Long form content is like Legos

Long form content is nothing but connecting ideas. That's why writing is linear and serial. And one side-effect of communicating serially is that you have to force ideas into some sort of order. 

With stories the authors flatten clouds of connected ideas into linear stories (lossy). Readers unbundle these linear stories, and stitch them into their own nonlinear cloud of connected ideas (lossy). In a constant game of bundling and unbundling information.

If you smash a lego collection you get blocks you can reuse to build new things. It's what makes it fun. It's the same with books or articles: break them down into smaller, reusable blocks.

Most written documents are made up of something like a series of smaller “idea chunks”, usually paragraphs. What if we blew these documents apart, so that each “idea chunk” became a thought lego, a block we could address?

Working with blocks of knowledge is what tools like Roam or apps like Deepstash are enabling.