In 1910, a Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet built something he called the Mundaneum — a physical "world brain" housed in Brussels, made of 12 million index cards cross-referencing every piece of human knowledge he could find. Each card had a subject, a link to related cards, and a location. He called the links "associations." Decades before the internet, he had invented hyperlinks, metadata, and the knowledge graph.

The Mundaneum was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Most of it burned.

What we built today in this vault — CONTEXT/, Projects/, Areas/, Resources/, a daily note system, links between ideas — is structurally identical to what Otlet designed by hand. The difference is that his system required a room full of people to maintain. Yours runs on one command.

Otlet believed the point of organizing knowledge wasn't storage. It was orientation — knowing where you stood in the world at any moment.

That's exactly what NOW.md is for.