Growing Pains of Starting a Secret Society
At 4am most mornings I go onto my sun porch in the dark and I watch the deep navy sky slowly blanch in degrees until 6 am or so, when it turns pale white. I listen to jazz and I drink coffee and I go on Hacker News or MIT Press and hunt for something intellectually stimulating. If I read something and sense it was even AI-assisted, I close the browser tab and I look for something else somewhere else. Lately, on HN, this happens more and more. It's ok. It's no one's fault in particular, except the obvious suspects, who are realistically beyond reproach according to the predominant capital-above-all value system, and certainly beyond consequence.
Yesterday I read a poem by this kid who went to school with my little sister. It was about a coal miner. It was very beautiful. He'd printed it out in bold Courier into a little booklet and he'd handed it out to his friends at a basement party. Reading it, I felt good, and like things don't have to be the way we think they have to be.
Anyway, on the internet in the very early mornings, I feel depressed.
I'm looking for community and singular perspectives. I want to know the personal universe of another delightfully un-optimized human being fumbling their way through the incredibly inefficient process of gradient descent as it expresses itself on a biological substrate. But I can rarely find this.
So last Thursday, I started a Secret Society.
Starting my secret society
I emailed a bunch of random friends from different parts of my life: a couple college friends, a bunch of ex-work colleagues, some friends of friends, and a couple people whose number I'd never gotten, but whom I was able to track down on LinkedIn (lol).
I excluded from my list a number of friends who I feel would've been a great fit, but who are especially busy or accomodating. I didn't want anyone to feel any kind of pressure to join an extracurricular like this, which requires higher-than-normal commitment for something you won't get paid to do.
I asked the group I'd selected if they'd like to join a secret society. About 15 of the people I contacted expressed some interest.
The vectors for collaboration and connection include a closed channel for asynchronous communication and artifact sharing (Discord), bimonthly virtual meetings (designed as Harkness tables - no more than 10-12 people per 'Google Meet link'), and weekend retreats every 6 months (the group I invited is distributed and I think IRL community is extremely important).
The basic creed of the group is as follows:
"[Redacted] is a secret, closed organization designed to foster intellectual exploration, philosophical, ethical, and civic debate, tolerance for nuance and disagreement, creativity, imagination, social enrichment, and rigorous interior examination.
It is intended to be our defense against a culture increasingly absorbed by passive consumption, intellectual laziness, irrational ideological extremism, polarization, discomfort intolerance, and overall Wall-E-ificiation.
Consider this a boxing club, but for critical and creative thinking.
If we take this work seriously, we will not only have an enduring competitive advantage in our working and creative lives, but also a sense of fulfillment in knowing we are preserving our inviolable ability to reason, imagine, reconcile, wonder, argue, create, persuade, and, most importantly, learn.
This group is much more than a book club or a writer's group. It's more like AA, the Free Masons, fight club, or church. It demands investment (in our case, a time investment), and a fervent commitment to a shared value system. In joining, you are promising to be accountable to the group, and to prioritize the health of the group over other minor discomforts, like ego or convenience.
Ours is a sacred mission. It's a fundamentally humanitarian mission. We aren't luddites, and we aren't opposed to new technologies; rather, we are committed to preserving what makes our own lives fulfilling. New technologies and a fortified human spirit can and must coexist. Now, largely because of AI/LLMs/hyperconvenience, it will take concerted, deliberate work to build toward a fortified human spirit, just like it takes concerted, deliberate work to develop transformative technologies."
I emailed this to everyone on my list, along with a set of 'commandments' and a design for the structure/commitment level/expectations of participation.
Then I started a Discord, where I hoped we could all start interacting and sharing things. Articles/news/lectures/music/topics for debate, etc. Anything interesting.
Most people I sent the document to never opened it or declined to participate at this time. That is totally reasonable. The commitment I 'required' for participation (since lurkers can kill communities of this size, causing everyone to hang back) was a bit high for a group comprising mostly people in their early 30s, most with long-term partners, some with children, all with relatively demanding jobs.
24 hours later, only 1 person has joined the Discord. He hasn't said anything. It's just me talking to myself so far (mostly outlining some administrative stuff.)
I am definitely being impatient. I'm an extremely impatient person, and I often get completely absorbed and one-track-minded when I'm onto a new project. Still, it seems to me collaborative projects like these, which offer no incentive to participants but an intrinsic one, must survive on their own momentum, and that momentum often peaks early.
It's been about 5 days since I started this community. My expectations are certainly high, but I can already sense this is going to be much harder than I thought. The lack of sustained interest over the past 5 days apart from 'this seems cool' doesn't bode well IMO. I could easily be wrong and would be happy to be proven wrong, but I have a feeling I'm going about this fundamentally wrong and therefore am destined to fail.
Below are, in my mind, the primary obstacles I'll face:
- It is possible no one cares about this as much as me. It was my idea and I felt the pain most 'acutely', so motivation to participate and keep this thing afloat is likely highest for me. This is typical if you're the driver of an initiative, but I suspect the gulf between me and the person with the next-highest level of interest in the group is exceedingly wide. That is probably bad.
- I'm solving a problem no one asked me to solve. None of the people I invited has ever expressed to me any kind of dissatisfaction with the state of the internet or internet-related discourse. None of them expressed a desire to find outlets for intellectual play or exercise. When I presented my idea to them, they thought it was a good idea, but that's different than expressing relief at a much-needed solution to a clear pain.
- Participants now are selected based on their relationship with me vs. desire for a group like this. This is the likely cause of all my issues.
That said, I do think there's a possibility the group I've assembled eventually will feel compelled to actively participate. If anyone else winds up joining the Discord, I'll drop in a prompt for discussion. This discussion prompt should be used as a vehicle for slow thinking and carefully considered writing that demands cognitive endurance. The group is about 'intellectual exercise', after all.
We'll see if this works. Will report back. If nothing else, building this secret society in public (lol) and reasoning/writing about my experience will give me a chance to keep my own brain from atrophying in the age of LLMs.