Personal Information Logos – Overview

It’s been many years since I last wrote about personal information logos – the system in a person’s life by which information is gathered, organized, maintained, accessed, and linked. I was just talking with my Mom about ongoing projects I’m involved with to reorganize a lot of my data, which corresponds with multiple hardware upgrades.

When you get a new computer it already comes with a system of information logos to some degree – a system that is inadvertently tied in with the vendor(s) of the system(s) you’re using. So for example, for organizing photos there may be an app from a vendor named “Photos”. It seems each competing vendor wants to monopolize each of the main areas of information logos – so for example each may have “Photos”, “Documents”, “News”, etc.

But the system I am developing is not tied to any vendor – is totally independent of all that – except for a seemingly amazing Open Source tool I am using which synchronizes data between multiple devices. More on that tool later.

Another aspect of personal information logos I want to touch on is that of the actual format(s) in which data is stored and the types of tools that are used to access and manage data in those formats. In this regard, the most significant thing by far is the use of Markdown for nearly all of my own personal documentation, and the use of several Open Source tools to deal with Markdown documents.

Markdown is a revolution, but the revolution only really kicks in when you’re using the right tools to deal with it. In brief, those tools are: the Vim editor (command-line, GUI-version available), the Atom editor (which has several Markdown addons), and a couple essential tools that work with Vim: vimpager which is used for viewing files and the Vim plugin vim-markdown.

With this system in place, you should be able to literally interchange almost any device you have with any other device easily and with minimal hassle. For example you can get a new computer and within only minutes have everything you need in place along with all your data for your personal information logos setup.

And there is no need to deal with managing the data. Once you’ve organized it wherever you want it is there for you on any device you use.

When talking with my Mom I explained how in the past I tried different approaches to dealing with my personal data but they invariably tended to fall short. One major attempt was the use of a personal cloud app (first Owncloud and later Nextcloud). At the time it seemed like a great idea and a great way to keep all my data organized and synchronized. However this fell short in multiple ways. Ultimately I ended up with data that was scattered across different devices and not in sync and basically a pain to deal with – a pain I’m still dealing with right now as I’m in the process of having to re-organize a lot of it.

There may be limited scenarios for which Owncloud or Nextcloud may work – for example a company might want to use something like that for employees. But I found these to be difficult to deal with and somewhat brittle in software terms – meaning that things can easily go wrong with them.

The new synchronization tool I’m using is Syncthing and it takes a different approach. Instead of a centralized server and multiple clients as with Owncloud/Nextcloud, with Syncthing all connected devices are peers. Any device that you connect to a shared directory becomes a peer that shares with all the others. This is supposed to work flawlessly across all devices so that changes to any data on any one device are reflected almost instantaneously on every other device.

I say “supposed to” because I’ve learned that things don’t always work as they’re supposed to (still have a somewhat bitter aftertaste from Nextcloud). I’ve been using Syncthing for a while now and so far I’m happy to say it has held up. On Android, it may not always been running in the background so I find that to get it to sync I have to manually open the app. This may not entirely be a fault of Syncthing: Android is notorious for being absolutely shitty when it comes to handling data access and syncing on personal networks. But even with all of Android’s shittyness Syncthing seems to be working well, and vastly better than Nextcloud did (which was close to a disaster).

The next consideration for personal information logos is the actual structure of of data. From the most general viewpoint, this is the folder hierarchy that is used for organizing files. This hierarchy has to make sense, be useful, and somewhat universal. It literally should be able to accommodate any form of data that you need to deal with in life, from photos to medical records to journal entries to product information and technical data.

If I could go back to my self 20 or 30 years ago closer to the dawn of digital technology and tell myself what type of system to set up I would. It would have been really useful to have known back then that I would need a system and to start using it rigorously to organize and manage all my information.

Of course I can not and did not, as no one has, however as we have all done our best to work with and manage our data we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. So now we can distill all this wisdom and lay it out for people in the future, who have the benefit of learning from our experience and expertise gained through many years of practical insights.

