The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

As the Internet became an always-on, mainstream phenomenon, however, it also reverted to the mean. Influencer culture happens at scale. It’s not about finding the bizarre nooks and crannies of weird, but reaching as many people as possible. Hit counts and numbers of followers are all that matter. It is about getting bigger, rather than smaller. Rea... See more

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

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not... See more