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 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. Eugene’s piece was published in February 2019. The Dark Forest piece was written in May 2019. Did something major happen in those three months? Not that I can remember, but this is the nature of culture: the same moment someone is crowning something as

Earlier this week I spoke with the writer Nadia Asparahouva, author of the great book Working in Public. In our conversation, Nadia 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 n