instead of seeking to maximize status — which some of us still do — more of us find ourselves seeking safety and context online instead.

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something... See more

Nadia described the Dark Forest as representing the next era of the internet — where we are now. Where instead of seeking to maximize status — which some of us still do — more of us find ourselves seeking safety and context online instead.

In recent years we’ve gotten tied up in this infantile vision of “the metaverse” where we port over our physical embodiments onto screens. It’s a vision based on a 20th century imagination of what computers would do.

What’s actually happening is even more incredible: the internet is a mesa verse. It’s concerned with what’s within ( mesa = ~within).... See more

What’s actually happening is even more incredible: the internet is a mesa verse. It’s concerned with what’s within ( mesa = ~within). The internet isn’t meant to give a graphical representation to our bodies. The internet is what allows what’s inside — our minds, our souls, our many selves — to interact with the insides of others.