2021ii10, Wednesday: “Conspiracy without the theory.”

Someone is right on the internet: I remember my first argument about conspiracy theories. It was decades ago: I was in India, on a gap year, in a cafe somewhere in Rajasthan. Jaisalmer I think, out in the Thar Desert. And some other Brit was expounding on some conspiracy or other. I took the other side: what I now recognise is the classic position of noting how improbable it was that everyone involved could collaborate so perfectly and secretly. I can’t remember what it was about; probably the Moon landings.

One of the many depressing things about the past few years has been the proliferation (and popularisation by people you really wish knew better for selfish ends) of conspiracy thinking, to genuinely poisonous and damaging effect. This piece does an excellent job of walking through - as it puts it - their “enduring allure”, noting as they do that the USA was founded on a conspiracy theory of a sort, and that “losers” in politics often turn to conspiracy theories and paranoia to explain the outcome. (A classic piece of writing, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, noted this tendency more than half a century ago. He’s no more wrong now than he was then; I suspect we’d see strong echoes here, too.)

But then the piece takes a darker and scarier turn, noting that the turn now is towards - as the authors put it “conspiracy without the theory”. By which they mean the old days of obsessing over bullet trajectories (Kennedy) and flag shadows (Moon landings) are gone. Who needs actual facts to analyse when instead you can disappear down a rabbit hole of assertion like QAnon - something which, as has been noted, seems almost as tailor-made to deliver addictive dopamine hits to its adherents as a computer game?

Compared with this, the innocent era of the Bush administration - when people were shocked, shocked to hear an anonymous US government source declare that they “created their own reality” in contrast to what he dismissively referred to as “the reality-based community” - seem like halcyon days.

It just works: Those who’ve been reading my stuff for a while will be aware of (and may fairly despair of) my on-off search for the right tool for taking notes and keeping records. Scrivener, Ulysses and Notion have all come in for favourable reviews - and are, without a doubt, fantastic pieces of software. For the right user, each of them is probably spot on.

But none have settled for me. Scrivener’s clunky sync was a killer. Ulysses’ clumsy search and less-than-ideal tagging frustrated me intensely. Bear - which I’ve only mentioned in passing before - is an excellent “dump stuff for later” tool with the best tag system I’ve come across, and I still use it for that purpose; but is just too “flat” for my purposes. (I need ways of keeping info about particular cases together without relying on tags or keeping everything in a single file.) Notion wowed me with its versatility, but I need reliable offline working and easy import-export, and that isn’t it.

At least I’ve realised what my priorities are by now. Not all are deal-breakers, but all are important:

• Portability. I don’t want my stuff locked up in a format or location I don’t control. So ideally files on the desktop or in a cloud share I trust, and Markdown as the format.
• Easy export. I need to be able to dump stuff into a PDF or Word document easily, with minimal formatting faff.
• Bringing stuff together. I need to have everything about one topic easily accessible.
• Search. There’s no excuse here. Rock-solid, no-brainer universal search is essential. If you make me work for it (Ulysses, I’m looking at you), that’s a critical fail.
• Linking, in both directions. I’d forgotten how much I love this. Not only must I be able to embed links to other files/documents in the system into any other file; ideally I want to see what links to the thing I’m looking at now. This is backlinking; it’s a very old-school hypertext function, but now I’m using it again I’m staggered how I survived without it.
• Multi-platform. Being limited to the desktop doesn’t work for me. Admittedly my new machine is lovely; but my workflow absolutely embraces phone and iPad. I need convincing to do anything that blocks that.
• Multi-window. I need to see two or three things at a time.
• Speed. I’m lucky enough to have good kit. If the software slows it down, that’s unforgivable. I’m looking at you, Word.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Don’t force me to use a mouse or trackpad any more than I have to.

In our new no-paper world, I’d very much recommend anyone else thinking through their own priorities. I’m very happy to discuss with mates what they need, and what might fit.

Me? Two new tools have presented themselves, both of which tick almost all these buttons. Both promise shortly to tick them all, although we’ll see what those promises are worth.

First, there’s Obsidian. This is desktop-only, for now, which is a real pain. But it’s wonderful: in essence, a smooth, keyboard-led take on a Markdown wiki and knowledge handler with everything stored locally as individual text files, back- and forward-linked to high heaven. It’s not for everyone: it’s a kind of throwback to a primarily text-heavy world. But I just ran a 10-day hearing with everything in Obsidian: a master page for the case, with pages branching off (in separate panes) for each witness’s evidence, for my own notes, and for important background. All cross-linked and lightning-fast.

Then there’s Craft. I found this late last year, and frankly I don’t quite know how to describe it. It’s got some (though not all) of Notion’s virtues - a block-based structure where each paragraph on a “page” can easily have links, formatting and other things defined by easy keyboard shortcuts, or be turned into a link to a sub-page which in turn backlinks smoothly. It isn’t as versatile as Notion, but it’s happy offline, it’s quicker and smoother, and its exporting is excellent. Initially it was single-window, but that’s been sorted now. It’s cross-platform all the way, too. The one fly in the ointment is that right now it stores its own data; but its developers promise the ability to host data wherever you want within weeks, and their pace of evolution is excellent, so I’ve some faith they’ll manage it.

For the moment, I’m sticking with Craft. It’s smooth, it’s elegant, it’s designed by people who clearly care deeply about their users, and much as I love Obsidian (and I do), for now cross-platform ease is too important to sacrifice. I’d strongly recommend it.