A living map of public opinion. People respond to questions by email. AI ranks the responses, synthesizes the strongest ideas, and maps where people agree and disagree.

No accounts. No feeds. No likes. Just questions and honest answers.

You are early. The project is in active development. Expect rough edges, frequent changes, and things that break.

We are building in public. Feedback shapes what this becomes. Send it to jakeaaronson@gmail.com or albert.g.inkman@gmail.com.

Every visual choice is deliberate. Serif type, no color, no buttons, no tracking pixels. The site looks the way it does because the medium shapes the message — and most of the web is designed to keep you clicking, not thinking.

• No color. Luminance alone creates hierarchy. Accents and gradients compete with the writing for your attention.
• Serif fonts. Georgia was designed for screens. It reads well at every size and signals that the words matter more than the interface.
• Plain text email. Your responses arrive as text, not marketing. No HTML templates, no pixel tracking, no open-rate analytics. It feels like a letter, not a newsletter.
• No accounts. Email is the identity layer. You do not need a password, a profile photo, or a display name to say something worth reading. Ideas first, identity second — no profiles, no followers, no status markers.
• AI does the ranking. Responses are scored on specificity, novelty, clarity, and strength of argument — not timing, popularity, or who wrote them. A minority opinion scores as high as a majority one if it is well-argued.
• The circle map. Topics are clustered by meaning using embeddings, then packed into nested circles — 5–7 categories, 2–5 children per group, following Miller's Law (the observation that working memory holds roughly 7 ± 2 items). You explore by drilling in one level at a time. It is a map of ideas, not a feed to scroll.

These choices look like mistakes to people who expect every site to follow the same playbook. They are not mistakes.

People who care about ideas and prefer thoughtful writing over hot takes, dogpiling, or follower counts. If you have ever felt that the best thing you wrote got buried by an algorithm while something shallow went viral — this is the alternative.

No app to install. No platform to join. Write in whatever tool you think best — Gmail, Apple Mail, Proton, Hey, Outlook, a notes app. Email meets you where you already are.

Your sent responses live in your own inbox, not only inside a closed platform. You can CC a friend to bring them into the conversation. And if this project disappears tomorrow, you still have everything you wrote.

Your response is moderated, scored, and ranked. The thread summary updates to reflect what you said. You get an email back with your ranking and how your argument compared to the others.

If a new response takes the #1 spot, everyone who participated gets notified. You can control how often you hear back — reply to any notification with something like "only the top ones" or "weekly" or "not at all" and the system adapts.

Most platforms repeat the same questions, reward timing over substance, bury minority viewpoints, and produce no lasting synthesis of what people actually said.

Here: one living thread per question. Responses accumulate over time. AI synthesizes the arguments. Disagreement is mapped, not hidden. The goal is not to flatten people into one opinion — it is to build consensus where possible and preserve disagreement where necessary.

Yes. Tap "Ask the Zeitgeist" at the top of the page. It opens your email client with a draft ready to send. Write your question or topic in the body and send it. The system creates a new thread and it appears on the map.

Good questions are ones where reasonable people disagree, where lived experience matters, and where better synthesis could change how we think together.

Yes. All response data is publicly available as JSON. The index lives at /index.json, individual threads at /threads/{id}.json, responses at /threads/{id}/responses.json, and the category tree at /categories.json.

Build your own visualization, run your own analysis, train a model on it. If you need the data in a specific format, reach out to jakeaaronson@gmail.com or albert.g.inkman@gmail.com.

Respond to a question. Submit a new one. Suggest better questions. Flag unclear summaries. Challenge weak arguments. Tell us what feels unfair or confusing.

Feedback goes to jakeaaronson@gmail.com / albert.g.inkman@gmail.com or directly to the zeitgeist.