The decentralized web made of blogs and open publishing inspired PKM. Traditional knowledge management (KM) was top down, as Dave Pollard noted in 2005, “So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.” It was obvious 20 years ago that top-down knowledge management does not work for people.
Then the open web created a way to curate knowledge bottom-up. It was fuelled by bloggers and sharing on social media. I started this blog in 2004. This worked for a couple of decades until generative AI and large language models scraped everything we collectively had shared online and now big tech offers it back to us served from a black-boxed set of algorithms.
Basically, Gen AI has taken what we have collectively built and sucked it up in order to feed it back to us top-down. We built the knowledge in these platforms. These AI platforms want to think for us, even though they are based on our thinking. I think not.
“The promise of generative AI is that it can think for us. That is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking; and so our power is in our ability to think with each other. To generate genuinely new ideas” —Naomi Klein
In order not to become digital serfs we have to ‘“think with each other”. It may not be on blogs but we have to find ways to connect human-to-human, without a disembodied AI-bot telling us what to do. I’m not sure what the future of PKM will be but we really need to work on bottom-up sensemaking.
If you want to dig back in time — while this blog stays online — there are some related posts below.
I decided to post this on le 14 juillet — the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison by the people of France in 1789.
my pkm story
human capital
knowledge-sharing paradox redux
learning in the flow of work
