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More Real Than Life | Gabriel Winslow-Yost | The New York Review of Books

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What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, besieged by “the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors,” people are retreating to safer regions: “newsletters and podcasts…Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on.” There, in the shadows, under “psychological and reputational cover,” we are safe again to “be ourselves.” Strickler’s account seems more accurate by the month. But his central metaphor is slippery: the “dark forest” is at first the public Internet, which gets quieter as users go into hiding. Within a few paragraphs, however, those hiding places become “dark forests” as well, as if users are fleeing from forest to forest, or finding new ones h

Visit us on Facebook! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Twitter! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet," by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, besieged by "the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors," people are retreating to sa

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