Shining a light on the Dark Forest theory of the internet
In Against the Dark Forest internet writer and thinker Erin Kissane (who has just been killing it recently) re-assesses then challenges the notions of the Dark Forest (and by association the Cozy Web). People in my corner of the internet will already be familiar with the writing of Yancy Strickler, Maggie Appleton and Venkatesh Rao, all cited in the piece.
Figure: Maggie Appleton’s now famous illustration of the layers of the web.
Kissane’s piece is long but worth it. A couple of choice quotes:
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
She points out “we all can’t be Buddhas.”
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.
Nice provocation.
our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
PREACH! As David Graeber said: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
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
Yes, we do need to build local communities of mutual aid and respect, take care of our neighbours, etc, but we should not disconnect completely from the larger context.
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.
This. People have heard struggling with how I can fight the climate crisis: I am not the engineer that can invent the revolutionary carbon capture or universal solar battery. My skills and experience are on the internet. However, the climate crisis is the biggest coordination problem known to humankind, and the internet is the best global coordination mechanism we have. So I have doubled down by dedicating myself to make the Internet global, free and open — that is how I personally can fight the climate crisis.
Anyways, this is the kind of writing that energies me and so many people around me to just DO something. Go read the piece, then let’s do something!