This essay also describes the architecture behind the Stimpunks knowledge system.
Below is a fairly accurate reflection of my writing process and how my blogs start!
Takes a while for them to form into a vaguely coherent structure for me to share more widely!
Autism isn’t linear, my thought process and way of being is monotropic, multi sensory, neuro-holographic, rhizomatic and omnidirectional.
I shared this last year. Follows on nicely… – Helen Autistic Realms | Facebook
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s manuscript draft of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) looks rather… web-like and well-suited to emergence.
In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a “web” of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized
Introduction
Much of the internet still organizes knowledge like a filing cabinet: folders, categories, and neatly separated topics. But many ideas do not grow that way. They grow through connection.
When notes link to other notes, patterns begin to emerge. Concepts reinforce one another. Insights travel across fields. Over time, a simple collection of notes can become something more powerful—a living web of ideas.
This piece explores the emergent power of a web of notes with links: how linking transforms isolated thoughts into a network of understanding.
The same principle underlies the broader Stimpunks knowledge system. Across the site, glossary concepts connect to patterns of neurodivergent life, which link to design recipes and environments. Together, these connections form a growing knowledge web about neurodivergent life.
What begins as individual notes can evolve into a shared network of insight.
That is the promise of linked knowledge.
Our Practice
We advocate knowledge management methods such as Zettelkasten, which feature webs of atomic notes connected with links. This approach helps us transcend academic silos, practice syncretism, and enable emergence.
The capture and highlight flow used by our team lends itself well to the Zettelkasten method.
In this piece, we expand on our previous piece, “Contextual Computing, Workflow Thinking, and the Future of Text”, with some web history and a quick introduction to Zettelkasten and flow-based notetaking.
Explore the Stimpunks Knowledge Web
Stimpunks is a digital garden for neurodivergent life—a growing network of linked ideas, patterns, and design practices.
This article is one node in a larger web of ideas about neurodivergent life.
You can explore related parts of the Stimpunks knowledge system:
- Start here:
Start Here - Core concepts:
Glossary of Neurodivergent Life - Recurring patterns:
Pattern Library - Design responses:
Pattern Recipes - Designed environments:
Neurodivergent Environments - The full system:
The Stimpunks Knowledge System
Transcending Silos
Stimpunks is built to transcend silos. Instead of isolating ideas into separate fields, we connect experiences, patterns, design practices, and environments into one evolving system. When ideas link across boundaries, new possibilities emerge.
Knowledge grows like a rhizome or a mycelial network—spreading through connections rather than hierarchy. Transcending silos means cultivating these connections so that ideas, practices, and communities can nourish each other across fields.
The problem Bush was addressing, or the problem of the individual researcher, was one of system topology. The poor person has successively narrowed and narrowed his or her field of interest in order to cope with the information overload, and soon is connected only to things of very local interest. The topology clearly doesn’t work, because there is no path for the transfer of knowledge from one discipline and the next.
Fractals and Hypertext
Fractal structures emerge in the interconnections of hypertext, transcending the silos.
That brings us to another interesting feature of topologies, and that is their variation with scale. A few years ago, the world was fascinated (quite rightly) with fractal patterns. For those of you too young to remember the fad :-), a fractal pattern is one like the shape of a fern, which when you look at it closer and closer rewards you with a similar level of interest through many orders of magnitude. It is like the tree outside my office window, but it is not like my office block, whose interesting features are limited to a rectangle maybe 100 meters long, windows around a meter wide, and rivets a few millimeters wide.
Is society fractal? Yes, it certainly is. There is structure at the highest levels and the lowest levels. There are great big links formed by organizations which themselves are made up of smaller links. You can simplify society on a number of levels. You look at a newspaper and it will perhaps have a few sorties of domestic bliss or otherwise in the neighborhood, a story on the town, a story at state level, and (even in Boston), usually some stories about world affairs. (For those not from the area, the Boston paper’s typical foreign news headline is “Boston woman has twins in China”.)
People need to be part of the fractal pattern. They need to be part of organisms at each scale. We appreciate that a person needs a balance between interest in self, family, town, state and planet. A person needs connections at each scale. People who lack connections at any given scale feel frustrated. The international jet-setter and the person who always stays at home share that frustration. Could it be that human beings are programmed with some microscopic rules which induce them to act so as to form a wholesome society? Will these rules still serve us when we are “empowered” by the web, or will evolution give us no clues how to continue?
Look at web “home pages”. “Home pages” are representative of people, organizations, or concepts. Good ones tend to, just like people, have connections of widely varying “length”. Perhaps as the web grows we will be able to see fractal structure emerge in its interconnections. Perhaps we ought to bear this in mind as we build our own webs.
One of the reasons that the web spread was that the hypertext model does not constrain the information it represents. This has allowed people to represent topologies they need. We have found that people love to use trees, but like to have more than one, sometimes overlapping. We have found they need structure and involvement at all scales.
