Trying, failing, and trying again to build earnest intellectual fellowship

In May 2026, I tried to start up a little online enclave where people with various political, religious, and philosophical inclinations could share and discuss ideas. Obviously, this was a response to the internet being polluted by LLMs, yes, but also to the persistent and worsening problem of too much low-quality information being distributed at hyper-speed and hyper-volume, which is very often presented in absolute terms. Nuance is hard to come by, everybody is pissed, and it feels like 80% of what is on my computer screen is either wholly AI-generated or heavily AI-modulated. Even people whose thoughts I typically appreciate and respect and whom I believe to have brilliant, original ideas increasingly sanitize their thinking/writing with LLMs. We are bulldozing the fecund rainforest of human ingenuity! It’s sad as hell. Anyway, as a result of all that, for about ~4 months, the ~15 people part of this group sent each other articles and wrote long, deeply considered meditations on…