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Why create a Zettelkasten
For me, the Zettelkasten is the system of last resort for writing and research. I've tried index cards, blogs, Kanban boards, commonplace books, journals, mind maps, structured procrastination, spaced-repetition algorithms for long-term memory, dual-N-back for short-term memory, transcranial direct-current stimulation, URL bookmarking sites, flashcards, incremental reading in SuperMemo, emails to myself, and Wikis. Wikis were the most effective of these until they too ran out of gas. Still, the siren song of brain prosthetics, ringing like the tinnitus in my ears, led me to the Zettelkasten, the only system I've tried with any staying power.
According to Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes, 2nd Ed, the Zettelkasten promises to spare the writer the existential angst of the blank page and a blank mind to accompany it (Ahrens 2022, pp. 2–3). Ahrens is critical of standard educational approaches to academic writing and proposes the Zettelkasten as an alternative (Ahrens 2022, pp. 44–46). While Ahrens critiques ineffective study methods and the lack of integration between note-taking, thinking, and writing in traditional education, he wants to cultivate intellectuals who follow ideas wherever they lead. He claims that the Zettelkasten is suited to exploratory reading and writing in preparation for projects that interest the writer.
By contrast, the usual methods prepare students for employment as mental technicians whose writing serves their employer. I owe the distinction between intellectuals, who follow ideas wherever they may lead, and mental technicians, who direct their attention to external, non-epistemic ends, to Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Hofstadter 1963, pp. 26–27). The demarcation between intellectuals and mental technicians is permeable: there is no definite boundary separating them; the difference is teleological, in application (Hofstadter 1963, p. 428). While both intellectuals and mental technicians may follow the epistemic values and motives of learning, knowledge, understanding, and the desire for these (Leiter 2012), the mental technician qua mental technician subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to instrumental, non-epistemic ends.
With its protean capacity to co-opt anything for profit, the market tells another story. Cultivating a Zettelkasten does not an intellectual make; thus, we see the Zettelkasten marketed to the mental technician as a "personal knowledge management" (PKM) system. The contemporary PKM market is non-neutral: it commonly presents note-making as a productivity instrument for professionals. PKM is self-deceptive hype for note management.† There is note management and there is the discipline one brings to it. PKM conflates these.
The Zettel repository and Zettel Wiki were designed to resist the pull toward instrumentalism and to prefer inspectable artifacts to anecdotal productivity hacks and heuristics. After all, we're talking about note taking.
Ahrens, Sönke. 2022. How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking. 2nd edition, revised and expanded edition.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Vintage Books.
Leiter, Brian. 2012. “The Circumstances of Civility.” In Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding, edited by Cornell Clayton and Richard Elgar. University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper, No. 351. Washington State University Press. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1804544.
†The acronym "NMS" for "Note Management System" works for me.