đź‘‹ Hello!
My name is Bhuvan and welcome to my digital garden.
“What the hell is a digital garden?” you ask (not)?
For that, we have to go back in history, all the way to 2023.
Why, you ask?
As Carl Sagan said:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
It’s the same with my blog post. I’m sorry, but you clicked this page. So buckle up and get ready for what will easily be one of the greatest stories ever written on an about page.
I first bought this domain in 2023 and set up a WordPress blog in August of that year. I created the blog to share interesting things I came across on the interweb. The inspiration came from a book called Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess that I had read earlier that year.
Reading the book awakened a latent desire in me to start a linkblog—something I had always wanted to do but was too lazy to pursue. The final trigger to set up the blog was listening to Maggie Appleton on The Informed Life podcast, where she talked about digital gardens. Until that moment, I had never heard of a digital garden, but as I heard Maggie speak, I was sold on the ethos of digital gardening.
Digital gardening conceives of the web as a space for growth and exploration. The way I understand it, digital gardening captures the truest and purest essence of blogging: explore, learn, share, and discuss. To my mind, this was always the case, but then blogging took a sharp detour and became the hideous performative abomination that it is today.
Perhaps the one thing that sets digital gardening apart from regular blogs is the philosophy of what your site means in the first place. Here’s an excerpt from Mike Caulfield’s canonical post on digital gardening:
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.
To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.” If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.
You see this most clearly in things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. But it’s also the notifications panel of your smartphone, it’s also email, it’s also to a large extent blogging. Frankly, it’s everything now.
Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.
The stream is what I do on Twitter and blogging platforms. I take a fact and project it out as another brick in an argument or narrative or persona that I build over time, and recapitulate instead of iterate.
Digital gardens eschew the typical chronological tyranny of traditional blogs. The problem with blogs as we know them is that they stifle iterative thinking. A typical blog imposes a straitjacket and forces people to think in terms of a start and an end. There’s a finality implicit in each post—once you publish a blog, you are done. Traditional blogs and their chronological stream-like structure aren’t designed to encourage people to go back and update their thoughts.
Here’s how Maggie Appleton describes what a digital garden is:
It’s not like you posting a stream of updates the way that we’ve been trained to do on platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Medium where you are just doing this… well, maybe not Medium, sorry. Tumblr’s one that’s a bit more chronological. Actually, Medium would count too. But yeah, this chronological posting of content—of finished pieces?
Instead, it is this growing garden of interlinked content where you are just going back and cleaning up and revisiting and adding to bits over time. Which means that you are trying to update your knowledge over time, right? You are not posting a log of things that happened to you or thoughts you had in a stream. You are being like, “okay. I have a bunch of topics I’m trying to deepen my understanding of. And over time, I’ll go in and I will make those topics better. I’ll make them clearer. I will clarify my understanding. I will share information with other people so they can use it.”
It’s very like pro-open source knowledge, pro sharing everything that you know.
From her definitive post tracing the history of digital gardens:
The garden is our counterbalance. Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number. It’s hyperlinking at its best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
When I heard her explain what a digital garden is, I had a profound “aha” moment because I’d always thought of blogging in a similar way, but my notions were vague, fuzzy, and ill-defined. Listening to Maggie lifted the fog and clarified what I had long thought. So I named the blog From the Dumpster Fire because that was the common description for what the internet had become.
I wanted From the Dumpster Fire to be a digital garden, but there weren’t easily usable tools for a non-technical person like me. So, the site ended up looking like a traditional feed-based blog. Having said that, everything I wrote still embodied the ethos of a digital garden.
I haven’t posted a single polished and performative post on the site. I just wrote and shared whatever fascinated me in a very raw and messy way. In a way, the blog motivated me to explore, which caused this deep urge to write what I learned, creating a weird feedback loop.
I can’t recollect what the trigger was, but in May 2024, I wrote this post on optimism vs pessimism. It might have been some podcast or video. Whatever the trigger was, it was a fascinating topic and I kept thinking about it. After publishing the post, I had this idea of setting up a website, a feed of sorts, where I could keep track of this endless debate between optimism vs pessimism and hope and despair.
