I only wish to discuss with you one possibility: Perhaps seeds of love are present in other places in the universe. We ought to encourage them to sprout and grow.
“That’s a goal worth taking risks for.”
Yes, we can take risks.
“I have a dream that one day brilliant sunlight will illuminate the dark forest.”
(Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest: 552)
In recent years dark forest of the internet has become one of the most written about conceptualisations of the current World Wide Web. The notion captures an almost universal feeling of disenchantment with the virtual spaces we once occupied or called home and explains the changes their successors were forced into implementing. All of these complex dynamics are enclosed in a simple and beautiful metaphor of the dark forest, which has been adapted differently by different researchers and theoreticians. It originates from Liu Cixin’s second novel in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, The Dark Forest, where he outlines the axioms of cosmic sociology, based on the belief that the universe resembles a dark forest. In this forest, every civilization must stay quiet as more technologically advanced civilizations are always lurking, listening and watching very carefully. If one were to bring awareness to their own existence, they would be immediately destroyed – thus every attempt at communication is considered a death sentence.
Jancey Stickler, who first adapted the metaphor to the web, described the shift of internet’s social dynamics from ones of a bowling alley to ones of a dark forest. The internet was once a place that primarily hosted social interactions, you would log on in order to read discussions, share your thoughts and participate in the discourse. Now, in a landscape littered with bots, ads, and trolling, it is wiser not to expose your beliefs or yourself at all. Early adopters of the concept, like Stickler, stuck to the original metaphor; Bogna Konior leaned into Liu’s idea and discussed the entropy of internet communication, while Venkatesh Rao and Maggie Appleton each charted their own topologies, proposing something they called the cozy web as the alternative to the dark forest’s logic.
Through the evolution of the concept, with each internet cosmonaut or explorer adding their own views and ideas, the topology shifted. Now the dark forest is not something we escape from anymore, but something we escape to, it occupied the place the cozy web once held. We can thus define a dark forest as a digital space where users can retreat into, hiding from the threats of the commercial web (clear net), to form their own closed off communities, based on authentic connection. These communities are guarded either by paywalls or function under the rule of invite-only principles, to ensure a safe and comforting place to exchange ideas. These dark forest communities usually take advantage of platforms such as Discord, Slack or Telegram to build their core nesting place, or reside in less conventional spaces such as exclusive newsletters or podcasts.
Marta Ceccarelli’s Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary, first published as INC Network Notion and now available a book title published by Aksioma, ands out as a work that critically examines an already developed concept and masterfully analyses, picks apart and discloses its inner workings. The concept is mature enough that we could already look at the author, Marta Ceccarelli, as a second generation explorer of the forest. If the forest has already been discovered and named, Ceccarelli was one of the first to venture into its depths, get lost in its vastness and return with her own map to draw and stories to tell. The work is thus extremely valuable as both an acknowledgement of research and writing done prior and more importantly a careful and sometimes deeply personal and experiential study of social dynamics that govern the dark forest communities. The author is also the first to show the complex interaction between the clearnet and dark forest communities, seeing that the line between them is often not as clear and explicit as we would like to imagine. While dark forest communities are often rooted in closed off digital spaces, their treetops sometimes reach high into clearnet territory, where they share their cultural production on widespread social media platforms, slowly expanding their reach and sometimes even the number of its dwellers.
The deep vernacular web is slowly dying out. This process is more and more evident by recent events, such as the data breach of 4chan or the existence of large language models that are able to identify users’ alt accounts based on their writing style and language expressions. True online anonymity, the absence of any accounts or personal data that could be traced back to different platforms, is disappearing. That does not mean that the internet vernacular culture has to die along with it, it is merely searching for a new, more distant, less visible ecosystem to thrive in. Ceccarelli’s analysis focuses on the concept of lore – a shared cultural knowledge, collective memory and self-mythologization that acts as both an entry barrier and a driving force of dark forest communities. Lore is both something very real and omnipresent and something very hard to grasp, a mist your typing fingertips can easily slip through. It’s often described by the words “you just had to be there to know” which emphasises one of its core characteristics – it’s fleeting and can only be acquired and kept by endless interaction with niche discourses.
The notion of lore first originated in the deep vernacular web where A-culture and mask culture found a fertile ground to flourish. The combination of anonymity and consequently strong group identity based on language and type of discourse spawned much of the terminology and memes still in circulation. As the deep vernacular web gets more and more toxic, less used and populated, as image boards are dying off left and right, it is easy to feel like it’s becoming irrelevant. Coupling that with the breakdown of its most essential and defining elements such as anonymity, more and more people are seeking refuge in the dark forest communities, now also well versed in their own lore.
Another extremely valuable insight Ceccarelli shares with us is how someone can stumble their way into a dark forest, its paths hidden between the branches in plain sight. The author retells her own story of joining such a community and running a, as she puts it, Multi-admin-estoteric-shitposting-content-aggregating meme page. In her analysis of one of the most important instagram meme page phenomena in recent years, she outlines its ways of subverting clearnet platform physics and establishing its own game rules antithetical to strict algorithmic optimisation and curation. Incellectuals are a movement very well versed in esoteric lore, taking absurdity and inside jokes to the public square of instagram, diabolically laughing at bystanders, not caring if they are being watched or pointed at, as that would maybe even perpetuate the fun they are having.
Once an explorer is accepted into such community, either by interaction with its users, posts or ideas and thus given the key (via for example a discord invite on an instagram story), they first need to learn how to traverse this particular patch of the dark forest, slowly picking up its lore to constitute a common language. After slowly getting acquainted with its customs, the new inhabitant can get more involved in debates and other participatory work. Once deemed worthy, they are granted a passage to the communal platform or make their own in order to grow, expand and show off their work to the digital selves residing in the polished cubicle of the clearnet being pushed and directed by their own feeds.
These communities also employ or show some of the practices we could observe in deep vernacular spaces – residing behind a single spinofflectuals account hides a hyperactive group chat deeply engrossed in their meme producing process. They often troll their own followers by making fun of them in the comments or randomly blocking them on one hand and straight up posting against Instagram’s community guidelines to encourage chaos and accelerate edginess on the other. They also impose clever tactics to circumvent Instagram’s group chat limits such as different incellectuals accounts interacting in the same chat, thus massively boosting the number of people that can communicate at once. This countercultural exploitation of platform physics shows a similar sentiment as the early communities before, proving loudly and clearly that the alternative web is alive and well, just a bit tougher to find and traverse.
Ceccarelli drew us a detailed and expansive map, littered with helpful knowledge about the forest’s twists and turns coupled with colorful drawings of its residents – but these are only the findings of a pioneer expedition. Equipped with her accomplishments, wisdom and field studies we can venture out on our own, find communities that welcome us or even create new ones. If a stomping ground catches your eye, just look for the tracks tucked away under the grass. The recent excitement around dark forests represents a new way to oppose the hegemonic grip of the new web and its algorithmic curation of totality. This means a hope for a different, genuine internet, even if its entryways are hidden in small public parks and reserves in the midst of data highways and social media skyscrapers.
More information how to order the title here: https://aksioma.org/internets-dark-forests.