Create a Web of Knowledge
Our knowledge systems need to make use of webs.
Once you predetermine the categories, it gets difficult to connect ideas from one category to another — let alone multiple. Each idea becomes a rigid part of its category. It’s not a problem to have categories (it guides how you tag notes, for example) — I’m saying the rigidity becomes a problem.
How, then, should we manage our knowledge without predetermined categories? It’s hard to imagine, but if you think of categories as “folders” in your computer, it makes sense to create “shortcuts” from one folder to another for better access.
Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Smart Notes (A Beginner’s Guide)
But isn’t note-taking a cognitive tool in the first place? It helps extend our memory by offloading; notes allow you to focus on thinking rather than remembering.
So if we could only turn our notes into a trail-capturing machine like a memex, we’d be able to accumulate insight instead of piles of half-dead ideas.
If we could only organize our notes into a “web” of knowledge, research wouldn’t be as tedious as it currently is. Our knowledge repositories also could’ve gotten smarter, instead of dumber, in the process.
Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Smart Notes (A Beginner’s Guide)
Zettelkasten: Emergent, Atomic, Hyperlinked Note-Taking
Zettelkasten methods bring emergence, atomicity, and hyperlinking together, powerfully.
First, the problem is that conventional note-taking is too linear to form new insights. He used notecards instead. Second, as your note collection grows, it gets harder to retrieve ideas. So, like Berners-Lee, (perhaps, the other way around) he organized them using links rather than strict categories. Yes — Luhmann was a badass who used hyperlinks back when it wasn’t even a thing yet.
Anyway, because there were no categories, there were also no hierarchies — or more appropriately, hierarchies didn’t form until they made sense. In other words, hierarchies were emerged instead of established from the start. That allowed new ideas to form — not to mention high-level insights that wouldn’t even cross anyone’s mind.
It’s as if Luhmann was deliberately countering the flow at which specializations emerged from disciplines. Instead of starting from the top — a predetermined specialization — he starts from the bottom, the content, and then builds them back up into new topics.
Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Smart Notes (A Beginner’s Guide)
Connection of multiple notes causes new higher-level concepts to emerge; connection of multiple concepts causes a giant category to emerge.
Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Smart Notes (A Beginner’s Guide)
Flow-Based Notetaking
Bring the power of webs to your notetaking with flow-based methods.
When notes are treated as part of a living web of ideas, notetaking begins to follow the natural flow of thought. Instead of forcing ideas into rigid outlines or categories, flow-based notetaking allows curiosity to guide the process. A question leads to an example, an example leads to a pattern, and that pattern links to other concepts.
This way of working often feels intuitive for neurodivergent thinkers. Attention moves along threads of interest, much like the monotropic flow of attention, deepening connections between related ideas. Each note becomes a node in a network, linking outward to other notes in a structure that resembles a rhizome or a mycelial network rather than a hierarchy.
Over time, these flowing connections form a web of notes, where insight emerges from the relationships between ideas rather than from rigid organizational systems.
Flow-based notetaking is creative process, not a recording process. Instead of just writing down what the professor argues, you’re also going to come up with your own ideas, examples and connections.
The simplest form of flow-based notes is just to write down all the information, except instead of recording it into a bulleted list, you organize it spatially with arrows connecting ideas.
Linked Notes, Digital Gardens, and Knowledge Graphs
The idea of a web of notes is closely related to what many people call a digital garden or a knowledge graph.
In these systems, ideas are not organized into rigid folders or hierarchies. Instead, knowledge grows through links between concepts, forming a network that evolves over time.
Many tools now support this style of thinking, including:
- Obsidian
- Logseq
- Roam Research
- Tana
But the tools are only part of the story.
The deeper idea is that knowledge itself is relational. Understanding emerges when ideas connect.
The Stimpunks knowledge system works in a similar way. Concepts in the Glossary link to Patterns of Neurodivergent Life, which connect to Design Recipes and Environments.
Together these connections form a living knowledge network—a kind of digital garden for understanding neurodivergent life.
Conclusion
Each section of this piece points to the same underlying idea: knowledge becomes more powerful when it is connected.
Instead of isolated notes, disconnected disciplines, or siloed conversations, linked ideas form a living network. Concepts reinforce one another. Insights travel between fields. New patterns emerge from the connections.
This is the principle behind the Stimpunks Knowledge System.
Across the site, experiences, patterns, design practices, environments, and philosophical ideas are intentionally interlinked.
A concept in the glossary may lead to a pattern.
A pattern may connect to a design recipe.
A recipe may shape an environment.
Together, these links create a growing web of understanding about neurodivergent life.
Like a rhizome or a mycelial network, the system expands through relationships rather than hierarchy.
The more connections it gains, the more insight it can generate.
You can explore the system through the Universe Map, the Pattern Atlas, or the Neurodivergent Design Catalog.
This article is one small entry point into the Stimpunks knowledge web.
Follow the links, explore the patterns of neurodivergent life, and see where the web leads.
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