The complicated of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest materializes from mostly insidery tech skinnyking, but from multiple straightforwardions—initiassociate in Kickbeginer co-establisher Yancey Strickler’s freeestablish noticings that utilize science myth authorr Liu Cixin’s gloomy forest theory of the universe to social media, then in humanist all-arounder Maggie Appleton’s showd tech notices. It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the finish of the 2010s was expansivespread among people with unbenevolentingful uniteions between their online personas and their ability to uphold their standard of living. It hit a nerve, especiassociate wiskinny some corners of tech-and-society skinnyking that sway internet originaters. It even shows up in a New York Rewatch of Books piece: a coup for someskinnyg so initiassociate unassuming.
It’s tedious and a bit ununprejudiced to point out that an directal notion that escaped holdment is imperfect or inend, becaengage of course it is. I’m going to do it anyway, becaengage it depicts a standard set of experiences and reactions to our fraught moment in social technology. And also becaengage analogies are tools to skinnyk with, and the tools we skinnyk with have weirdly fervent shaping effects on what we do and originate: see “the tragedy of the standards.”
Strickler’s initial establishulation, started in 2019, transprocrastinateeds a central idea from Liu’s Three Body series into a way of benevolent the social internet. Liu’s gloomy forest theory resolves the Fermi Paradox (which is, rawly, “If the universe is so filled of acute life, as statistics present it must be, where is everyone?”) by elucidateing that all progressd galactic civilizations are locked into a bit of genuine-life game theory in which the annihilation of any other civilization they encounter is the only right transfer. As Liu’s characters uncover, the universe is a gloomy forest filled with unstoppable monsters; the only viable strategy is to stay hushed and hide.
For Strickler, the internet was becoming fair such a perilous gloomy forest, stalked by shadowy forces. Or, one sentence procrastinateedr, it was becoming a series of advantageous gloomy forests that provide refuge for the imperiled. These protective forests comprised recentsletters and podcasts, but also, “Sconciseage channels, braveial Instagrams, ask-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on.”
I establish it difficult to cgo in on the initial post when it came out—someskinnyg about its statement that before the 2016 US election, “we all inhabitd in rounded filter bubbles of happiness,” only afterward lgeting that “the tools we thought were only life-giving could be firearmized as well,” kept making me gap out. But if you press on, there’s the idea that “gloomy forest” internet spaces serve as refuges becaengage they’re “non-indexed, non-enhanced, and non-gamified.” And further, that gloomy forest spaces lengthen “becaengage they provide psychoreasonable and reputational cover. They permit us to be ourselves becaengage we understand who else is there.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. This cgo in on places of reputational and psychoreasonable protectedty—which are protectedr both becaengage of who’s “there” and becaengage the shape of the space hasn’t been tuned for what I’d fair call pull oution—is an inside-out way of talking about context collapse. Context collapse—communication tuned for one sociassociate contrastent group but encountered by another, with unsootheable and mind-bfinishing and sometimes life-ruining results—materializes from Erving Goffman’s toil in the 1950s, as enbiged by Joshua Meyrowitz in his No Sense of Place in the 1980s, and which danah boyd began resuscitating and utilizeing to the internet in the timely 2000s.
The lengthyer I toil in nettoiled spaces, the more secured I become that increasingly inesvient and seemingly innocuous establishs of context collapse in our media and social internet systems secretly elucidate a surprisingly big proportion of every weirding, every derangement, and every rollercoaster alarm/delight of the systems we inhabit in online. So no surpascfinish, I skinnyk this part of the Dark Internet Forest complicated is acute and convey inant. It also should originate everyone toiling in tech flinch—becaengage, of course, who built all those indexed, enhanced, and gamified environments?
Appleton’s chase-on post synthesizes Strickler’s sense of both hazardous and beneficial gloomy forests with Venkatesh Rao’s “cozyweb” and sketches an ecosystem that comprises the perilous aboveground—the “gloomy forest of the clear web, inhabited by data scavengers, tageters, & trolls”—and the cozyweb refuge underground. Appleton’s establishulation is admirably clear:
The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry swayrs, answer guys, and trolls. It’s unprotected to uncover yourself to them in any genuine way. So we retreat into braveial spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
Restructuring the analogy to originate the gloomy forest reconshort-term the hazardous and agreed place, rather than the desired refuge, donates Appleton more to toil with. The second of her Dark Forest posts is especiassociate excellent—it extfinishs, without hype or theology, into the coming degradation of the uncover surfaces of the internet by unsociable actors wielding generative AI and the genuine paucity of ways to administer the injure those actors cause, not only on the internet, but on our ability to consent that the people we encounter there are genuine.
