I Wish I Knew How To Quit Roam Research
Dreaming Of The Global Knowledge Graph
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Every idea is a remix.
Nothing is original.
Matter cannot be destroyed or created, it can only be organized. Transformed.
Matter is eternal. God organized matter into life, but life is co-eternal with God by nature of the matter from which it was formed.
Like the ring on my finger, eternity is one eternal remix.
My digital life didn't start until I found Roam Research. When I discovered the note taking app at the beginning of COVID lockdown, my life was transformed.
My brain had always worked the way it works, but I only came to know it when I found Roam Research.
Note taking apps have been termed a "tar pit" idea.
In the words of my friend, Michael Dempsey, "there is a distinct type of smart person in tech that gets nerd-sniped by a Roam Research-style tool every cycle...and every time 1-5 of them are VCs."
But, like every doe-eyed lovestruck puppy, I can't help but feel like my love is different. It's something special. It's not productivity porn. It's not over-optimization. It's a world view.
When I say my digital life started with Roam, I don't just mean single player; the way I take notes. I mean multiplayer. My addiction to Twitter began as an avenue to engage with the #RoamCult who shared that world view.
Today, I don't recommend Roam Research to people anymore, despite the fact that I am, to this day, five years after I first discovered it, an hourly active user.
Roam is my life; it houses a fundamental part of who I am.
But Roam Research and the man behind the vision, Conor White-Sullivan, are not building a productivity app. And the majority of notetakers are looking for a productivity app.
Joseph Smith once said:
"Let us here observe that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation."
Others have said something similar; anything worth having is not easy to obtain.
The same could be said of Roam Research.
The majority of people don't care enough about the fundamental atomic unit of knowledge to engage in a pursuit of graphing the global knowledge pool.
The fundamental reason that Roam Research is so unique in a sea of productivity apps is because it represents not a life hack, but a life line.
What I mean is that all of life is connected. Every idea, principle, habit, song, poem, fabric, motion, technique, belief, bias; every aspect of the human experience has a back link.
Roam Research offers a small taste of what it would mean to block reference a piece of the intelligence of the universe.
Think about Excel. When I type "=A1" I am calling down the powers that be which have previously populated cell A1. A block in Roam is a cell in Excel. I can block reference any corner of my personal knowledge graph.
The same is true in any facet of human knowledge. For example, when I reference a quote from Interstellar:
"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."
This idea is a remix. Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot." Oscar Wilde's polarity. John F. Kennedy's Rice University speech.
A back link is the Excel reference to past ideas. Every idea is a remix; but a remix of what? That remains a fundamental limitation of the human experience.
In many cases, we know the lineage of our ideas; the historicity of our thinking. I may know the book / essay / tweet / song / movie that a particular aspect of my worldview was inspired by. But in the vast majority of cases we do not. We do not know where our programming has forked from.
But Roam Research represents a fundamental belief that I subscribe to. The back links of the human experience are worth understanding. Because in that lineage lies the mysteries of the universe.
As God said, "all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal." It is all connected. We think that some ideas are temporal. Unnecessary. Uncritical. Forgettable. But they are not. Every aspect of the human experience represents an intelligence of the universe. In other words, "all truth may be circumscribed into one great whole."
In the heyday of the #RoamCult I wrote a blog post entitled "Building The Global Knowledge Graph" where I laid out the structural vision of why Roam Research is so powerful. The idea that I can graph the interconnections of my own knowledge in a notetaking app is true, whether the analogue is Excel, GitHub, Google, Twitter, or the World Wide Web itself. As I said in that piece, "Imagine the internet, but with backlinks. The architecture is already the same. Every domain is a block, every child block is a subdomain. They just need to let you see the links back and forth." That vision was articulated at the birth of the internet by Tim Berners-Lee:
“All the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer’s, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared.“
Imagine you’re a cancer researcher in Chicago. You’re poring over a query showing every time [[carboplatin]] has come up in relation to [[oxaliplatin]] without references to [[melatonin]]. You see one small unlinked reference in the notes of a marine biologist in Oslo who has been studying cancer cells in whales. She uses a term you’ve never heard of before. She also references the work of a nuclear physicist in Moscow who has spent 30 years writing about cellular decay and he is the world’s leading expert on a chemical you were totally unaware of. You don’t know it yet but you just cured cancer.
That's the power of the Global Knowledge Graph. Interconnecting the conceptual ancestors of human knowledge will unlock the maximized progeny of the human family.
So, despite my attempts to try Notion, Obsidian, Reflect, Mem, and even vibe-coding an alternative…
Like the golden idols of Ba'al, all pale in comparison to the true and living exceptional vision that Roam Research represents.
So here I am. For the 190th week in a row, writing this blog post in Roam Research. Because without it, I become cut off from the fundamental remix of the things I've come to understand. The small corner of the human experience that I've wrapped my tiny mortal arms around is available to me in the references across my Roam graph.
And despite my carnal desires for a better mobile app, easier to use integrations, a reader view, or any other small feature requests, here I stand. A member of the #RoamCult that has never gone away. Continuing to believe in a world view that may not be an enterprise-grade SaaS app, but represents the state of knowledge that I want to believe in.
And here I will remain.
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That is one of the things I hate in modern internet, which is developed upon the basis of information. Content creation has become duplicate and redundant. Unique insights that are formed during synthesis are hidden in favor of shallow level ideas or funny memes. For me, due to my personal ethical constraints, I would much rather prefer to see a public clean space where knowledge is interconnected and linked, as you describe in Roam Research.
But who am I to judge? A poor commenter in a sea of "influencers" who found another system to abuse.
Hi Kyle, a fellow hourly Roam Research user here. Roam triggered a Cambrian explosion of tools (there are over 80 PKM tools https://x.com/kvistgaard/status/1709934180430475462, of which more than half are influenced by Roam), and some of them with way more powerful features (notably Tana). And yet, there is something unique remaining that makes some people go back to it. I think that is the specific design that makes it open to re-purposing. That and the specific technology stack allowing streaming and treating code and content as the same thing.
Recently, I wrote an essay here about how I use Roam to write essays here. It got a good number of views, just as an earlier one about a "graph pruning" technique. This tells me that, although the heyday of Roam is well in the past, there is still a lot of interest. And I keep hearing stories about people trying out alternatives and then coming back.