The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual
“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ‘90s web is gone... The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web... See more
The Post-Individual
The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
Maggie Appleton • The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
The longer I work in networked spaces, the more convinced I become that increasingly inescapable and seemingly innocuous forms of context collapse in our media and social internet systems secretly explain a shockingly large proportion of every weirding, every derangement, and every rollercoaster terror/joy of the systems we live in online. So no su... See more
Erin Kissane • against the dark forest
The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our... See more
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