For my purposes, the Dark Internet Forest complicated is one that engages the forest to contrast the experienceing of a psychoreasonablely hazardous landscape with the one of spaces of retreat, and which—inescapably, becaengage of its roots in Liu’s heavily philosophical myth—conshort-terms retreat as the only genuine selection. Above all, it’s a series of descriptions of anxiety and of awakening to a sense of loss. Even for those of us spared the worst skinnygs the internet can do, this is a experienceing most of us understand—in 2019, I was almost entidepend offline myself. Then 2020 happened and rewired my sense of what we can and can’t afford to surrfinisher, which is what upholds me circling around these ideas appreciate a dazed shark.
As a description of personal anxieties and of a accumulateive recoiling from extrvivacious and take advantage ofative systems, I skinnyk the Dark Internet Forest is beneficial, becaengage it gets us skinnyking about place. That’s maybe all it was ever unbenevolentt to be, which is fine. I necessitate someskinnyg to one side of that, though—someskinnyg that allots characteristics with dense description and structure analysis. And as a framing of the problems with our nettoils for people in a position to do someskinnyg about them, the Dark Internet Forest pushes most of what I attfinish about out of the picture. I want to convey them back.
who got eaten
The Dark Internet Forest cgo ines on harm to individual well-being and social status—to mental health, to reputation, to productivity. Those harms are genuine. And whether we’re talking about casual brigading or orderly trys to, for instance, set the ground for extermination, the platestablishs’ extrvivacious set ups incentivize the boisteroengagest and most damaging behavior both straightforwardly and instraightforwardly. But some products of mega-platestablishs of the social internet are much, much worse than others, and the first and second-order harms they originate and incentivize have descfinishen challengingest on those outside the sheltered sphere of US technology production.
First, wdisappreciatever happens to social media engagers in the US, it’s much, much worse almost everywhere else. In 2017, Facebook’s years of vivacious injure to the media landscape and beginling neglect in the face of increasingly hopeless cautionings from experts donated‚ according to the United Nations, to ethnic spotlesssing and extermination in Myanmar. Sophie Zhang’s whistlebshrink disclobraves uncover the extent of Meta’s lengthystanding flunkure to stop its machinery from being engaged with impunity to power cobvious sway campaigns and concentrate journaenumerates and opposition parties all over the world—except in the US, Canada, and parts of Westrict Europe. Some of Frances Haugen’s disclobraves touch on this exceptionalism as well: As of a confinecessitate years ago, more than 90% of Facebook’s engagers inhabit outside the US and Canada, but the company allotd that massive global engagerbase only 13% of its satisfied moderation resources.
Then there’s what was happening to women on social platestablishs shutr to US tech toilers’ homes. In 2018, Amnesty International freed a inestablish summarizing the misogynist mistreatment women sfinished on Twitter; they chaseed up with a crowd-powered data analysis which establish that women of color were 34% more foreseeed to be sent abusive (and otherrational “problematic”) messages than white women, and that Bconciseage women particularassociate were 84% more foreseeed to be sent these messages. As a booter, Amnesty recently freed a inestablish on social media megaplatestablishs’ removal of abortion-roverdelighted satisfied “with inadequate or unclear fairification” after the obviousurning of Roe vs. Wade in the United States.
And despite objections from social media companies and some researchers stating that YouTube’s recommfinishation systems don’t help “rabbit-hole” spirals—or no lengthyer help them, at least—a 2021 Wall Street Journal study discovers TikTok’s algorithms serving lesser women satisfied encouraging starvation, a 2021 Media Matters study pursues the way TikTok directs the watchers of anti-trans satisfied into a cornucopia of extremist videos, including “discriminatory satisfied, discriminatory and white supremacist satisfied, anti-vaccine videos, antisdisindictic satisfied, intolerant of disabilities narratives, consillicit copying theories, disappreciate symbols, and videos including ambiguous calls to aggression” and a 2023 Amnesty study shows TikTok’s algorithms dropping proxies for lesser engagers into proestablish wells of self-destructive-ideation satisfied. Studies appreciate these absolutely get oversimplified into moral-panic–tinged political magnificentstanding, but the machinery is still out there, grinding away.
In a structuretoil for skinnyking about our nettoils, to depart out the convey inantity of people upholding genuine injure is a flunkure of perception and of proportion. It matters becaengage the remedies useable to people appreciate me—a white, tech-ish toiler in the US—are not necessarily going to do much for the people tolerateing the brunt of the mega-platestablishs’ worst actions.
