Kissane argues for not ceding the public social Internet predators and having only the privileged exist in Cozy Web space.
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions—initially in Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s freeform noticings that apply science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory of the universe to social media, then in humanist all-arounder Maggie Appleton’s illustrated tech notes Dark Forest and Cozy Web. It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the end of the 2010s was widespread among people with meaningful connections between their online personas and their ability to maintain their standard of living. It hit a nerve, especially within some corners of tech-and-society thinking that influence internet makers. It even shows up in a New York Review of Books piece: a coup for something so initially modest.
One of the confusing points for me is that Dark Forest has ended up being explained in two opposite directions: what is listed below as "beneficial dark forests" is in fact the Cozy Web of permissioned spaces.
For Strickler, the internet was becoming just such a perilous dark forest, stalked by shadowy forces. Or, one sentence later, it was becoming a series of beneficial dark forests that provide refuge for the imperiled. These protective forests included newsletters and podcasts, but also, “Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on.” … here’s the idea that “dark forest” internet spaces serve as refuges because they’re “non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified.” And further, that dark forest spaces grow “because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there.”
So, Kissane's post here would be called "Against the Cozy Web", where the intent here is to push back against Brazilianization of the Internet
In a framework for thinking about our networks, to leave out the majority of people sustaining real damage is a failure of perception and of proportion. It matters because the remedies available to people like me—a white, tech-ish worker in the US—are not necessarily going to do much for the people bearing the brunt of the mega-platforms’ worst actions.
As a call to privileged folks who can build their own Cozy Web, Kissane says that we need to not retreat and leave the long tail of the public open to predation:
The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.