Seven years in the forest

Seven years ago this month, I sent this list an essay about how I felt increasingly reluctant to be my real self online. I and many others, I wrote, were retreating from public view into the dark forest — a phrase borrowed from Cixin Liu’s novel, where civilizations stay silent because being seen is dangerous. 

“The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” was a way of understanding how the feeling of the internet was changing. As each of us rationally responded to more aggressive online spaces, we began to migrate to group chats, private feeds, and invite-only spaces. An innocence and camaraderie had been lost. 

Seven years later, this has become a dominant pattern of online life. We show up and collaborate in private spaces. We lurk or perform in public ones. This in-between is where most of us stay. 

Everything public is an ad. Everything private feels more real.

The Dark Forest essay put a phrase to these emotions. A new project we’re introducing today puts an architecture to it. It’s called the Dark Forest Operating System, or DFOS (pronounced dee-foss).

DFOS is a new platform for building your own internets. A shared desktop of apps, files, folders, and ways to talk, publish, and earn together. All of it running on an open protocol that guarantees your identity and data will always be yours. 

We call this first version of DFOS “Hacienda” after the mythical place in a Situationist manifesto where all the right conversations used to happen. But, the author writes, “Now that’s all gone. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.”

DFOS R.01: Hacienda is our first public beta. More than fifty founding spaces are launching with us. A few examples:

This is the space for the podcast I do with Josh Citarella. Almost 2,000 people are here. We’ve made AMAs, memes, and there are book clubs and sub-communities.

This is a space called clear.txt, which a group of developers started. They even did a wheatpaste campaign for their space all around NYC while we were in private beta. It’s both a dev community and a kind of group publication.

This is a space I made for my own work. It’s like browsing the desktop of my computer. A different way of expressing who I am, and for someone else to experience my work.

DFOS makes me excited to be myself online again. It’s not about filling a feed or getting likes. A simpler, more truthful kind of expression. It feels like discovering the internet all over again.

Four of us built this: Brandon Valosek, Ilya Yudanov, Lena Imamura, and myself. It’s one of the strongest teams and most ambitious projects I've ever been part of. Grateful to be working together.

The dark forest isn’t a retreat or a permanent condition. It’s the breeding ground for something new.

See you in the forest.

---

If this resonates, please tell people about it.