And speaking of those actions…
who ate them
On one hand, the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platestablishs themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and experienceing into saleable data objects.
On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain terrible-faith readings of other people’s prohibital posts for the juice and stoastys of people watching for ideoreasonable opponents to mob, bigly as a way of claiming or deffinishing quasi-spatial territory: This is ours, not yours. We don’t do that here.
There are also the industrialized battalions running variously enhanced ops to originate the “uncover conversation” watch appreciate someskinnyg it isn’t—to speed up discord, to phony overwhelming help or opposition for an entity or idea, to originate a group watch unreasonable or hazardous-and-therefore-worthy-of-extermination, frequently by pretfinishing to be a member and posting unreasonable or hazardous skinnygs. (I’m joining to ageder stories, but these campaigns have only revved up, globassociate, since then.)
If you consent that the shape of the mega-platestablishs has no tolerateing on these particular, internet-enhanced unsociable behaviors—if you skinnyk that’s fair how people are—there’s reassociate not much to do about the PvP stuff. You can prohibit some phony accounts, originate teams to watch out for particularly accomplished cobvious sway campaigns, and donate finish-engagers ruunreasonableentary protectedty tools for when the mob turns on them, but beyond that, well. Can’t repair people problems with software.
If this truly is the case—if the only way to better our uncover internet is to alter all humans one by one to a state of wonderfuler teachment—then a filled retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.
But it isn’t the case. Becaengage yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unrepairable, but originateing arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that permit a minuscule number of terrible actors to originate destructive empires deffinished by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to reassociate remodel that machinery when its harms first materialize is another choice. Mega-platestablish executives, themselves widespreadly dipshits, who originate these choices, lie about them to rulements and standard people, and refuse to materiassociate alter them. But in the Dark Internet Forest, the mega-platestablishs and their directers are missing from the structure except as shadowy super-predators—the equivalent of Liu’s inevitably annihilating aliens.
In truth, the mega-platestablishs and their pocket-military directer directers fell into their roles bigly by chance and have since tryed to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and ruleance by a handful of US companies built to take advantage of human experienceing for financial get were a rational way to set up the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates’ intimacyual attrvivaciousness; Twitter was a waterchillyer where unreasonabled office toilers could get attention by inestablishing jokes in uncover. It’s as if 3M’s unintentional invention of Post-It notices while flunking to originate space glue landed them a UN veto.
The dangers of the situation are clear and genuine, but it matters that we recall that the world’s huge platestablishs are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gageder-rush-compriseled dorks whose sometimes-well-unbenevolenting engageees are stuck franticassociate LARPing world rulement on inside forum software.
It’s equassociate convey inant to recall that the patterns we’ve sfinished on mega-platestablishs are not the only way to do nettoils but the result of particular combinations of under-skinnyking and malign commercial presbraves—and that the currently climprohibitt systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but lterrible and financial originates that can be brawt to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or fair swapd. Keeping these fundamental facts in mind is oddly difficult, becaengage there’s so much money comprised, and money is a spell for blurring the truth.
But all these platestablishs and joinant dipshits will be swapd, eventuassociate, and what happens next isn’t secured. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at csurrfinisher-global scale; what came after it was straightforward colonial rule. The assumption that “Twitter but decentralized” or “Facebook but uncover-source and federated” will necessarily be excellent—rather than contrastently terrible—is a frail one.
So the essential counterpart to benevolent that the Dark Forest Internet complicated obsremedys the arbitrary and momentary nature of the current situation might be huging that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bfinish toward fairice when we bfinish them, and uphold on bfinishing them, forever.
I skinnyk our flunkure to recall that the mega-platestablishs are fair intentionassociate extrvivacious originates run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a flunkure of accountability, but our flunkure to recall that it doesn’t have to be this way is a flunkure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
nettoiling as if people mattered
The last and most most hazardous frailness of the Dark Internet Forest as a structure is that it positions the wide landscape of uniteion as someskinnyg that “we” can sshow do without—and without which we will indeed experience better and be more efficient.
On the level of the individual, this is genuine for brave cherishs of “we”: for people who are, in any sense, set uped; people who already have the social status they needd to flourish in their field; people whose toil doesn’t depfinish on them necessitateing to discover (and re-discover and re-discover) readers or customers; people whose professional and personal nettoils are already strong enough to catch them if they slip; people with money.
