Tools for thought

I remember this phrase from the book by Howard Rheingold that I read a long while ago. It's coming back in to fashion with PKM tools like Roam and org-roam.

It's easy to forget, but the web began as a tool for thought, and it had many of these same properties — personal, multiplayer, distributed, evolvable. It lost most of the personal and distributed aspects as it grew into an app platform. Perhaps we might carve out a bit of space for those again?

– Building a Second Subconscious