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Against the Dark Forest

The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.

Context collapse—communication tuned for one socially distinct group but encountered by another, with uncomfortable and mind-bending and sometimes life-ruining results—emerges from Erving Goffman’s work in the 1950s, as expanded by Joshua Meyrowitz in his No Sense of Place in the 1980s, and which danah boyd began resuscitating and applying to the internet in the early 2000s. In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. It’s equally important to remember that the patterns we’ve experienced on mega-platforms are not the only way to do networks but the result of specific combinations of under-thinking and malign commercial pressures—and that the currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced.

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