Believe it or not, I owe a lot to The Star Wars Holiday Special.

In 2009 I was deep in an art funk, and hadn’t done anything creative in years. When my friend Leo asked me to start That SciFi Guy with him, it pulled me out of a dark hole and literally gave me creative life again.

The Holiday Special was our first review. It was pretty rough, but it was a lot of fun to do, and it led to some of the coolest experiences of my life.

We did a lot of great work and got better at our craft. We joined That Guy With The Glasses and got invited to go to cons and meet our fans. (We had fans!) The momentum I gained from doing TSFG led to me restarting my comic and making it a bigger success than it had ever been.

But my favorite memories of the project were those writing meetings where a group of us would just watch something together, take notes, yell at the screen, make each other laugh, and turn our best jokes into scripts.

So thanks to this very silly 1978 TV special for helping to make that happen, thanks to everyone who worked on this project with us, thanks to Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur, and thanks to our fellow nerds who now celebrate Life Day with us.

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about enshittification.

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.

Enshittification, Wikipedia

It’s something that’s become readily apparent to those of us who were still on Twitter when it slicked its hair back and started calling itself X after Elon Musk’s disastrous acquisition.

But enshittification is a much wider phenomenon, and it affects every aspect of life. In our late capitalism existence, precious few commercial entities are satisfied by merely making a reasonable and reliable amount of money. Shareholders must be placated with new sources of revenue. The line must continue to go up. If you’re no longer able to quickly acquire new customers, you must extract more revenue from your existing user base. And that means making your service shittier if they don’t pay up.

When it comes to online services, this is an easier sell once they have become entrenched in your ecosystem. When the process of moving away from your service is seen as prohibitively pain-in-the-assy, you can charge your customers more for the basic elements of your service that were once cheap or even free.

While the enshittification of social media sites can hugely impact your digital life, there’s one other type of service that can cause even greater damage, and that’s your note-taking application.

The Basics of Taking Notes on Your Computer

As a kid in the 1990s, I started to take notes in plaintext files. I was always dealing with tech that was a decade or two old already, so I often lost data. In fact, to this day I still have a list of filenames of some .TXT files that went wonky on me in a very particular way – the files claimed to exist, they still took up the same amount of space on the drive, but they contained no data. The only clue I have as to what I lost are the filenames themselves.

Obviously, this was not ideal, but once I had access to more than a confoundingly small hard drive and the couple of old floppies I could find lying around, it worked pretty well.

I continued to keep my notes in plaintext files until around 2008, when a service called Evernote started coming onto the scene.

Evernote was the answer to all of our note-taking problems, or so we thought

In the days before the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, there wasn’t really a place to host your files remotely if you weren’t running a server. For things I needed to keep private or confine to a specific audience, I’d use my email or Livejournal. For any non-privileged info, I’d use the trifling 6MB of space that Geocities offered me. Enough for text files and a few images, as long as you hadn’t filled up your capacity with MIDI music, animated fire gifs and UNDER CONSTRUCTION graphics.

I’d heard of Evernote by 2009, but I hadn’t really thought much of it – my text notes were working fine now that I had multiple backups. I was even using Dropbox at that point already, so my text files had a home and wouldn’t burn down with my house if I left the oven on.

But my boss had begun using Evernote and really enjoyed the workflow. He said the key was to “fully jump in and commit” to Evernote. I tested his theory, and it really helped me to take and organize tons of notes relevant to my work and my life in general. It was easy to take extensive notes on the new subjects I learned at work so I never had to ask the same question twice. I wrote more notes than ever before, I clipped articles, I (very infrequently) collaborated with said boss, and I fully became a devotee to the ecosystem. The ease with which I could take notes and save important information (mostly in whole form) helped me succeed at my job.

Over the years, Evernote kept adding features. It had a browser extension called Clearly that cut all the ads and other crap out of online articles for you, and then let you save (eventually this just became Web Clipper.) Eventually I even started to use it to keep receipts, thanks to its built-in document scanner and OCR search for text within images. If I wanted to find my receipt for that almond milk that went bad, I could just search Evernote.

Things were good for quite a while, but enshittification was creeping up. First, in 2016 Evernote limited Free users to two devices only. This was a little annoying, but as someone who used the web client almost exclusively, it wasn’t a huge hardship.

Eventually, Evernote decided to really pull the plug, and limit Free users to 50 notes. By this time, I had been using Evernote for years, and I had well over a thousand notes. This was not going to cut it. It was time to find another solution.

It’s time to go back to TXT Files (with a slight upgrade)

I spent a lot of time looking for an Evernote replacement that I knew would not fall victim to enshittification.

I had used Notion before, so I knew they had pioneered the restrictive note limitation that Evernote had just thrust us all upon. They had given up on that in 2020, offering unlimited Notes (blocks, as they call it), but they had already demonstrated that I could not trust them.

I tried Joplin for a little while, and I appreciated the approach, but it was far too limited for what I wanted to do.

Enter Obsidian.

Obsidian is essentially a fancy browser for Markdown-format notes that you host yourself (backed up with a cloud provider like Dropbox, Google Drive or Nextcloud if you’d like), and it works as well as anything in Evernote or Notion, but can be read in plaintext if Obsidian ever goes to hell. In addition, there is a robust community of people creating plugins for it, so you can truly do what you want to do with your notes, and integrate with a lot of other sources.

It’s not truly Open-Source, although you can look at an obfuscated version of the code. But if Obsidian becomes untenably enshittified, so what? All my notes are now in Markdown format. I can take them anywhere, and if I choose not to, I can just read them in plaintext.

More than just Notes

When I first listened to the Serial podcast, it occurred to me that if you were to ask me, I couldn’t account for my whereabouts on any given day. If it was crucially important for me to tell you what I was doing two Tuesdays ago, I’d have no idea. And while I didn’t anticipate being accused of murder like Adnan Syed anytime soon, that seemed like a vulnerability that I could do something about.

Now, I’ve been keeping a daily journal for almost ten years. I do it Captain’s Log-style, so I have a record of everything I did on any given day. It’s great to be able to tell when we went to a specific restaurant for the first time, or find out when I got into an interest, or to win an argument with my Mom. But I think it’s most valuable just to give me a snapshot of what my life was like 1, 5, or 10 years ago. I wish I had started when I was a kid.

Previously, I was keeping these daily journals as private entries on Livejournal, but I got concerned after they moved their servers to Russia. I moved to Dreamwidth, which was certainly an improvement, but after I had full control of my own Notes, it made sense to not leave those important files in the hands of any overlord entity that might enshittify or otherwise fumble my data.

It was a minor task to then start using Obsidian to keep these logs, and now I have full control of them, and I’ve backed them up with my cloud provider so I can maintain access to them on several different computers and on mobile.

Write down everything, and keep it safe

Daily journals have a utility that I can’t adequately express. But general Notes have a lot of worth too, and the amount of time and energy you can often save by consulting your past self is immeasurable. It makes sense to take Notes on everything, and it makes sense to control those notes. Whatever service you ultimately opt for, make sure it’s something that is resistant to the whims of corporate capitalism, and is something you can count on for the long haul.