Sanctum

I'd like you to imagine a place—a library—softly aglow with lamplit corners, rich with wood paneling, ornate molding, beautiful paintings, and immaculately bound books. The kind of place we don't build anymore—like a relic of a more wondrous age. Now, imagine this place is not a museum, nor a public library, but a club. Think of the Morgan Library in NYC meets SoHo house. Or simply, the University Club. The Century. Except the main feature of this library is not just exclusivity, but singularity. For inside, none of the written words—be it books, magazines, or articles—are online. They have never been online. They have not been emailed; they aren't indexed by Google; no LLM has trained on them. They have been air-gapped from the internet. Deliberately severed.

This place, this hallowed place, is the antithesis of the commodified internet. There are works here that not only evade publication online, or distribution via Amazon, but aren't even known outside its walls. Imagine reading a book that few even know exists. The secret knowledge. That human knowledge, bordering on sacred. Imagine a scene: four people have all recently finished reading a severed book (1), then sit in a plush lounge, discussing what they've read. They sip strong liquor, laugh, debate, and feel alive. What an experience! Unbelievably rich—and human.

As the world floods with increasingly meaningless content, data, and information from people and LLMs, this imagined place calls out to me. If I were going to found it, I'd call it Sanctum. It might even work because scarcity confers status and value, and in a world where information and knowledge is overabundant, this type of scarcity might be extremely valuable. The current glut of content makes information less valuable generally because the average piece of information is both lower quality and less scarce. Endlessly churned online content is default low status.

At the same time we have access to the most high-quality information in history. I can access anything, and everything. Any book from any time—flickering to life on a screen—whatever your heart desires. Yet these curated publications, newsletters, and paid classes that whisper tantalizing wisdom in our ears typically leave us yearning—we keep scrolling, convinced the next page might hold the secret we crave.

But what's missing in your life isn't the right blog post, or the right influencer-promoted curriculum. What’s missing is the real world. Moments where pages rustle under your fingertips—where you exchange knowing smiles and whispered observations in a circle of armchairs, each conversation a gentle reminder of what it means to be alive.

In this restless age, we wander across digital deserts, sipping from a million data streams. It’s intoxicating at first, until we realize how thirsty we remain. The promise of “all knowledge” is a mirage—click again, scroll further, and the oasis recedes. But in a hidden room lined with real pages, we might find the human spark re-ignited. Sanctum stands apart, like a lamplit library in the darkest night, where readers gather to remember what it’s like to truly be alive.

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Notes

(1) I rarely watch TV, but Severance does offer this fascinating conceptual base.