Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
= "spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments". [1]
Context
Yancey Strickler, in: The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual.
"Earlier this week I spoke with the writer Nadia Asparahouva, author of the great book Working in Public. "In our conversation, Nadia Asparahouva 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 essentially all ambitious people felt compelled to do.
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."
(https://ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-and-the-post-individual)
Description
Yancey Strickler:
"“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
“Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.
“An increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”
(https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-anthology-of-the-internet/)
Discussion
Why the Dark Forest has become a Dead Forest
Venkatesh Rao:
"The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest.
A dark forest is still one forest. Signals travel. Creatures remain connected by the possibility of encounter. Silence is strategic. The Dead Forest begins where the silence becomes irreversible. The inhabitants are no longer choosing not to speak across the public sphere. Increasingly, they cannot speak.
The defining feature of a black hole is not infinite density but the existence of an event horizon: a boundary across which causal influence becomes one-way. Once crossed, no signal returns. Outbound communication is not forbidden or unwise. It is impossible.
A mature cozy community increasingly resembles such an object. Its defining characteristic is not privacy but inaccessible interiority. It possesses an evolving local culture, cadence, trust structure, hierarchy of attention, stock of shared assumptions, repertoire of jokes, vocabulary, and ongoing history that cannot be reconstructed from outside observation. These are not simply hidden facts. They constitute a living dynamical state. To understand them requires inhabiting them. Outsiders may observe artifacts, but they do not share the community’s present.
Crossing into such a community is therefore not simply gaining access to more information. It is crossing into another causal universe.
This is why the metaphor of secrecy has become inadequate. Secrets can be revealed. Documents can leak. Membership lists can become public. Event horizons are different. What lies beyond them is not a collection of hidden documents but a continuing history. The defining loss is not information but contemporaneity. Outsiders no longer participate in the same unfolding present.
This mixed metaphor of an arborescent digital cosmos entering its death-arc phase of evolution immediately clarifies several otherwise puzzling features of the contemporary internet.
The first is the accretion disk. Every black hole is surrounded by a liminal region where matter has not yet fallen across the horizon but is already gravitationally bound to it. This is where enormous amounts of observable activity occur. The accretion disk is the liminal zone.
The modern public internet increasingly consists of such liminal objects.
Books. Conference talks. Substack essays. Open-source repositories. Journalistic profiles. Podcasts. Public talks. Screenshots. Occasional bridges built by individuals who inhabit multiple communities simultaneously. These are not the interior life of cozy communities. They are matter orbiting their boundaries. They remain visible precisely because they have not crossed the horizon. Some eventually escape into the broader public. Some spiral inward and disappear forever. Most spend long periods circling the boundary between publicity and interiority.
A common mistake is to confuse the accretion disk for the black hole itself. Increasingly, the public mistakes public-facing artifacts for communities. But the relationship resembles that between sunlight reflected off an accretion disk and the interior of a black hole. One cannot infer the character of one from the other.
The second feature is what might be called zombie public life.
If the living public has largely collapsed into compact informational objects, why does the public sphere still appear so active? Because visibility has become detached from shared reality.
Politics, celebrity, institutional media, brands, influencers, and platform-native personalities continue to generate immense volumes of public content. But much of this activity no longer serves the historical function of public discourse: creating common knowledge among strangers. Instead, it functions as a perpetual visibility engine. Attention circulates. Narratives recycle. Audiences become increasingly parasocial. Public performance continues while public life gradually disappears.
Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.
The third feature is artificial intelligence.
The emergence of large language models has often been interpreted as the culmination of the public internet. It is almost the opposite.
Black holes are not entirely black. Quantum mechanically, they emit Hawking radiation. This radiation does not consist of messages sent from beyond the event horizon. It is the long thermodynamic aftermath of gravitational collapse itself.
Artificial intelligence increasingly occupies an analogous role: That of a thermalized fossil public.
Its training corpus consists overwhelmingly of the accumulated public internet that existed before blackholification reached its present stage: books, websites, Wikipedia, blogs, forums, public code repositories, digitized archives, public conversations, and institutional documents. Models continuously remix this material into fluent statistical syntheses. They possess extraordinary knowledge of the fossil public.
What they fundamentally lack access to is the living interiority of today’s blackholifying cozyweb.
This is not a temporary engineering limitation. It is a consequence of the causal geometry. The defining conversations of mature communities increasingly occur beyond event horizons inaccessible to public observation. AI therefore becomes the thermalization of the fossil public: the ambient informational glow emitted by a civilization whose most vital conversations have already disappeared into causally disconnected interiors.
This also explains why AI often feels strangely omniscient yet oddly lifeless. It has absorbed the archaeological record of public civilization while remaining largely excluded from its present tense.
This distinction also clarifies the status of genuine leaks. Screenshots from private Discords, leaked Slack logs, internal documents, accidental recordings, whistleblower disclosures—these are not Hawking radiation. They are better understood as fragments of the surrounding black-hole system that never fully crossed the horizon: material lingering in unstable orbit within the accretion disk, occasionally perturbed outward before finally disappearing. They are exceptional precisely because they do not violate the causal integrity of the interior, and can be flexibly narrativized in ways entirely disconnected from the interior narrative. The event horizon remains intact.
Taken together, these three phenomena define the observable universe of the Dead Forest.
First, the thermalized fossil public continuously recirculated by artificial intelligence.
Second, the liminal accretion disks of boundary objects orbiting living communities.
Third, the zombie public whose endless performances preserve visibility while generating progressively less shared reality.
What is conspicuously absent is the thing that once defined the internet itself: a common causal manifold in which strangers could reliably become contemporaries through public communication.
The internet has not become private. It is dying with cosmological grandeur.
The public did not disappear because everyone retreated into private spaces. It disappeared because those spaces underwent gravitational collapse into compact worlds whose interior histories increasingly belong only to themselves. We still observe their radiation. We still see the debris orbiting their boundaries. We still mistake the theater of zombie publicity for public life.
But we no longer inhabit a universe in which the public is the primary medium through which reality is jointly constructed and enacted.
The Dead Forest is what remains after the public has collapsed into black holes.
The Dead Forest did not emerge because a new force entered history. It emerged because the forces that produced the Dark Forest were allowed to operate uninterrupted until they exhausted the geometry of the public sphere itself."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/dead-forest-theory)
More information
- Book: The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.