A few days ago, I was deep into No Bullshit Strategy by Alex M H Smit. One of those books that doesn’t just inform—it sparks something. Mid-sentence, an idea lit up in my mind. I needed to capture it before it faded.
I glanced at my desk, noticing my open notebook, scattered with other thoughts. Grabbing a pen would have been the simplest option. But then I hesitated. How many times had I scribbled something down only to forget which notebook it was in? How often had I flipped through pages, knowing a thought was there but unable to find it?
Highlighting on a Kindle would have been another option. In a way, that would mean my Kindle becomes part of my mind—a digital extension of my memory. But here’s the issue: there’s no straightforward way to pull all those highlights together into something useful. Maybe there’s a hidden CSV export buried in the settings, but even if it exists, there’s no guarantee that whatever great future tool that might handle my thoughts can read the format. Instead of making my thoughts more accessible, they became fragmented, locked into systems that don’t talk to each other. And once again, my thoughts wouldn’t really be mine—they’d be stuck in yet another walled garden.
So, I did what seemed like the best choice: I reached for my phone and opened my notes app. Easy to type, easy to search, always with me. It felt like the perfect solution. But as I typed, another thought crept in—what if my AI assistant could remember this for me? Not just store the note, but actually connect it to other ideas I’d saved, remind me when relevant, help me build on it over time?
That’s when something clicked. Why not use any of today’s AI solutions? ChatGPT, Claude, Raycast—tools that already exist, ready to store and structure my thoughts. Typing out a passing thought, and then, weeks later, having an AI remind me of it at the perfect moment. Not just storing notes, but surfacing forgotten ideas, making connections I hadn’t noticed, and suggesting ways to expand on them. It would be like having a second brain—one that actually works with me, helping me refine and develop ideas over time.
But as exciting as that sounds, there’s a catch. All of this would come at a cost—not just in terms of money, but in control. My thoughts would once again become part of someone’s business model. They’d be taken hostage, 'forgotten' (as if anything truly disappears in the digital age) the moment I stop paying for the service. A paywall separating me from my own ideas, reducing my reflections to mere rented space in a system designed to profit off my thinking.
And don’t get me wrong—I'm completely fine with paying for a service. But I don’t like being held hostage by one. My ideas, my reflections shouldn’t be part of someone else’s business model, held ransom by a subscription fee.
I put my phone down, and the whole thing reminded me of an old box of journals I found while moving last summer. Years of scribbles, ideas, half-baked concepts. Some had turned into real projects. Others had just sat there, waiting for me to rediscover them. But at least they were mine. I could pick them up, flip through them, revisit old thoughts without asking anyone for permission.
But my digital notes? They aren't really mine. Take Google Keep, for example. Plenty of people used it to store their thoughts, only to wake up one day to find Google shutting it down, giving them 30 days to copy and paste their 'keeps' elsewhere. If only those notes were stored in an easily exportable format, moving them wouldn’t have been a hassle.
I’d love to share my thoughts with ChatGPT, but what happens when Claude launches a more advanced AI? Or when some startup finally builds something like Samantha from the movie Her? The cycle repeats: my ideas, locked into yet another system, waiting for the day I might need to rush to save them.
So What Now? Maybe the answer is simpler than it seems. What if we just agreed on a universal format—something as straightforward as Markdown? A format that any AI, any tool, could read and understand. A simple, open way to store and transfer thoughts, without worrying about paywalls or platform lock-in. This is bigger than convenience—it’s about the future of thinking itself. As AI becomes more intertwined with how we process, remember, and build on ideas, we have to ask: who owns our thoughts? Will we be free to move them between different AI tools, or will we be locked into a single ecosystem, unable to take our knowledge with us?
The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes—we need a decentralized way to handle this. A system where thoughts aren’t tied to one AI provider, but remain ours, accessible across platforms, eras, and innovations. We’re used to owning our books, our notebooks, our thoughts. Why should digital notes be any different? With decentralized social media on the rise—Mastodon, Threads—why couldn’t we have something similar for our ideas? A way to store and retrieve thoughts without being tied to a single company or service?
What if there were a way to take our thoughts wherever we go? A universal, open-source thought vault. A place where an AI assistant could help—but never own.
That moment, staring at my phone, I realized: we assume that when we write something down, we’ll always have access to it. But in a world where even our memories are turning into subscriptions, maybe it’s time we rethink where we store our thoughts.
Thoughts?
All the love,
Jonas
PS: In case you're wondering how you ended up receiving this newsletter: I recently did shut down Monday Workday, and transformed this project into a new creative space. I'll be sharing insights on design, AI and the books that shape my thoughts.
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