A new category of apps promises to collect all the digital material we generate into one single, seamless interface. SophieHaigney reports on these 'second-brain' apps and their thriving subculture of devotees
Illustration: Pablo Delcan 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.
Nearly a century later, Moses’s anxiety has become our reality. We are constantly turning our lives into data, much of it nonphysical: photographs and screenshots and stray notes, reams of text messages and bookmarked tabs and other digital detritus. I could tell you with a glance at my iPhone exactly where I was on October 24, 2015, or how many hours of sleep I got last night.
These platforms have fostered thriving subcultures of devotees. Enthusiastic Roam users call themselves the Roamcult, and the Obsidian Discord server has nearly 50,000 members. On massive Facebook groups, fans who identify as “Notioneers” trade templates they’ve built on the platform: customized tables like “Plants Manager” or “Pokémon Collection Tracker” that others can download.
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