And this really is what personal information logos is all about and why I’m writing about it: I want people to understand that this is necessary and important for your life. We all access, create, use, and share information and we need to have coherent and well-organized systems for dealing with it. Data is part of our lives and it’s important how we handle it.

I don’t know what’s being taught now to younger people in this digital age, but it actually concerns me. From what I see, as I mentioned above, there is a lot of vendor lock-in type stuff that occurs. There are a lot of proprietary “solutions” which involve unwanted dependencies and compromises. And also these “solutions” in the end may not actually be that great. They may be immediately convenient on one level, but not what is actually best in the long run.

Hence, I think people, especially younger people, really need to learn a system of personal information logos that transcends vendor proffered solutions and is based on immutable concepts that will last.

Another, philosophical aspect of this which I hope arises is that there really is only one information logos. For the individual and for the entire world there is only one information logos. Greedy people attempt to capitalize, corner, control, manipulate, etc. various aspects of it as we constantly see from the worse of what I call the new Silicon Valley (as opposed to the old one, which was hard-core geek people building chips and computers in their garages and pioneering universal concepts).

The more you understand information logos the more it becomes overwhelmingly apparent how off so much of the modern “technology industry” is. Basically it’s based on “markets” and when you boil it down even further it comes down to simple greed. Boiling it down even further, it comes down to each human being on a spiritual plane choosing why they’re here on Earth and what they choose to dedicate their efforts towards in this lifetime.

It’s clear that some people – despite all the lies and BS they proffer – put themselves first and everything else last. They make billions of dollars through “innovation” that diverges significantly from information logos by being closed, manipulative, and usually deceitful.

It’s important now more than ever to teach people about information logos and understand that it’s not just about organizing and managing information. There’s an ethics about it. Just as there’s an ethics about everything humans do on Earth.

Earth is finite and there are only so many resources. This in fact is one of THE major blind spots of a lot of modern thinking around technology and society. It forgets the essential truth that there are only so many resources available and that we therefore have an imperative to respect them and use them as wisely as possible.

I will not go off on this but I will just say one example is: When you look at some medieval village that has survived through the ages, it’s not just that the buildings are beautiful and the materials they are made from are beautiful. Those materials came from that particular place on Earth. They are finite resources that humans used in the best way they could to create things which would last for generations.

It is ignorance to think that those things will always just be there in infinite supply, without any regard to Earth. That is a rapacious form of thinking, and that rapacious form of thinking underlies a lot of what presents itself as cutting-edge thinking.

Has anyone thought to consider that part of what makes a medieval village or the ruins of an ancient site so amazing is that it represents the logos of that particular place on Earth – the use and application of resources to create something beautiful and enduring.

If that village burns down or that site is bombed into oblivion, you cannot just recreate it. Because part of the essence of those places comes from the finite resources of Earth itself. How the particular plants grew in that area which created, over hundreds of years, the wood that was used. How the geological processes occurred over hundreds of millions of years to result in unique features and distinctive rocks and other formations.

Once that has been used or destroyed it cannot simply be put back. Of course to some people who are basically spiritually dead it doesn’t matter. They don’t have the inner capacity to distinguish between something living and breathing and deeply connected to Earth and something prefabricated and thrown together that looks appealing.

And while there are some places and things which may be magnificent, old, and beautiful, and connected which can be consequently be destroyed, there are places which have never been beautiful and connected. Much of the United States is that way unfortunately. The people who came and developed the land and built cities simply had no connection to Earth and no idea what they were doing. So you have entire cities which are gravely disconnected and dissonant in many different ways with Earth and with life itself.

And this is why it’s important to teach people because unfortunately many people don’t even know about these things – they’ve never been exposed to them and entire parts of their being have never even been activated. Unless they are activated they will never awaken to essential parts of themselves and of existence on Earth and in the Cosmos that are necessary for evolution.

And this is also why much if not most of the new Silicon Valley is evil. Because it’s capitalizing on disconnectedness and permanent de-activation of humans. It’s like an opportunistic, parasitic infection that has sprung up in an unhealthy environment which fosters it’s survival and, once it flourishes, continues to ensure it’s own flourishing by preventing changes to that environment and to the host which it’s parasitizing off of.