A living implementation manual
The Antinet, answered in one place
Running an Antinet Zettelkasten raises practical questions that most sources either skip or answer in passing, scattered across a dozen half-agreeing posts. This site answers them from a worked implementation: a complete numbering scheme, applied at full scale, with the reasoning left in.
What is here
Filing rules
How an address is computed, and the one decision you make every time you file: does this card continue the one in my hand, or dig into it?
Start here if you have a card and nowhere to put it.
The 65 divisions
The four-digit numbers. These are the guide cards — the only place in the whole system where taxonomy lives.
Start here if you are building the skeleton of a new Antinet.
The numbered outline
All 2,576 addresses, searchable. A worked example of the scheme applied to a real body of knowledge.
Start here if you want to see the scheme at full scale.
Hub cards
What to do when your interests cut across the numbering — which they will, because interests are practices and divisions are disciplines.
Start here once you have enough cards to lose one.
If you arrived with a question
- Can four digits really hold everything?
- What number does this card get?
- How do I file a card between two others?
- What if my topic is not a discipline?
- Where does the taxonomy stop and the address begin?
The one idea to take away
The four digits are the classification. Everything after the slash is position, not meaning.
Which means the branch never has to be correct — only unique and stable. Almost every difficulty people report with a numbered Zettelkasten comes from trying to make the address carry meaning it was never built to hold. The number's job is to be a pointer other cards can rely on forever. Finding things is a different job, done by hub cards and a keyword index.
The worked example numbers an outline of academic disciplines, but the scheme is not about academia — it is a demonstration at a scale large enough to break a system that does not work. Your own Antinet will file mostly your own thinking, branching off these anchors.