Dark forests and the new internet
Last week we spoke remotely at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona. This is the text and slides of our talk.<br>My name is Yancey Strickler. Thank you for having me.<br>Today I'm going to talk about how we and society are changing. In ways that are uncomfortable and ways that are very different from the present.<br>I don't endorse all of these ideas, nor do I think they lead to simplistic or purely positive outcomes. I'm here speaking as a witness, sharing the parts of the picture that I see.<br>There's an unusual feeling in the air. Parts of life feel increasingly scarce. Areas where there used to be soft tissue and durable muscle that held us together, we can feel their absence. It happened slowly, then all at once.<br>We see the ends of the highways. We've reached the parts of the ladder where rungs are missing. A free floating feeling. How long before gravity pulls us down?<br>All of this starts with the internet, of course. Thirteen years ago social media was ascendent. The wide openness of the world felt like freedom.<br>A decade later the consequences came. A society remade around the self-image, gameified and monetized.<br>What happened? We accepted and normalized the potential of infinite scale. We monetized human society. We built a global slot machine — first for our attention, now, through betting, on top of everything.<br>We played along because the cost-benefit seemed worth it. Type the right string of letters on Twitter and end up famous. Make enough videos of yourself and you could do it for a living.<br>I'm a slightly earlier version of this, but not dissimilar. I grew up on a farm in Southwest Virginia, the son of a traveling waterbed salesman and musician, and my mom was a secretary.<br>My first job was as a music critic, writing for Pitchfork and the Village Voice. I started a tiny record label that put out music from bands a group of us saw at shows. I was active in message boards meeting people like me all around the world.<br>Around that time I met Perry Chen and Charles Adler, and we started working on Kickstarter. A way for creative people like us to raise money for projects without going through gatekeepers or middlemen. We wanted the company to stay true to its creative values, and became one of the first Public Benefit Corporations.<br>Since then I've continued to explore new models for supporting creative people and encouraging more collective connection generally. Three books exploring economics, the internet, and creative practices, and several projects supporting the creative ecosystem: The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Artist Corporations, and now DFOS.<br>The period since Kickstarter has been driven by my own emotional experience as I returned to the life of being a writer after stepping down as CEO in 2017. I started a newsletter, a community, doing all of the things to create energy among a group of people. Yet I felt lonely, isolated, and weirdly competitive with people who did things like me. Eventually I had the embarrassing crash out where I had to put the project on hiatus. I didn't have the energy to do it anymore.<br>In May 2019 I sent an email to that newsletter list talking about my increasing reluctance to post online. I connected that feeling to an idea from the Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem series of the Dark Forest. It goes like this:<br>We call our voices out into the universe announcing our presence. Because nothing calls back, we assume we're the only ones here. But think of a dark forest at night. You call out. Nothing calls back. The forest is still. Not because the forest is empty. Because it's full of predators who already know it's not safe.<br>This is what the internet was becoming, I wrote. A dark forest. We had moved away from the main channels and into groupchats, Discords, and private spaces where it felt safe. It wasn't the battleground or dangerous like main had come to feel.<br>This is the dark forest theory of the internet.<br>The email was sent to a tiny list, but it caught on. Venkatesh Rao built on the idea, introducing the idea of the Cozy Web. Maggie Appleton turned it into this amazing graphic. This emotion was something a lot of people were feeling.<br>In the seven years since, the desire to be less seen online has grown. It shows up in the data of people posting less. It can be understood by the idea of antimemetics — or creating things that are designed not to be seen. This was an unthinkable desire back in 2013. Now it makes perfect sense.<br>But people are not going offline. They're becoming less public. More DMs, stories, and groupchats. Fewer posts to main. More lurking in the feed.<br>This is why everything public is an ad and everything private feels real. Every time I tweet something or post on Instagram I'm effectively creating an ad for my work. That's the reason I'm doing it. When I share in private channels, I’m being intimate with people I care about.<br>This weird disconnect becomes more deeply embedded the longer you've...