If we carefully closed the right feedback loops, could we construct a creative flywheel that generates finished works almost by accident, through a stream-of-consciousness process?

Knowledge gardening is one kind of system for generating self-organizing ideas. As a kind of self-organizing system, it can’t happen without some kind of feedback loop.

This is what broken feedback loops feel like. Everything is feed-forward. There are no opportunities in the interface to stumble back over your notes, to recurse back over them. You’re continually adding energy to the system, but none of it is returning back.

Knowledge gardening, on the other hand, is the emergent result of constructing a feedback system. I recurse over scratch notes, revise them, add to them, refactor them, and combine them with other ideas to form new ideas.

The core game mechanic of Zettelkasten is to file your note some place where you would want to stumble over it again.

Like Zettelkasten’s game mechanic, this search-or-create mechanic closes a feedback loop. Every time you enter a new idea, you’re recursing over old ideas. Often you find yourself editing, or refactoring an old note, instead of creating a new note. Over time, these microinteractions add up, generating knowledge from the bottom-up.