Mike Caulfield: The Garden and the Stream
The 2015 talk that the whole digital garden idea traces back to.
The original. Everything written about digital gardens since is a gloss on this talk, and most of the glosses are worse than the source.
Caulfield’s argument isn’t really about note-taking, which is how it usually gets summarised. It’s about what the web lost when it became a set of feeds. In a stream, a page is an event — it happens, it gets its attention, it sinks. In a garden, a page is a place you return to and change. The wiki was the garden’s native form and we more or less abandoned it.
The line that stuck with me is about how streams make us think in terms of reaction rather than arrangement. You can’t rearrange a timeline. Worth sitting with, given that this site is a timeline.