If I could teach you one thing, as a gardener, it would be this: the soil is alive. It is a living structure, full of bacteria, fungi, insects, and chemical signals constantly interacting. It is not an inert matter.
And because it's alive, it shapes everything that grows in it.
The same is true of our knowledge environments.
Media theorists like McLuhan have argued that every medium reshapes the ideas it carries. Gardeners understand this intuitively: conditions matter. Some mediums support variation, linking, recombination, and wild growth. Others isolate information, restrict movement, and keep each idea in its own pot.
The soil of the modern web is the millions of potted plants in hardware stores.
The substrate was never meant to sustain long-term life. The soil is sterile, lifeless. There are no worms aerating it, no fungi networking through it, no micro-organisms breaking down matter into nutrients.
A plant can't propagate in that environment. It can't connect to anything. It can't spread, re-seed, or exchange signals.
The modern web is built the same way.
Most of our knowledge lives in sealed containers: platforms, apps, proprietary formats, walled gardens, subscription silos. Each one acts like a plastic pot — self-contained, neatly branded, and fundamentally disconnected from everything around it.
You don’t really own what you grow in these pots. Exporting it is hard. Moving it breaks it. Re-using it somewhere else is often impossible.
Your notes, your posts, your documents, your data — they live at the pleasure of the platform that holds them. And the platform dictates the soil conditions:
what you can link
what you can export
what formats you’re allowed to use
what connections you’re allowed to make
how your work can circulate or be found
Most knowledge isn’t free to root beyond the boundary of its container. It can’t form networks, and it can’t participate in a larger ecosystem.
In sterile soil, nothing decomposes into nutrients. On the proprietary web, nothing decomposes into shared understanding.
And so we end up with a landscape full of plants — full of content — but very little that is truly alive.
Knowledge is alive, too.
Ideas don't sit still. They evolve, cross-pollinate, decay, and re-form, and occasionally burst into bloom. When the substrate allows it, knowledge behaves like an ecosystem, not a set of files.
People who build personal knowledge systems — Zettelkasten practitioners, digital gardeners, Obsidian users, ontologists, hypertext enthusiasts — all reach for this intuitively. They want ideas that can:
connect themselves,
resurface when relevant,
reorganize,
fork,
and recombine.
Their knowledge is alive. What they're really longing for is a medium that behaves more like soil.
The "Medium is the Message" means it matters how and where you publish.
If ideas behave like living things, then what features of the publishing environment determine whether they survive, spread, or die?
This is where the gardener’s intuition crosses into media theory. McLuhan argued that a medium doesn’t just carry a message — it reshapes it.
The earliest hypertext visionaries treated their mediums not simply as a channels but as environments for thought.
Bush imagined knowledge that followed associative trails instead of rigid hierarchies; Nelson wanted documents that stayed connected across time; Engelbart envisioned systems where ideas could be extended by others rather than trapped in place.
Hypertext makes all of that literal. The structure you publish into determines how your work can move: whether it can link outward, be referenced, be remixed, or become part of something larger than itself.
Choosing where your life’s work should live is not a neutral decision.
A platform can freeze your ideas in place, while a living hypermedia environment can let them circulate, adapt, and keep unfolding.
The architecture becomes part of the meaning.
What makes a living knowledge structure?
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