Dark Forests and the new internet

The text of a talk I gave remotely for the Sonar Festival in Barcelona this morning.

My name is Yancey Strickler. Thank you for having me.

Today I'm going to talk about ways we and society are both changing. In ways that are uncomfortable and ways that are very different from the present.

I don't endorse all of these ideas, nor do I think they lead to simplistic outcomes. I am here speaking as a witness, sharing the parts of the picture that I see.

There's an unusual feeling in the air these days. 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.

We see the ends of the highways. The part of the ladder where the rungs are missing. A free floating feeling right now, but how long before the gravity pulls us down?

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.

A decade later the consequences came. A society remade around the self-image, gameified and monetized.

So what happened? We accepted and normalized the potential of infinite scale. We monetized human society. We built a global slot machine — first for attention, now through betting, on and for everything.

We played along because the cost-benefit seemed worth it. Type the right string of letters on Twitter each day and end up famous. Make enough videos of yourself and you could do it for a living.

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.

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.

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.

Since then I've continued to explore new models and ideas for supporting creative people specifically, and more collective connection in general. Three books exploring economics, the internet, and creative practices. And starting projects to support the creative ecosystem. The Creative Independent. Metalabel. Artist Corporations. And now DFOS.

This period since Kickstarter was 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, and was doing all of the things to create energy among a group of people. Yet I felt lonely and isolated, and also weirdly competitive with other 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 anything more.

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:

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. But not because the forest is empty. Because it's full of predators who already know it's not safe.

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.

This is the dark forest theory of the internet.

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.

In the seven years since, this 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.

But people are not going offline. They're just becoming less public. More DMs and stories. More groupchats. Fewer posts to main. More and more lurking within the feed.

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 honest with people I care about.

This weird disconnect is deeply embedded in younger generations. They feel more themselves online where it's easier to see from behind the screen, to keep your identities separate, to be in control.

This is the energetic force pushing people into more private spaces. The public ones feel hostile and algorithmically oppositional. Everything on there is an ad anyway, and that's not how you actually want to show up. The rewards for being seen seem dubious. Do you really want more scrutiny? Do you actually want more time and reason to be on your phone?

This is where you might expect me to say go touch grass, be analog only, burn it all to the ground. Earlier versions of me have said that. Part of me still wants that. But time does not reverse. We can not go back. The people being born now will come up in this new normal. It is a disservice and unrealistic to design futures in which we imagine these technologies and dynamics do not exist.

But it's also important to call out what's no longer working for us. The public internet as we know it today is cooked. Increasingly de-humanized. Economically antagonistic. Socially corrosive.

But people aren't spending less time on screens. They're just spending more of it in private spaces. The public internet is the past. The private internet is the future.

The private internet right now is scattered across tools. Groupchats. Google Docs. Disconnected. Things meant for other purposes.

What we're building instead is an operating system for shared private internets. It's called DFOS, or Dark Forest Operating System. A networked universe of shared desktops for groups of people to create, collaborate, and conspire together.

We built it as an operating system, where every space is different. Edit your desktop to install new apps, like a groupchat, a private image feed, videos, a shared treasury for money, and more.

Every space looks and operates differently based on how the Space Runner designed it. DFOS has been open for a month. It's being used by bands, record labels, creative communities, small teams, design studios, and hundreds more creative squads.

We've also learned from the past, including our own history building as Metalabel. We intentionally designed DFOS as a collective operating system where we and others can publish apps that expand what people can do together. It's also built on top of an underlying protocol that protects people who use it from the enshittification that always happens.

The DFOS Protocol that powers our world uses an underlying architecture of decentralized identifiers, an open, interoperable system that Blue Sky uses. But our protocol uses that structure to create portable private data that's always yours, and can be verified beyond our servers and even offline. A world where you always have control over your work, not us.

In DFOS everything is private by default. These are spaces that will not be indexed by Google, and can protect what's inside from unwanted eyes. In a world where everything is training data, the importance of the creative community to be even more thoughtful and diligent about what we let into the light only increases.

This moment is a divorce. A divorce from one way of seeing the world into another. The assumptions of infinite scale of web 2.0 led inevitably to the extremities we see today, of content as slop, everything extractive.

The private web enters as a counterbalance. A new online universe where we decide how we are seen. Where we hold our data by default. Where care and safety are assumed and preserved, rather than constantly under threat.

The emergence of this schism will create a different relationship to the public internet. I can imagine a world where connecting to the public web is an explicit step we have to take, like connecting with a modem used to be. It will be the only way to know we are truly safe.

This world is neither a utopia or a distopia. As Josh Citarella and I discussed in the last season of New Creative Era, the podcast we do together. We explored and debated what purpose dark forests serve, and what it means when Signal is used by the White House to plot attacks on Yemen. Has all of power moved to the vape-filled rooms of the groupchat? What happens if it does?

Even though they may be used by ideological opponents, these spaces are important.

There's a great book written by James C Scott, author of Seeing Like a State, that explores how oppressed people and cultures survive domination. What he finds is they do this through the hidden transcript. The truths everyone knows are true, but can only be shared privately. It's through these private connections where more sensitive material is shared that countercultures and challenges to the dominant culture later emerge in public. Not in any one political direction, but all directions.

It's wise to ask whether a life of dark forests is a removal of civic responsibility.

Adam Curtis argues in the Century of the Self that the left's retreat into self help and yoga ultimately ceded the floor to the right, and set the stage for the '80s and everything since.

We should not let go of our public space. We should not become digital homesteaders. There is still a wider culture and society to be defined and argued over, in which it is important to participate.

But it could also be the case that these private online spaces, which have more in common with the world before the internet than the infinite scale we're used to, will be the biodiverse islands where new cultures, ideas, and ways of coming together are created and spread. Not just in ways that agree with my own personal politics.

My hope is a world where we feel safe to be ourselves online. Where the promise of connection, thriving subcultures, new ways of thinking, and coming together and becoming bigger than just a collection of individuals — things that we all naturally have as a species — are more central to our lives. Not just online. In all areas of life.

Isn't that the thing we're all searching for?

This is a breaking point. But breaking doesn't mean broken. This isn't the end. This is the beginning.

Thank you.