So I bought a domain called hopeanddespair.world. I mentioned this to my erudite colleague Joice and told him I was thinking of setting up a simple WordPress blog, because that’s the only thing I knew. He suggested that a simple static site generator (SSG) like Zola would be a better option and offered to help set it up, which he did. But being the lazy bum that I am, I’ve successfully managed to not post anything on that site.
I had read about SSGs earlier on a blog post written by another colleague, but now that I had one site, I was curious to learn a little more about them, not that I understood anything. Several months later, Joice mentioned that my other blog could be moved to Zola, and then I’d been Googling trying to understand how complex it was.
Several weeks ago, I had another bright (dumb) idea to set up a simple blog on a domain I already owned to share my LLM research linked to a blog post on the history of profanity. Since I’m not a coder, I decided to use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to set it up. After wasting several days, I managed to set the blog up and, to be honest, I was shocked and amazed at how good these LLMs were.
This rekindled my desire to set up a proper digital garden again because I had read a little about how you could actually do that using SSGs. Now that I was a “koder,” I started Googling about digital gardens and somehow came across Quartz, which was designed as an alternative to Obsidian Publish.
It’s a brilliant tool, and I again asked Claude to help me set one up. Much to my surprise, it was really easy even for a non-tech idiot like me. Quartz had pretty much all the basics required for one to start and nurture a true digital garden, and so I decided to move From the Dumpster Fire to Quartz.
Which brings me back to digital gardens. Now that I could actually set up a real digital garden, I went back and started reading and watching all the posts about digital gardens again. It reminded me of the “aha” moment I had the first time I discovered them. In re-learning about them, it struck me that digital gardens are a perfect metaphor for human thinking.
The way we learn is much like a garden. We plant thought seeds, we water them, tend to them, cull the weeds, and harvest the bounty. If we don’t, then the thought saplings and plans wither and die. Learning is much like tending to a garden. It takes time, effort, and a lot of patience. When you look at blogs from this lens, they look like a weird aberration.
So, what I wanted to say is: welcome to my digital garden, my own tiny corner on the raging and stinking dumpster fire that is the interweb.
Why create a digital garden, you might be (not) wondering
I’m an information junkie, and my idea of downtime is to read something, anything. Although I’ve deluded myself into thinking that this is a good thing, there are probably downsides. I’m constantly scrolling Twitter, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app for things to read, watch, and listen to.
It’s not that I end up consuming whatever I save for later. They all enter the gaping black holes that are my read-it-later and bookmarking apps. The one bright side of my constant craving for an information fix is that I’m not very active on social media. I don’t use Instagram and Facebook and only use Twitter and LinkedIn for some moderate shitposting that may cost me my job one day—that’s right, I’m a fucking daredevil.
I’m remarkably below average in life, and the only reasonably useful skills I can claim to have are a fair amount of common sense and writing. Both are the outcome of being an information junkie. Another way of saying this is that I’m lucky to have grown up in the era of the internet. I know we all complain about the internet being a cesspool and a raging dumpster fire, but nonetheless, it is a marvel to behold.
Pretty much everything I have ever learned is thanks to the internet, including the content on this site and setting up the site itself. The amount of information that is free on the internet still blows my mind. If I can confidently say that I am a little less dumb in life, it’s because of the internet and the fact that I started writing about whatever I learned.
Given that I’ve learned from others, I had this strong urge to pay it forward by sharing the things I learned. It didn’t seem right to me not to do so. In a way, this garden is also a way of thanking all the people I learn from by sharing it in the hopes that other people may discover and learn a thing or two just like I did.
The other reason is that I’ve been increasingly thinking about our “information ecosystems” and how broken they are. From the noxious and filthy social media feeds to the decaying print media, the degenerating online media, to the cacophony of the chimera called “new media” that’s taking the space ceded by the old, things are changing.
I’m not crying for the good old days when everything was all right. I, of all people, should know that there were no good old days. Drowning in tides of bullshit of varying intensities has been a constant feature throughout humanity. It’s just that the tides of bullshit now have tsunamis of bullshit, thanks to digital technologies.
