Baku Hashimoto is a visual artist based in Tokyo, known for generative art, motion graphics, and experimental film — Cannes Lions Bronze, Ars Electronica selection, Tokyo TDC Grand Prize. But what he has been building for the past two years is something entirely different from the practice those awards name. He has been constructing a content management system called garden.ooo: Local-First, wiki-structured, rejecting hierarchy, rejecting timelines, rejecting the binary opposition between "finished" and "unfinished." This CMS is not his "work" — it is the infrastructure on which his own website runs, something grown incrementally through dogfooding.

garden.ooo performs three chisel operations on today's web. The first chisel targets the CMS hierarchy-construct. Content management systems since WordPress demand that you build boxes before you write: post types, categories, tag trees. The moment a page is "both a work and an event," the box system collapses. garden.ooo chisels away all classification, leaving only links. Pages and tags are not distinguished; structure is not preset but emerges from links between things. This is how the World Wide Web was originally imagined by Tim Berners-Lee — rhizomatic, where anyone can link to anywhere. The mesh topology of that original web is the remainder exposed after the CMS hierarchy-construct is chiseled away.

The second chisel targets the cloud-first construct. Notion, Medium, Google Docs — your data lives on someone else's server, convenience traded for control. garden.ooo chisels away cloud dependency. All data is stored locally as text files, the Single Source of Truth; the cloud is merely a mirror. The implementation is three-layered: local Markdown files ↔ browser IndexedDB (RxDB) ↔ remote MongoDB. You can start using it without even creating an account. The data format is Obsidian-compatible — plain Markdown plus YAML frontmatter — meaning your site can be edited in Notepad, Obsidian, Cursor, or sed. The plain text file is the remainder after all proprietary formats have been chiseled away: the oldest, most durable, most universal vessel for digital information.

The third and deepest chisel targets the completion-construct. Today's publishing systems maintain a binary: "published" (polished, official, immutable) versus "unpublished" (draft, private, nonexistent). garden.ooo chisels this binary into a gradient. Using four visibility levels (public / unlisted / protected / private) and a "permanent" flag, it treats content maturity as a phase transition: gas (fragments, tweets) → liquid (amorphous thought) → crystal (archive). One of its design principles is called "dada-more" (—) — literally "leaking overflow" — allowing content of different maturity levels to coexist freely. Another principle is "gukou-ken" — Mill's concept of the right to foolishness — the system acknowledges the user's right to publish imperfect content; the CMS does not police whether your pages are messy. What is chiseled away is the concept of completion itself; the remainder is that vast grey zone between published and unpublished — where human thought actually lives, but for which no existing publishing system has made room. Hashimoto himself writes: loosen the concept of completion. This is, precisely, the core declaration of the beauty of the remainder.

The naming gap is wide open. It is not a CMS (no hierarchy, no post types). Not a wiki (it serves as portfolio, diary, paid content platform). Not a static site generator (it has dynamic sync and database layers). Not Obsidian (it is designed for public-facing web publishing). Not a blog (it rejects timeline structure). Not a digital garden tool (it is more comprehensive — with replication, paid content, graduated visibility). Hashimoto made the name itself into a URL — garden.ooo is both the system name and the service name. Its predecessor was called Morion. Its intellectual lineage traces to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Zettelkasten, Tadao Umesao's Kyoto-style index cards, Cosense's (formerly Scrapbox) refusal to distinguish pages from tags, Obsidian's local-first principle, and Olia Lialina's Vernacular Web. But no single predecessor can fully name it — because garden.ooo attempts to simultaneously restore the web's original mesh topology and provide infrastructure for "leaking" and "foolishness."

Seeing it now matters more than later, because it is currently in the state of remainder. garden.ooo is still growing through Hashimoto's own site via dogfooding; the design principles are documented but the implementation continues to advance. It has not yet been formally released to the public. The system's logic has not yet solidified into construct — it is itself still remainder. Once it is named as "a type of tool" and widely adopted, it will become new construct. Right now, while it is still loosening the concept of completion, is when it is most alive.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics