Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management — Unattributed

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management<br>July 19, 2026 Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0

I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.

Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan's position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn't seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.

What Was the Purpose

There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan's argument about Personal Knowledge Management:

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It's taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?

Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven't. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.

The tool doesn't make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:

I think it's safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.

And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or “future-proofing.” What it does suggest is, “We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. […] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.” There is no hint at the concepts being “higher-brow” or anything to indicate an ascribed “epistemological value.”

Instead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite:

Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.

Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution.

The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that's enough.

So where Brennan came up with all of this “future-proofing” and “highbrow” and “epistemological value” is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need.

Where I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it's developers have provided?

I think I am going to side with the developers on this one.

Brennan then posits his central thesis a second time:

My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.

I do wonder what “complex, robust systems” he means at this point. He's only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It's a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995).

Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This...