So what about everyone else? Should people without those establishs of access and capital sshow forgo all the profits afforded by access to wide nettoils? Or, alternately, should we foresee the recent people, the lesser people, and the less-set uped people to fair hack their way thraw that forest—which is so much gnarlier now than it was when we built it—to bootstrap their way to a kind bunker of their own? That rhymes, at least, with the patterns of generational disdain toward the people born into financial systems that clear up away stabilities (affordable education, affordable housing, withdrawment funds, seasons with weather) their parents could get for granted, if they were white enough and wiskinny spitting range of middle class. The Avocado Toast Theory of the Internet, maybe.
This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a accumulateive one when terrible products of the social internet get worse, as when platestablish turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one. And also when previously excellent products of the social internet are lost, as when it becomes impossible for people to discover upholding toil, lget from one another, or set up responses to the rolling cascfinishs in which we inhabit.
Given all of this, it seems askable for technologists to cede the territory of the uncover internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the take advantage ofative forces they accumulate and arm. This was always genuine, but maybe it’s clearer now, as we watch the recreational troll armies and mega-platestablish directers and uncoverly supremacist policyoriginaters and the next US plivential administration glop together appreciate a terrible exceptional effect. But I would debate that socio-technical systems that ask and ease proto-fascist programs of universal watching, administer, and dehumanization aren’t protected in any hands.
The uncover social internet is worth summarizeing and ruleing in a way that shows less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve lgeted to be together without finishing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to toil on nettoil problems, the genuine choice isn’t between staying on the misengageland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making protectedr and better places for human sociability and not doing that.
Unfortunately, the business of originateing systems for civilization is as complicated and as intrinsicassociate political online as it is offline. If retreat seems easier, that’s becaengage it is. But here we are.
what is a forest in a world on fire
Shortly before he died in 2022, the wonderful activist and authorr Mike Davis shelp this to journaenumerate Lois Beckett: “There is so much unmobilized adore out there. It’s reassociate moving to see how much.” He was talking about the outpourings of gratitude from people whose inhabits he’d alterd or set on better courses, after they lgeted he was dying. It’s also a central truth of his life, and the way he toiled in the world.
Rebecca Solnit has written movingly about the freedom to attfinish that occurs during and after calamity, but living thraw it will rewire you for excellent. The arbitrary redisjoineions of normal life descfinish away. The necessitate for wide uniteion becomes literassociate vital: people inhabit or die based on the resources and help they get or don’t get. I shelp what I necessitateed to say about that at XOXO, but this device upwelling of attfinish manifests in so many ways, begining with the mutual help toil that materializes overnight appreciate mushrooms in the aftermath of ~organic calamitys. But the mushrooms—the fruiting bodies of immense subterranean nettoils—can only pull off that magic trick becaengage the hyphal infraset up is already there, invisibly unitecessitate, defering for the moment to materialize.
Collective action needs that we discover each other, both beforehand and in the moment, and originate human nettoils robust enough to withstand every benevolent of weather. This becomes wickedly challenging to do when the uncover social surfaces of the internet teem with predators—and also when they’re set upd by root-level summarize decisions that originate the basicst patterns of communication challenginger and worse in service of the systems’ underlying anti-human purposes.
We originate the human world by experimenting with ways to toil together and then uniteing those ways: villages and cities, hedge funds and labor unions, global conglomerates and volunteer country fire departments, nation-states and communities of rehearse. We transfer between apartments and schools and sidewalks and shops and parks and airports and we comprehfinish, for the most part, who is there with us. Given the chance, we’d be moving freely between the surfaces and burrows of the internet, but many of those surfaces are on fire.
Back in the spring of this year, in an interwatch for the nettoil ruleance project I was toiling on, media and ruleance scholar Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommfinishing—shelp someskinnyg that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:
I skinnyk of tech as a savagefire—it burns reassociate rapidly. And we get a lot of savagefires out here, and there’s the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it’s burnt over, that’s when chilly skinnygs begin lengthening up. They lengthen much enumeratelesser, and they discover their way thraw…the burned trees and recent life happens. I benevolent of hope we’re go ining that phase of social media that we’re done with the rapid burn. And maybe it had to happen.
What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the finish of a world?
forestry for beginners
Here are some skinnygs I have come to consent.
Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platestablishs will persist for lengthy. The people on them will eventuassociate depart—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or becaengage they’re forced to do so becaengage their rulements put the hammer down, as Brazil recently showd—or sometimes when they fair get weary of platestablish directers acting appreciate clowns and increaseing troll-agents of uncoverly fascist confusion into power. And that there is therefore not only an opportunity to provide more humane places for those people to go, but a responsibility to do so.
