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THE DARK FOREST AND THE COZY WEB

An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web

 * Anthropology
 * Illustrated Notes
 * The Web

Planted almost 4 years agoLast tended over 1 year ago
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The cozy web is
Venkatesh Rao
's term for the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet we have all
retreated to over the last few years.



It's the “high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps,
private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.” The
informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven't
infiltrated yet.

Venkat first proposed the term in one of his Breaking Smart emails on
The Extended Internet Universe
. He builds off Yancey Strickler's companion idea of
the Dark Forest
theory of the web. The “dark forest” is a place that seems eerily quiet and
devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because “night is
when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.”

The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators,
attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal
yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We
hide in the cozy web.

> “These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of
> their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments”
> 
> Yancey Strickler – The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Loving both of these notions, I felt compelled to bring them together into an
illustrated diagram of our current social internet situation.


We create tiny underground burrows of Slack channels, Whatsapp groups, Discord
chats, and Telegram streams that offer shelter and respite from the aggressively
public nature of Facebook, Twitter, and every recruiter looking to connect on
LinkedIn.

It's the digital realm of
Domestic Cozy
Gen-Z vibes. Casual, comfy, and not trying to kick up a fuss.

The cozy web works on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of
text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams", hopefully one day
evolving "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned,
addressable, searchable, interlinked clips" as Venkat puts it.

It's since become a standard part of the Venkat Vocabulary for fellow
Ribbonfarmers and Yaks, and remains one of my favourite
Neologisms
of this year.

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3 BACKLINKS

THE EXPANDING DARK FOREST AND GENERATIVE AI

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

A BRIEF HISTORY & ETHOS OF THE DIGITAL GARDEN

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

SILENT SYNCHRONOUS READING SESSIONS

Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions


MENTIONS AROUND THE WEB


21 Likes and Retweets
Mayamentionedin mr. openai I don't feel so goodFebruary 14, 2023
STEALThis is about kind of techie things, but the real center of this post is
feelings. I can only speak for myself. I’m sharing them because I don’t think
I’m particularly special, so I’m guessing bits of this will sound familiar to
other people like me1. Some of this is still
Mayamentionedin max read validates my opinions on the internet's impact on
culture: thank you max readJanuary 31, 2023
I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, there’s a self-flattering
conventional wisdom about the emptiness or unoriginality of contemporary culture
crudescing among my peers that seems worth resisting, or at least attending to.
Why would or should yuppie parents like us be awa
mordecaiholtz 🤳🔉💻mentionedLink to Maggie's TwitterJanuary 08, 2023
Interesting approach to the internet, Cozy Web vs Dark Forest
Tom ParishmentionedLink to Maggie's TwitterJanuary 05, 2023
A brilliantly written post with a thought provoking illustration. I get it now.
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web. Turns
out I think many of us kinda sorta hide out in our little cozy-web corners.
Show 4 more


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