Tabular Self

I saw the best minds of my generation being uploaded onto “second-brain” apps.

The 20th century brought with it a deluge of paper. 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. 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 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. 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.

Some people have even applied this tabular logic to something as mercurial as attraction. A few years ago, Annie, a 27-year-old in New York City, began taking notes on her dating life. She started out using the Evernote app but later migrated her record-keeping to Notion; the database (which she calls her “Notion Love Tracker”) now sits next to tabs dedicated to travel itineraries, her favorite doctors, her apartment-cleaning routine, and articles to read. After each date, Annie logs in Notion her likes and dislikes about the person, how she felt after the encounter, and the answers to the questions she always asks, such as “What is your role in the friend group?” For Annie, the Notion Love Tracker functions almost as an alternate memory — which, once or twice, helped her clarify amorphous gut feelings she was experiencing. Once, after a first date, “I remember thinking, This guy is so much fun, but he seems really immature,” Annie says. Then, during the third date with him, she was enjoying herself but began to feel a bit uneasy, like “something was eating at me that I couldn’t put my finger on,” she said. She went home and consulted her Notion Love Tracker; there, in her neatly organized tables, she found that she had noticed his immaturity from the very beginning. She stopped seeing him.

Watching Notion evangelists describe their systems, I was reminded a bit of those devoted to Marie Kondo’s methods of tidying up. But rather than emphasizing removal as an antidote to chaos, the answer lies in the act of continued accumulation: every book you’ve ever read, every glass of water you drank for months, every inchoate hunch or feeling. I wondered, Do we really need all of that information? Rao thinks we do; you never know when something will turn out to be valuable, so capturing anything you can is a boon. It’s tantalizing to consider: the idea that the answers to all of our questions are searchable in our own history and experiences, so long as we’re able to save everything (and arrange it in an orderly manner). Some of these second-brain apps, like Mem, are even employing artificial-intelligence tools that might resurface information we stowed and then forgot about (for example, using time and location data to remind you what you ordered at a restaurant when you return a year later). Mem sees itself as a search company — one that will allow you to trawl through a visualized version of your own brain.

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