Stripping the medium

McLuhan said the medium is the message. He meant it as an observation, not a problem to solve. I've been treating it as a problem to solve.

For the past year, I've been converting almost everything I consume into plain text. YouTube videos, podcasts, meetings, articles behind paywalls I pay for. Not to archive them. To read them, think with them, and feed them to language models. The format I end up with, every time, is markdown.

The oldest instinct

This is not a new idea. The monk copying a manuscript was doing the same thing: separating the information from its carrier so it could travel further. The printing press industrialised that instinct. The paperback made it cheap. The e-reader made it weightless.

What changes in each era is not the instinct but the friction. The question is always: how much does the medium resist you?

Right now, audio resists. Video resists. The meeting resists most practically of all: it happens once, in real time, and then it exists only in whoever was paying attention. The beautifully designed magazine website resists in a different way, because it was built to be experienced, not extracted. McLuhan would have loved it. The medium has become so expressive it almost swallows the message entirely.

Markdown is my answer to that. Not because it is elegant, but because it gets out of the way.

Linear in a parallel world

I am a linear reader. I process information sequentially, with attention, one thread at a time. That puts me at a structural disadvantage in an information environment built for parallel consumption: the feed, the notification, the autoplay queue.

The workflows I use are, at their core, a way of reasserting linearity. A podcast becomes a text I can read at the pace I choose. A YouTube video becomes something I can skim, annotate, return to. A meeting becomes a document I can search rather than a memory I have to trust. A paywalled article becomes a file, not a session.

The sweet spot I am looking for is high information density with low format noise. Markdown delivers that. Everything else is packaging.

Why not plain text

Plain text and markdown look almost identical. For reading, the difference is marginal. For everything else, it matters.

A markdown file can carry frontmatter : a small block of metadata at the top of the file that describes what it contains. Source, date, speaker, topic, context. The file becomes self-describing. You do not need an external index or a carefully named folder structure to know what you are looking at six months later.

For a language model, that difference is significant. When I pass a transcript to Claude or ChatGPT, the frontmatter travels with it. The model knows where the text came from, when, and why I kept it. I am not just handing over words. I am handing over a small, structured piece of context.

Plain text is readable. Markdown with frontmatter is readable, findable, and passable.

Shortcuts to backend transcription flows. Very seamless.

The second reader

Here is where something genuinely new enters.

For most of history, converting information to a more portable format had one destination: a human reader. The monk, the scholar, the commuter with a paperback. The conversion served attention.

I am converting for two readers now. Myself, and the language model I will hand the text to next. A transcript I made three weeks ago becomes context in a conversation today. A meeting summary from last month becomes the briefing for this week's follow-up. A collection of articles on the same topic becomes a working corpus, not a reading list.

That second reader changes the logic of the whole operation. I am not just a consumer of information. I am a curator preparing material for a machine that will help me think with it. The format has to work for both of us. Markdown does.

McLuhan observed that every new medium contains the previous one. Television contains radio. The web contains print. What contains the language model? I think it might be the archive: the personal, intentional collection of text that someone has decided is worth keeping close.

Gleick wrote in The Information that the history of communication is the history of encoding. What I am doing is, in that sense, unremarkable. What is different is who the encoded message is for.

The same logic works in reverse. From a markdown file, I produce blog posts, documents, structured reports. The format is not a destination. It is the place everything passes through.

Which is why seamless is not a feature. It is the only requirement. Add one step that requires attention, and the whole thing collapses. We are, after all, fundamentally lazy. Good systems know that about us.