I don't. That would be idiocy - it's just a website after all. I have come to love some of the friends Ive made through E2, but frankly that could have been the case if I’d happened to join a gardening club, so I don’t give the database any special credit for that.

But I am passionate about E2, about its ethos and its survival. I'm passionately against diluting the powerful simplicity of it, and even more passionately dedicated to encouraging its growth and proliferation – though without compromising any of the commitment to quality and rigour that it embodies.

We're living through the epoch of the subjective. Existentialism and relativism got drunk sometime in the seventies, fell into bed together and spawned a deformed, maleficent, destructive monstrosity that bedevils education, public debate and personal intellectual intercourse: the devourer of opinion. In today’s intellectual environment, any argument that is not based on either a) so called verifiable fact or b) deeply held personal feelings is not a viable starting point for a debate. Disputes and disagreements quickly degenerate into quibbles about methodology or slinging matches between instances of anecdotal personal experience.

The cumulative damage to society is incalculable; without a solid basis of opinion and ideology there is no fertile ground for the sort of viable philosophical work that can give rise to a John Stuart Mill, a Thomas Paine or a Karl Marx – practical philosophers engaged in finding ideological solutions to everyday human dilemmas. The retreat of 20th century philosophy into the highly formal academic sphere and its capitulation to the superficially compelling methodology of the sciences has left the West ideologically rudderless for the past 30 to 50 years, a directionless depredation that is beginning to make itself felt more and more in everyday pressures like infrastructure, education, healthcare and of course foreign policy and the environment.

Alone in the midst of the highly subjective and the pretentiously “objective” manifestations of Web 2.0, Everything2 stands out as a haven for opinion, thought, debate (real debate – not flame wars and slinging matches, but the making of consecutive but independent arguments that is so important to dialectics) and ideology. As such I see it not only as a source of unending pleasure thanks to the beauty and inventiveness of so much of the writing, but as an important intellectual bulwark against the anti-Enlightenment forces threatening us with a second Dark Age.