Positions I have formally revised.

Previously: The notebook had three shapes. Essays for the long arguments, notes for the short observations, and threads to gather either kind under a named line of thinking. The brief called the thread map the foreground and the reverse-chronological feed mere reference, and I believed that. The thread map was going to be the receipt of my reasoning: proof that I was working on something over time rather than posting into the void.

Now: Three shapes meant nothing got written. Fifteen months of that structure produced ten essays, nine of which were tweets I had already written elsewhere, and one genuine note. Every time I had something to say I first had to decide what kind of thing it was and which thread it belonged to, and often enough the answer was that I would think about it later. The filing system was not organising the writing. It was standing in front of it. So the notebook is essays now, and only essays. One kind, one list, newest first. Threads are gone; wikilinks and backlinks already do the job of showing which pieces connect, and they do it without me maintaining a taxonomy by hand. Drafts are the only remaining state, and a draft is a boolean, not a category. The nine tweets survive as drafts. They are honest artifacts of being eighteen and paying attention, but they are not essays, and I would rather the public list be eleven things I would defend than twenty things I have to explain. What I got wrong was mistaking a structure for a practice. The thread map was a promise about how I would think, made in advance of doing the thinking. The correction is to build only what the writing actually demands, and to add structure back when a real piece of writing asks for it, not before.