While my personal library holds more than a few books about digital media and culture, I still treasure a little cache picked up in the infamously eclectic Community Thrift on Valencia Street in San Francisco, where I lived in the early aughts. Published independently or by small imprints and often written collectively or under pseudonyms about subjects like cybersex and gender, these books capture the experience of the early social Internet in mostly conversational prose. They’re fascinating in their strange specificity and their earnestness — reflective of a seeming desire to legitimize through the act of physical publication what was then a rather nascent thing to do: hang out online.
I imagine a future in which another young person stumbles upon my copy of The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet: How to Create, Live, and Survive on the Internet (2024), a palm-sized paperback time capsule of a compendium edited by writer and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler. A collection of texts produced over five years by a group of authors, the book loosely lays the conceptual groundwork for Strickler’s latest venture: the platform Metalabel, nebulously billed as a “new space to release and collect creative work.” (In a nod to the music industry within which Strickler once worked as a journalist and as the core tenet of the platform, the “release” process allows individual and collectives — artists, authors, musicians, and such — to essentially publish and sell their works online while retaining control over their content and profits.) The book was first launched in July in a limited edition of 777 copies. The telling number holds various soft-sounding religious and spiritual meanings but in the realm of gambling signifies good luck in the form of cold, hard cash.
This is where we find Strickler in the opening salvo from which the book takes its name, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” a text originally sent as a newsletter to a private audience of roughly 500 readers in 2017. In it, he identifies so-called “dark forests” as spaces mostly free from the indexing, optimization, and gamification that governs the Internet writ large. Think podcasts, newsletters, and Slack messages. In these back channels, we can all feel a little more relaxed in what we say and how we say it. Yet in retreating to them from our public X accounts and Instagram grids, we essentially surrender our ability to influence an Internet that simply isn’t going away, Strickler argues, opening up space for his cohort to collectively identify, diagnose, and otherwise memorialize the various idiosyncracies of today’s Internet in a series of widely-ranging texts.
But how can one manifest the Internet with words? Writing about virtual, infinitely shapeshifting spaces is particularly difficult in that one is challenged to articulate a sense of experiencing interactions that feel purely social, but are actually governed by a deeply considered (and now, mostly data-driven) series of design decisions. If the Internet is a place, then the author’s role is, in part, to invite the reader to imagine themselves inhabiting it.
Generally speaking, the authors of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet are fairly presumptive about their imagined audience, which seems to be folks who are as chronically online as they are. The book is packed with ideas and neologisms, some inventive — Venkatesh Rao’s “cozy web,” for example — and others that hold more weight. Yet, while the authors’ collective concern is mostly a sociological or even political one, the texts are often riddled with industry or technical jargon, granular references, and fanciful terminology whose lexicon renders them not only amusingly affected but simply painful to read. Theory doesn’t have to hurt.
Luckily, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet is anchored by Strickler himself. The book ends with another essay of his, the more heavily researched “The Post-Individual,” and texts by several others who grapple with a set of concepts currently percolating in very specific corners of the Internet, academia, and the art world. Many of these ideas — around art, commerce, and social and cultural institutions, in particular — are genuinely exciting.
By the early aughts, the Internet held a certain speculative allure as a space for creative and financial self-determination. By now, art itself has evolved to conform to — and to critique — the platform-driven digital space while our consumer behavior is all but fully defined by the socially-driven apps and payment systems that power our everyday financial transactions. The rarefied world of “the arts” forms its own mysterious and opaque set of socioeconomic microsystems, one where producers, paradoxically, hold the lion’s share of social capital as creators, yet suffer the most where financial returns are concerned. Metalabel’s purpose-built platform feels different by design in its streamlined process, clean look and feel, and frank transparency: The company makes its cut known up front and chances are, it’s a much better deal than what’s on offer at your gallery, label, or publisher. Whatever the currency may be, we all pay to play. Fact!
While much has been said about Strickler’s first venture, Kickstarter, which he co-founded with Perry Chen and Charles Adler and launched in 2009, two clear facts remain: Kickstarter’s economic and cultural impact is indisputable as a company and a platform whose software-meets-sociology ethos, friendly design, and hopeful valorization of the independent creator helped define a version of today’s aggressively upstarting, entirely performative, and yet still utterly precarious “creator economy.”
Moreover though — and critically so where the book is concerned — the Internet of 2009, in all of its bubbly peak global economic-crisis-meets-Web 2.0 possibility, has changed radically in 15 years since, undergoing a tonal shift into a site of deep socio-political foment. Technology itself has evolved, too — enter algorithmic discovery, cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, and generative AI, for clear examples — as well as the public perception of the industries that power it, which has darkened considerably. The vibe online in 2024 is decidedly not a good one.
Joshua Citarella, Caroline Busta, and Lil Internet — all of whom operate at the vanguard of contemporary art and media theory — pick up on this feeling in a series of essays that form the intellectual backbone of the book. I was also struck by Leïth Benkhedda and Nathan Schneider’s conversation in “Proof of Vibes,” as well as Maggie Appleton’s “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI.” What is notable about these future-forward thinkers, all of whom directly engage with so-called “new” or emerging media, is their deep-seated and thoroughly articulated distrust of institutions, including Big Tech. These folks have seen the inside — all have or once had what I call “big jobs” — and they have strong ideas about how to escape it and go beyond.
A generous interpretation of the anthology places Strickler, his cohort, the book, and Metalabel itself at the center of a constantly evolving critical conversation about the role and relevance of the Internet as a site of global cultural production and consumption. This is where the book’s authors clearly wish to stand as longtime participant-observers of a system and a culture that Strickler and his co-founders helped design.
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet captures a sense of the sociocultural zeitgeist around the Internet in 2024. A set of feelings, sensibilities, and tastes that Metalabel is gambling will guide what are, at the end of the day, consumer behaviors. Whether or not the platform truly catches fire as it opens up to the world — as of this writing, anyone can request an invitation — remains to be seen. I’d use it.
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (2024) is published by Metalabel and is available online.
