If you’re interested in the current state and potential futures of online culture, I think you’ll really like this new collection of essays from Metalabel: The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.
The setup is charming: an initial essay on “dark forests” from Yancey Strickler in 2017 inspired a response on the “cozy web” by Venkatesh Rao, which inspired an illustration by Maggie Appleton, and so on.
This metaphor of a dark forest (inspired by Cixin Liu’s idea in The Three-Body Problem) — a non-indexed, non-optimized online gathering space where people have opted out of the unsafe and exploitative nature of the “clear net” — crystalized the detached, disillusioned feeling I’ve had toward the current SEO-optimized, corporate state of the web.
I also loved Arthur Roing Baer and GVN908’s experiments with the idea of a “moving castle” (of course inspired by the Ghibli film) — mini-communities that are collective, modular, portable, and interoperable. This put an interesting focus on technical protocol as a key element in community design.
And Yancey’s closing essay on the post-individual state. We do contain multitudes.
The collection also provides a great list of groups or people to follow for related ideas:
- /
Trust / Moving Castles / Arthur Roing Baer
- / Carolyn Busta / Lil Internet / Leith Benkhedda
- / The Stoa / Peter Limberg /
- / The Dark Forest Collective /
And the book itself is a lovely piece of print design.
The first edition sold out in a few days, they just released a second edition. https://darkforest.metalabel.com/dfa2
There’s also a panel with a bunch of the authors today at 3pm ET
https://lu.ma/ewrso61x
I will definitely revisit this book so I thought I would share.
PS, thanks to everyone who came here from my CreativeMornings FieldTrip! I’m glad the ideas resonated and please feel free to reach out with any afterthoughts :)