The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. — Franklin Pierce Adams
Given that I’ve grown up as a citizen of the extremely online era, I’ve had the nagging feeling that this isn’t working. By that, I mean our information ecosystems are not serving us well.
I don’t know what the good solution is, but I do know that part of it involves building your own tools and spaces to learn, think, and share information. That is, we all need our own spaces—private or otherwise—that help us think, learn, and share. Spaces don’t solve the information acquisition problem, but by putting structure into how you consume things and opening them up to scrutiny from the rest of the world, they help you stabilize against the absolute idiocy and nonsense.
This is the only way we can retain our sanity, given that hurricanes and typhoons of swirling bullshit are raging all around us. It is very easy to get caught in this and simply vanish.
So, this is my own tiny, cause-driven space in the absolutely horrendous, foul, noxious, and disgusting dumpster fire that is the internet. This is my nod to the quaint web of yore.
Perhaps most importantly, this garden is my space to understand the shape of my ignorance:
This isn’t to say that philosophical enquiry should be unconstrained by concern for discovering truths. On the contrary, we should pursue truth earnestly. But philosophical enquiry is naturally adventuresome, exploring topics where our ordinary epistemic tools break, revealing their limitations. When we plunge after the most fundamental questions, we shouldn’t expect to find the one final truth that all future thinkers will be compelled to accept by argumentative force. More realistically, we should hope for glimpses through the fog. Often, our best success is only to better appreciate the shape of our ignorance. The distinctively awesome task of philosophy is to contemplate the most general and important questions that lie beyond our full grasp.
A metaphor: as the circle of light expands, Einstein apocryphally said, so too does the ring of darkness around it. Philosophy lives in that ring of darkness. More specifically, it lives in the penumbra, the shadowy boundary just beyond the light. — Eric Schwitzgebel
A thank you note
I also want to thank Jacky Zhao for building Quartz and open-sourcing it. The fact that a non-tech idiot like me can figure out how to get this site up and running so easily using Quartz is a testament to the insane amount of work that’s gone into building it.
This tool is awesome, and the fact that Jacky was gracious enough to open-source it is ridiculous. I can easily imagine people, including myself, paying for it. At the very least, Jacky could’ve made some money by monetizing it. So, once again, thank you Jacky.
Here’s what I had originally written on the about page when I set it up in 2024:
Title: About
Author: bebhuvan
Date: 2023-08-05
Short about
Hi, my name is Bhuvan.
This site is a tiny corner on the raging dumpster fire that is the interweb where I handpick and share interesting things that humans have published.
Long and deranged about
Hi, my name is Bhuvan.
I like reading random things and going down weird rabbit holes. It’s fun. For as long as I can remember, I’ve also shared interesting things I discovered with friends and colleagues. It was never deliberate, but something I started doing.
Except for books, I’ve always read random things. Not having mobile phones and TVs at some points in life helped. But along the way, I became lazy and stopped reading books. Like every person on the planet, my unique and original 2023 New Year’s resolution was to read more books.
The first book I read in 2023 was Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess by Michael Bhaskar. I may have chosen the books because I had watched a talk by the author—I can’t remember. It might have been because “information overload” has always been on my mind. The book is an easy read; the key idea is that we no longer live in a world of scarcity but abundance. Given the unlimited choice in everything from what we buy to what we read, curation is the key to coping with and making sense of the world. As the author defines it, curation is the “act of selecting, refining, and arranging to add value.”
Since I read the book, the idea of curation has stuck in my mind. Since I try to read as much as possible and share things, I started exploring more about the idea of curation. Every year, I try to organize the things I’ve saved elsewhere but I have given up after being been overwhelmed. By organizing, I mean not dumping links but maintaining them by adding context. The term in my head was “live posts.”
What if kept adding to a post, instead of publishing and forgetting? I have terrible memory but the inspiration was Vox Media’s cards format. They were swipeable cards at the end of each post that would be updated to add more context to the post as stories developed. Vox killed cards but still think the format was brilliant. News organizations publish hundreds and thousands of new posts every day, and they are all discrete items. Why don’t they update the existing posts? I keep wondering about this.
