadcrumbs for myself on the research rabbit holes I go down.

I haven't gotten around to implement full Roam-style links in this blog yet. Anything in italics in this post is something that was a link in Roam - I left them in so you can see the types of concepts I like to map.

I haven't written anything longer than an Instagram caption in 2 years, but here are 200 words I accidentally wrote Stream of Consciousness explaining some of the magic I found during an 8 hour Roam session today. It just kinda happened.

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” — John Muir

The Whole Earth Catalog is a seminal publication from the 1960s Counterculture era; a huge collection of resources for those interested in everything from the Ecology and Organic Gardening to Psychology and Psychedelics. It's a rich resource, but exists on paper and huge PDF scans. 1960s counterculture also produced Personal Computers and there's rich adjacency between Augmenting Human Intelligence & the very notion of the Catalog. Roam is today's spiritual successor to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu with its notions of Bidirectional Linking.

Today I had the idea to start transcribing The Last Whole Earth Catalog: 1971 into Roam to explore using Bidirectional Linking to browse its contents and inform my research in every area of interest I have.