The Commonplace Rebellion: On Locke's Method and the Modern Feed
We often imagine the pursuit of knowledge as a forward march, a linear progression into the bright, clean future of better tools and faster connections. But sometimes, the most radical act is to look backward, to a time when the volume of information first began to feel unmanageable. Long before feeds and algorithms, the 17th-century philosopher John Locke faced his own information crisis, and his solution—a method for commonplacing—feels startlingly relevant to our own digital disquiet.
Locke lived in an age of pamphlets, letters, and an exploding print culture. A gentleman scholar was expected to read voraciously and retain everything, a task as daunting then as keeping up with a relentless Twitter timeline is now. His response was not to read more, but to read better, and to build a system for it. In 1685, he published "A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books," a meticulous guide for turning reading into a personal, retrievable asset.
His genius was in the index. Unlike previous commonplace books, which were often jumbled by date or whim, Locke’s method was a precursor to the database. He instructed readers to create a two-page alphabetical index at the front of a blank book. On each subsequent page, a letter from the index and a vowel (Aa, Ab, Ac, and so on) were written in the top corner. When he encountered a noteworthy passage on, say, "Architecture," he would turn to the page reserved for "Ar" and transcribe it there. The subject was then logged in the master index next to its page number.
This was more than filing; it was a system of serendipitous rediscovery. By forcing a single, hierarchical index to govern a multitude of topics, Locke created a web of knowledge where an entry on "Gravity" might physically sit beside one on "Gardening" if they shared a page code, inviting unexpected connections. It was an analog algorithm for cross-referencing, a way of letting the structure of the book itself suggest relationships between ideas that the original authors never intended.
We now have apps that can search millions of words in milliseconds, yet we often feel poorer for it. Our digital notes are scattered across platforms, siloed and forgotten. The feed, optimized for novelty, pushes the old and valuable permanently out of sight. Locke’s method argues for a different value: not speed, but location; not accumulation, but purposeful placement. It asks us to be curators of our own attention, to decide not just what to save, but where to put it and how it might later converse with other saved thoughts. His rebellion was against the chaos of undigested information. Perhaps ours should be against the ease that allows us to collect without ever truly commonplacing.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: