The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions—initially in Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s freeform noticings that apply science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory of the universe to social media, then in humanist all-arounder Maggie Appleton’s illustrated tech notes. It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the end of the 2010s was widespread among people with meaningful connections between their online personas and their ability to maintain their standard of living. It hit a nerve, especially within some corners of tech-and-society thinking that influence internet makers. It even shows up in a New York Review of Books piece: a coup for something so initially modest.
It’s tedious and a bit unfair to point out that an informal notion that escaped containment is flawed or incomplete, because of course it is. I’m going to do it anyway, because it describes a common set of experiences and reactions to our fraught moment in social technology. And also because analogies are tools to think with, and the tools we think with have weirdly intense shaping effects on what we do and make: see "the tragedy of the commons."
Strickler’s initial formulation, published in 2019, translates a central idea from Liu’s Three Body series into a way of understanding the social internet. Liu’s dark forest theory resolves the Fermi Paradox (which is, roughly, "If the universe is so full of intelligent life, as statistics suggest it must be, where is everyone?") by explaining that all advanced galactic civilizations are locked into a bit of real-life game theory in which the annihilation of any other civilization they encounter is the only correct move. As Liu's characters discover, the universe is a dark forest filled with unstoppable monsters; the only viable strategy is to stay quiet and hide.
For Strickler, the internet was becoming just such a perilous dark forest, stalked by shadowy forces. Or, one sentence later, it was becoming a series of beneficial dark forests that provide refuge for the imperiled. These protective forests included newsletters and podcasts, but also, “Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on.”
I found it difficult to focus on the initial post when it came out—something about its statement that before the 2016 US election, “we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness,” only afterward learning that “the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized as well,” kept making me gap out. But if you press on, there’s the idea that “dark forest” internet spaces serve as refuges because they’re “non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified.” And further, that dark forest spaces grow “because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there.”
Now we're getting somewhere. This focus on places of reputational and psychological safety—which are safer both because of who’s “there” and because the shape of the space hasn’t been tuned for what I’d just call extraction—is an inside-out way of talking about context collapse. Context collapse—communication tuned for one socially distinct group but encountered by another, with uncomfortable and mind-bending and sometimes life-ruining results—emerges from Erving Goffman’s work in the 1950s, as expanded by Joshua Meyrowitz in his No Sense of Place in the 1980s, and which danah boyd began resuscitating and applying to the internet in the early 2000s.
The longer I work in networked spaces, the more convinced I become that increasingly inescapable and seemingly innocuous forms of context collapse in our media and social internet systems secretly explain a shockingly large proportion of every weirding, every derangement, and every rollercoaster terror/joy of the systems we live in online. So no surprise, I think this part of the Dark Internet Forest complex is sharp and important. It also should make everyone working in tech flinch—because, of course, who built all those indexed, optimized, and gamified environments?
Appleton’s follow-on post synthesizes Strickler’s sense of both dangerous and useful dark forests with Venkatesh Rao’s “cozyweb” and sketches an ecosystem that includes the perilous aboveground—the “dark forest of the clear web, inhabited by data scavengers, marketers, & trolls”—and the cozyweb refuge underground. Appleton’s formulation is admirably clear:
The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.
Restructuring the analogy to make the dark forest represent the dangerous and compromised place, rather than the desired refuge, gives Appleton more to work with. The second of her Dark Forest posts is especially good—it extends, without hype or theology, into the coming degradation of the public surfaces of the internet by antisocial actors wielding generative AI and the real paucity of ways to handle the damage those actors inflict, not only on the internet, but on our ability to believe that the people we meet there are real.
For my purposes, the Dark Internet Forest complex is one that uses the forest to contrast the feeling of a psychologically dangerous landscape with the one of spaces of retreat, and which—inescapably, because of its roots in Liu’s heavily philosophical fiction—presents retreat as the only real option. 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 things the internet can do, this is a feeling most of us know—in 2019, I was almost entirely offline myself. Then 2020 happened and rewired my sense of what we can and can't afford to surrender, which is what keeps me circling around these ideas like a dazed shark.
As a description of personal anxieties and of a collective recoiling from extractive and predatory systems, I think the Dark Internet Forest is useful, because it gets us thinking about place. That’s maybe all it was ever meant to be, which is fine. I need something to one side of that, though—something that shares characteristics with thick description and frame analysis. And as a framing of the problems with our networks for people in a position to do something about them, the Dark Internet Forest pushes most of what I care about out of the picture. I want to bring them back.
who got eaten
The Dark Internet Forest focuses on harm to individual well-being and social status—to mental health, to reputation, to productivity. Those harms are real. And whether we’re talking about casual brigading or organized attempts to, for instance, prepare the ground for genocide, the platforms’ extractive structures incentivize the loudest and most damaging behavior both directly and indirectly. But some products of mega-platforms of the social internet are much, much worse than others, and the first and second-order harms they create and incentivize have fallen hardest on those outside the sheltered sphere of US technology production.
First, whatever happens to social media users in the US, it’s much, much worse almost everywhere else. In 2017, Facebook’s years of active damage to the media landscape and startling neglect in the face of increasingly desperate warnings from experts contributed‚ according to the United Nations, to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar. Sophie Zhang’s whistleblower disclosures reveal the extent of Meta’s longstanding failure to prevent its machinery from being used with impunity to power covert influence campaigns and target journalists and opposition parties all over the world—except in the US, Canada, and parts of Western Europe. Some of Frances Haugen’s disclosures touch on this exceptionalism as well: As of a few years ago, more than 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US and Canada, but the company allocated that massive global userbase only 13% of its content moderation resources.
Then there’s what was happening to women on social platforms closer to US tech workers' homes. In 2018, Amnesty International released a report summarizing the misogynist abuse women experienced on Twitter; they followed up with a crowd-powered data analysis which found that women of color were 34% more likely to be sent abusive (and otherwise "problematic") messages than white women, and that Black women specifically were 84% more likely to be sent these messages. As a kicker, Amnesty recently released a report on social media megaplatforms’ removal of abortion-related content “with inadequate or unclear justification” after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the United States.
And despite objections from social media companies and some researchers stating that YouTube’s recommendation systems don’t encourage “rabbit-hole” spirals—or no longer encourage them, at least—a 2021 Wall Street Journal study finds TikTok’s algorithms serving young women content encouraging starvation, a 2021 Media Matters study traces the way TikTok leads the viewers of anti-trans content into a cornucopia of extremist videos, including “misogynistic content, racist and white supremacist content, anti-vaccine videos, antisemitic content, ableist narratives, conspiracy theories, hate symbols, and videos including general calls to violence” and a 2023 Amnesty study shows TikTok’s algorithms dropping proxies for young users into deep wells of suicidal-ideation content. Studies like these absolutely get oversimplified into moral-panic–tinged political grandstanding, but the machinery is still out there, grinding away.
In a framework for thinking about our networks, to leave out the majority of people sustaining real damage is a failure of perception and of proportion. It matters because the remedies available to people like me—a white, tech-ish worker in the US—are not necessarily going to do much for the people bearing the brunt of the mega-platforms’ worst actions.
And speaking of those actions…
who ate them
On one hand, the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platforms themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and feeling into saleable data objects.
On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice and swarms of people looking for ideological opponents to mob, largely as a way of claiming or defending quasi-spatial territory: This is ours, not yours. We don’t do that here.
There are also the industrialized battalions running variously sophisticated ops to make the “public conversation” look like something it isn’t—to accelerate discord, to fake overwhelming support or opposition for an entity or idea, to make a group look stupid or dangerous-and-therefore-worthy-of-extermination, often by pretending to be a member and posting stupid or dangerous things. (I'm linking to old stories, but these campaigns have only revved up, globally, since then.)
If you believe that the shape of the mega-platforms has no bearing on these specific, internet-optimized antisocial behaviors—if you think that’s just how people are—there’s genuinely not much to do about the PvP stuff. You can ban some fake accounts, build teams to look out for particularly successful covert influence campaigns, and give end-users rudimentary safety tools for when the mob turns on them, but beyond that, well. Can’t fix people problems with software.
If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.
But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them. But in the Dark Internet Forest, the mega-platforms and their leaders are missing from the frame except as shadowy super-predators—the equivalent of Liu’s inevitably annihilating aliens.
In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates’ sexual attractiveness; Twitter was a watercooler where bored office workers could get attention by telling jokes in public. It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto.
The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world’s big platforms are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software.
It’s equally important to remember that the patterns we’ve experienced on mega-platforms are not the only way to do networks but the result of specific combinations of under-thinking and malign commercial pressures—and that the currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced. Keeping these basic facts in mind is oddly difficult, because there’s so much money involved, and money is a spell for blurring the truth.
But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn't guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one.
So the necessary counterpart to understanding that the Dark Forest Internet complex obscures the arbitrary and temporary nature of the current situation might be accepting that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bend toward justice when we bend them, and keep on bending them, forever.
I think our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
networking as if people mattered
The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.
On the level of the individual, this is true for certain values of “we”: for people who are, in any sense, established; people who already have the social status they required to succeed in their field; people whose work doesn’t depend on them needing to find (and re-find and re-find) readers or customers; people whose professional and personal networks are already strong enough to catch them if they slip; people with money.
So what about everyone else? Should people without those forms of access and capital simply forgo all the benefits afforded by access to broad networks? Or, alternately, should we expect the new people, the young people, and the less-established people to just hack their way through that forest—which is so much gnarlier now than it was when we built it—to bootstrap their way to a nice bunker of their own? That rhymes, at least, with the patterns of generational disdain toward the people born into financial systems that strip away stabilities (affordable education, affordable housing, retirement funds, seasons with weather) their parents could take for granted, if they were white enough and within spitting range of middle class. The Avocado Toast Theory of the Internet, maybe.
This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a collective one when bad products of the social internet get worse, as when platform turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one. And also when previously good products of the social internet are lost, as when it becomes impossible for people to find sustaining work, learn from one another, or organize responses to the rolling crises in which we live.
Given all of this, it seems questionable for technologists to cede the territory of the public internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the predatory forces they assemble and arm. This was always true, but maybe it's clearer now, as we watch the recreational troll armies and mega-platform leaders and openly supremacist policymakers and the next US presidential administration glop together like a bad special effect. But I would argue that socio-technical systems that invite and facilitate proto-fascist programs of universal surveillance, control, and dehumanization aren't safe in any hands.
The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.
Unfortunately, the business of building systems for civilization is as complicated and as intrinsically political online as it is offline. If retreat seems easier, that’s because it is. But here we are.
what is a forest in a world on fire
Shortly before he died in 2022, the great activist and writer Mike Davis said this to journalist Lois Beckett: “There is so much unmobilized love out there. It’s really moving to see how much.” He was talking about the outpourings of gratitude from people whose lives he'd changed or set on better courses, after they learned he was dying. It's also a central truth of his life, and the way he worked in the world.
Rebecca Solnit has written movingly about the freedom to care that arises during and after disaster, but living through it will rewire you for good. The arbitrary restrictions of normal life fall away. The need for broad connection becomes literally vital: people live or die based on the resources and help they receive or don’t receive. I said what I needed to say about that at XOXO, but this explosive upwelling of care manifests in so many ways, starting with the mutual aid work that emerges overnight like mushrooms in the aftermath of ~natural disasters. But the mushrooms—the fruiting bodies of vast subterranean networks—can only pull off that magic trick because the hyphal infrastructure is already there, invisibly connected, waiting for the moment to emerge.
Collective action requires that we find each other, both beforehand and in the moment, and build human networks resilient enough to withstand every kind of weather. This becomes wickedly hard to do when the public social surfaces of the internet teem with predators—and also when they’re structured by root-level design decisions that make the simplest patterns of communication harder and worse in service of the systems’ underlying anti-human purposes.
We make the human world by experimenting with ways to work together and then connecting those ways: villages and cities, hedge funds and labor unions, global conglomerates and volunteer rural fire departments, nation-states and communities of practice. We move between apartments and schools and sidewalks and shops and parks and airports and we understand, 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 interview for the network governance project I was working on, media and governance scholar Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommending—said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:
I think of tech as a wildfire—it burns really quickly. And we get a lot of wildfires out here, and there's the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it's burnt over, that's when cool things start growing up. They grow much slower, and they find their way through…the burned trees and new life happens. I kind of hope we're entering that phase of social media that we're done with the fast burn. And maybe it had to happen.
What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the end of a world?
forestry for beginners
Here are some things I have come to believe.
Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platforms will survive for long. The people on them will eventually leave—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or because they’re forced to do so because their governments put the hammer down, as Brazil recently demonstrated—or sometimes when they just get tired of platform leaders acting like clowns and boosting troll-agents of openly fascist chaos 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-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance 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 extraction, I don't think any centrally governed platform at global scale is capable of doing the work, even if they hired the best and sharpest people I know.* Even if they put real effort into humanist upstream product design, rather than tossing loose change to trust and safety teams sent in to clean up after the fact.
Local norms matter too much for global governance of the social internet to make sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected. Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.
And most of all: The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)
The obstacles to these life-sustaining internet forests are fundamentally the same forces that threaten the real forests and our whole living world: unbounded extraction; unaccountable leadership; societal refusal to take on the responsibilities of governing our increasingly complex commons, instead of burying them deeper and deeper in pretenses to action.
I no longer think that it's possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks. I find this both terrifying and clarifying.
the burrow and the upper world
In the introduction of his Cosmos & Hearth, the wonderful humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan briefly refers to a passage about Mole’s homecoming in The Wind in the Willows. In that scene, Mole, who has been adventuring broadly with Rat and company, gazes around his home before sleeping:
He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own…
Mole’s contentment at this point, midway through the novel, is quite different from his state at its beginning, which finds him spring-cleaning his cozy, dozy network of tunnels, but struck with a sudden longing for something more. By the middle of the novel, Mole’s experience has opened out to encompass the whole of the wood and countryside and his friendships with Rat, Badger, and the born poster, Mr. Toad, along with his encounters with the book’s few real villains and dangers.
As he slides into sleep, Mole’s beloved Rat is already snoozing across the burrow; his friendship is by far the greatest gift of the world beyond Mole’s comfortable tunnels. In the morning, they will venture out together.
notes
(*) I'd love to be wrong about this, and I have a list of those best and sharpest people you can hire if you're serious—you know where to find me.
I keep coming back to Ucello's Hunt in the Forest because it's such a great, creepy painting—the streamlined deer and hounds, especially, echoing each other so closely it's hard to tell them apart. Most all the human faces are transfixed, staring, shouting or blowing the hunting horn. It's so loud in that moment, but the painting 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 know if I will ever get to see it again.
There's another essay applying Dark Forest theory to the internet that I only encountered much later—Bogna Konior's 2020 essay (alt version in HTML but without the accompanying photos) was commissioned for an exhibition in Slovenia. Konior’s piece engages with Liu's work before leaping into the void-flavored Mark Fisher zone. In its language and logic, Konior’s piece works in a Cronenberg-tinged mode of academic cool—edgy, a little squelchy, heavy on longing and sensation, but only at a distance and within the frame of inevitability. It was still fun to read. Konior doesn't acknowledge prior adaptations of Liu’s theories to the internet; as far as I can tell, the tech scene has ignored her back.
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