# Always bet on text Essay by **[[Graydon Hoare]]** (creator of the Rust language). His thesis: *"text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period."* When in doubt, default to text. ## Why text wins - **Durability** — Text outlasts every other medium. We still read 5,000-year-old inscriptions; it can be carved into granite to outlive humanity itself. - **Flexibility** — Text conveys complex, abstract ideas with precise control over ambiguity. No picture can express "Human rights are moral principles or norms…". - **Efficiency** — Orders of magnitude fewer bytes than audio, images, or video. A whole blog post can weigh less than a single small icon. - **Historical precedent** — Communication tech always adopts text first (optical telegraphs in the 1790s), then voice and video much later, only once bandwidth gets cheap. - **Social utility** — Text alone enables indexing, search, translation, async exchange, and multi-party editing. Libraries and forums show a depth no other medium matches. ## My take This is the philosophical backbone of why a [[Plain Text]] / [[Markdown]] approach to knowledge beats proprietary, media-heavy tools. The argument that text is durable and tool-independent is exactly the [[File over app principle]]: your files should outlive the app that made them. It's also why [[Obsidian]] — plain Markdown files on disk you fully own — is a sound bet for [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]], and a concrete instance of [[Local-First Software]]. Betting on text is betting that your knowledge stays readable, searchable, and yours for decades. ## References - https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html ## Related - [[Graydon Hoare]] - [[File over app principle]] - [[Obsidian]] - [[Plain Text]] - [[Markdown]] - [[Local-First Software]] - [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]]