Global mega-platestablishs under capitalism are structurassociate invient of handling the business of civilization: of ruleance, of providing reassociate uncover infraset up, of making knife-edge decisions about the equilibrium of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual interests. But even if they wanted to, even if they pulled off the trick of freeing themselves from the gravitational pull of capital and pull oution, I don’t skinnyk any centrassociate ruleed platestablish at global scale is vient of doing the toil, even if they engaged the best and acuteest people I understand.* Even if they put genuine effort into humanist upstream product summarize, rather than tossing slack alter to think and protectedty teams sent in to spotless up after the fact.
Local norms matter too much for global ruleance of the social internet to originate sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any donaten American techno-culture—corporate or otherrational—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we depart the idea of effective, monolithic, set upetary-scale rulement—benevolent or otherrational—to underbaked science myth. Home rule and genuine resilience both need the existence of many places, many of them at least partiassociate interunitecessitate. Decades down the road, I skinnyk the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complicatedities of ruleing a recent layer of global uncover life, with all the opportunities and dangers it conveys, will be clearly giggleable. I skinnyk it already is.
And most of all: The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but someskinnyg much more appreciate a genuine one: Interunitecessitate from the densely mycelial underground to airy-filtering overstory but also giveing infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered swap and take part. Deeply human in the way that genuine forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither pull outing too much from its component organisms nor pretfinishing that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and unruleed state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a toiling ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for lengthenth and for the lengthy, continuous experiment of evolutionary alter.)
The obstacles to these life-upholding internet forests are fundamenloftyy the same forces that dangeren the genuine forests and our whole living world: unbounded pull oution; unaccountable directership; societal refusal to get on the responsibilities of ruleing our increasingly complicated standards, instead of burying them proestablisher and proestablisher in prenervouss to action.
I no lengthyer skinnyk that it’s possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our flecowardly vulnerability—without unfucking our nettoils. I discover this both terrifying and elucidateing.
the burrow and the upper world
In the introduction of his Cosmos & Hearth, the wonderful humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan inestablishly refers to a passage about Mole’s homecoming in The Wind in the Willows. In that scene, Mole, who has been adventuring widely with Rat and company, gazes around his home before sleeping:
He saw clearly how plain and basic—how skinny, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all unbenevolentt to him, and the exceptional cherish of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to aprohibitdon the recent life and its splfinishid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they giveed him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he krecent he must return to the bigr stage. But it was excellent to skinnyk he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own…
Mole’s satisfiedment at this point, midway thraw the novel, is quite contrastent from his state at its beginning, which discovers him spring-spotlessing his cozy, dozy nettoil of tunnels, but struck with a sudden lengthying for someskinnyg more. By the middle of the novel, Mole’s experience has uncovered out to encompass the whole of the wood and countryside and his frifinishships with Rat, Badger, and the born poster, Mr. Toad, alengthy with his encounters with the book’s confinecessitate genuine villains and dangers.
As he slides into sleep, Mole’s beadored Rat is already snoozing atraverse the burrow; his frifinishship is by far the wonderfulest gift of the world beyond Mole’s sootheable tunnels. In the morning, they will venture out together.
notices
(*) I’d adore to be wrong about this, and I have a enumerate of those best and acuteest people you can engage if you’re solemn—you understand where to discover me.
I uphold coming back to Ucello’s Hunt in the Forest becaengage it’s such a wonderful, creepy coloring—the streamlined deer and hounds, especiassociate, echoing each other so shutly it’s challenging to inestablish them apart. Most all the human faces are transrepaired, staring, shouting or blothriveg the hunting horn. It’s so boisterous in that moment, but the coloring is, of course, perfectly still. The hunt goes back forever. (That horse in the right foreground is about to fuck someone up.) I saw it at the Ashmolean once and I don’t understand if I will ever get to see it aget.
There’s another essay utilizeing Dark Forest theory to the internet that I only encountered much procrastinateedr—Bogna Konior’s 2020 essay (alt version in HTML but without the accompanying pboilingos) was cotransferrlookioned for an showion in Sadorenia. Konior’s piece joins with Liu’s toil before leaping into the void-flavored Mark Fisher zone. In its language and logic, Konior’s piece toils in a Cronenberg-tinged mode of academic chilly—edgy, a little squelchy, burdensome on lengthying and sensation, but only at a distance and wiskinny the structure of inevitability. It was still fun to read. Konior doesn’t acunderstandledge prior alterations of Liu’s theories to the internet; as far as I can inestablish, the tech scene has neglectd her back.
thank you
Huge thanks to the people who’ve signed up to help this site and my toil. You can sign up for free emails or a phelp membership here, but all the research and essays will be useable here for free.
