I was recently looking for a better writing tool and came across Obsidian, a “powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.”

I saw this on their homepage.

And thought to myself, that seems familiar. So I went searching through some archives and found –

That second screenshot is from August, 2013 when I was working with the team at Slack and we were figuring out our positioning prior to launching.

Now, I don’t mean this post to say that Obsidian are ripping off a Slack that never existed because they’re not. Slack launched with a different homepage and positioning, and the chance that anyone saw that Slack copy above is pretty near nil.

What I do mean to point out here though is that the promise of a “second brain” or a “scalable, infinite brain” is a tantalizing thought that persists still today, pretty much unsolved.

And will we ever solve it? Maybe?

And if we did ever solve it, my sense is that it would change what it means to be human.

There is a reason the zombies seek and eat “Braaaaains!”