So, when I started my personal blog, I didn’t want just to publish posts but to keep them updated.
I didn’t.
Instead, I started writing long essays on things I liked. I never got around to organizing things. Then I heard Maggie Appleton talk about “digital gardening” on The Informed Life podcast, and the thought was reborn.
Digital gardening is a movement that wants to redefine how we interact with information. A digital garden is what you’d get if a blog, journal, and wiki had a kid. The movement is a reaction to the tyranny of chronological feeds, in which we publish and consume information. A digital garden is a personal space where you collect, connect, and curate thoughts and ideas.
When you publish a blog post, it’s done; there’s a start and an end. But a digital garden is never done. It’s a messy and ever-evolving space. It’s designed to help you discover new connections and meanings as it grows—things you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed in the straitjacketed world of chronological feeds. Here’s how Mike Caulfield, a key figure in the movement, describes a digital garden:
The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.” In an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.” —Mike Caulfield
A “post” forces you to think about a start and an end, but the beauty of a digital garden is that it primes you to explore. As you explore, you learn. The more you learn, the more patterns you observe and connections you make. Exploration reminds me of a beautiful post by Morgan Housel:
Figure out how the world works and align with those realities. And here’s an obvious trick: The best way to learn how the world works is to realize how connected everything is. The big lessons from one field can often teach you something critical about other fields. We’re usually taught as if math is math and chemistry is chemistry, with each field siloed off in its own department, focused on its own truths. But learning of that sort is only useful in academia. The real world has no silos. The big learning comes when you connect the dots from one field to the next. And once you do so, you realize those connections are infinite. It’s all just one big web. A big web of how the world works. —Morgan Housel
I’m wary of buzzwords because they are often a cover for nonsense, but digital gardening feels like an exception. I don’t know if it will ever catch on, but I love the ethos of exploration and discovery. I hope they catch on because that will be a welcome change on the raging dumpster fire that is the interweb.
It’s easy to make a virtue of things like curation and digital gardens and dunk on paginated chronological feeds, but I think that’s extreme. We can praise the virtues of the interweb of the old and yearn for it all we want, but we aren’t getting it back. When life gives you lemons, you can squeeze them in your eyes to blind yourself to the interweb hellscape or buy chicken and make lemon chicken.
The fact that we’re used to chronological feeds for publishing and consuming information doesn’t worry me. What worries me more is the industrial-scale production of garbage.
Everything has become so performative. We no longer write; we “publish content.” We no longer edit; we “optimize.” We “produce content” to please the invisible algorithmic overlords. We grovel before them, hoping they will bless us with views and likes. The result of this endless “optimization” and “hacking” is that everything looks the same today—packaged, formulaic bullshit. It’s all bland, colorless, and odorless vomit.
An entire generation has been brainwashed into this way of thinking. If you fart in an interview, you must write a LinkedIn post about 10 lessons you learned from letting one rip. If you read those glorified paperweights called books, you have to write a Twitter thread (now an X-rated thread) on how it changed your life and blew your mind. God forbid, if you don’t have anything to say, you must extract words from the human anatomical region that opens in the hind part of your lower abdomen, or the algorithmic overlords will be displeased.
People no longer write and share things because they want to and I think that’s a tragedy. Most of what you see online, especially on social media, is just engagement bait.
The moment “content” became the preferred term to describe “writing,” “audio,” and “video,” we took a sharp left turn to a place of no return. “Content” truly has to be one of the most vile words in English.
Ok, I’ll dispense with the totally sane and not deranged rant.
The very, very short point I’m trying to make is that given the bland dumpster fire the interweb has become, choosing your own rabbit holes and adventures is the key to coping. There has to be balance in all things—between writing, publishing, posting, curating, scrolling, consuming, and getting consumed.
I don’t know what this site will be or if it’ll even survive, but welcome to my digital garden—a collection of weird and wonderful things on the dumpster fire that is the interweb.