Imagining Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Internet
Couple of sample paragraphs from my master thesis & link to full doc
Hello. For the past +/- 8 months (lol) I’ve been working on my master thesis. Culminating at a whopping 91 page document, this thing was a big project to undertake. I decide to share here some bits from the thesis, and even link to the full doc down below ↓↓↓ [check that doc for full references]
Before starting with the sample, I did want to say a couple of things about the writing process. Writing this thesis has been challenging. It has gone through so many shapes, so many iterations, structures, so many different containers for such a leaky and liquid content, none of them which every felt fitting. It made me question wether the more general container of an academic paper, which this master thesis had to be, was fitting at all for such a topic. In many regards I don’t think it is. Academia’s walls are tight and strict even in new fields such as digital culture/subculture studies. But in some sense I still wanted to believe that my ideas had a place in an intellectual space, and could be recognised as valid, interesting and relevant by professors whose work in similar topics I, in some ways, admire. The process made me question my own brain and intelligence a lot. At times in which I could not physically bring myself to write, to type out sensical sentences, to turn blurbed notes into coherent narrative, I wondered wether I had lost my capacity to write as a whole, or at least whether I had lost my capacity to formulate my thoughts in a way pertinent to an academic setting, confirmed by the first assessment & request to resit/rewrite the thesis by the second reader (so fun). I felt as I had lost all creative ability to visualise a story and put it into words. In the end I kept going and it worked out. They hate to see a girl boss winning, but I won :P
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to all the dark forest which I’ve been part of, and to all the dark forest people I’ve “met”;
Thank you to my supervisor and reader for pushing me to actually write something decent;
Thank you to all my friends&family for sticking with me through this mad ting;
1. Introduction
Imagine the internet as a layered ecosystem. At the top, there is the vast sky of the Clearnet, controlled by and organized around the larger corporations. This is the searchable web of search engines and platforms, the mainstream layer where most users remain for their whole journey throughout the internet. Meters below ground sits the parallel network of the Dark Net, protected by encrypted access, and mainly associated with sites for illegal activities. Nestled in-between, hiding in plain sight, one might be able to find another layer: the Dark Forest. When trying to escape the increasingly controlled platform ecosystem, Dark Forests offer temporary place of refuge for the tired internet traveller. Dark Forests promise to be a space for forgiving and depressurised communication, crafting alternatives to the Clearnet’s data extracting practices, algorithmic moderation, and peer scrutiny. Casting long shadows over few, yet fertile corners of the web, these spaces however only make themselves visible to some. Accessible through continued interaction and decoding of a subcultural dialect, Dark Forests are reachable just to the ones who dare to follow the breadcrumbs. In an attempt to conceal their traces and remain in the shadow, the inhabitants of these spaces find ways to enrich seemingly empty symbols with layers of meanings creating new covert forms of communication. The Dark Forest system appears silent or incomprehensible from afar. But once you’re in, there is nothing but noise.
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The communities from this digital scene can be of different sizes and scopes, varying in levels of intended visibility and reach, from niche and private group chats to publicly promoted servers. There’s no map to this space, as it is an everchanging and fluid environment. The dwellers of these spaces are not anchored to one specific place, and while degrees of awareness of other communities might very, there is some overlap between different Forests. Dark Forests are not composed of discrete audiences, but leaky ones. The dynamics of these worlds contribute to a “murky, viscous, zero-gravity dreamscape”[1], a sticky subcultural medium in which communities dynamically grow and exchange materials operating as an open ecosystem. Becoming “leaky and lossy” [2] like oral language, visual and textual forms dynamically seep through the layered web. For the writers of the NM WebDex, this form of vernacular acts as “soft-resistance against processes of systematization and over-determination” of the Clearnet, since “selective obfuscation” allows meaning to take more sheltered pathways[3]. The type of vernacular, or internet dialect, described in the WebDex is what could be called lore, a form of collective memory and self-mythologization which independent researchers Tiger Dingsun and Libby Marrs see as bringing cohesion to digital communities[4].
In this thesis, I will explore the mechanisms that contribute to the formation of the Dark Forest internet. How do Dark Forest construct an alternative internet imaginary? What is the function of this imaginary? And, importantly, what does this imaginary consist of? From my research I find that the imaginary is constructed by enriching digital spaces with subcultural meaning as a way to cope with and momentarily resist technological hegemony and deterministic views of the internet. The Dark Forest/Clearnet imaginary consists of beliefs regarding the mainstream internet and possible subcultural solutions to it. Central to Dark Forests is the cultivation of attitudes antithetical to the Clearnet, as well as the subversive appropriation of already existing digital infrastructures. By crafting media imaginaries and forming parallel literacies, this digital subculture makes space for itself online.
[1] Libby Marrs and Tiger Dingsun, “The Lore Zone: How to Read the Internet,” February 28, 2022, https://otherinter.net/research/lore/how-to-read-the-internet/.
[2] “NM WEBDEX,” para. 4.
[3] “NM WEBDEX,” para. 4.
[4] Libby Marrs and Tiger Dingsun, “The Lore Zone: Introduction: 9999,” December 17, 2021, https://otherinter.net/research/lore/9999/.
3. A partial history of the internet
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3.3. The Self as Platform Ready
Much has changed from the time of nymwars. […] Mainstream platforms now allow a kaleidoscopic self-representation, as users are given more control to manage the visibility of their posts.
One could assume that this expansion of the possibilities of identity presentation online could be connected to profit. As more and more aspects of oneself can be expressed in parallel online without conflict, the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism could become even more accurate. In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton argues that social media companies “supercharged” the ability to calculate targeted micro-demographics, leading to almost an excess of identity[1]. Users' digital profiles “become their personas”[2], intensifying the process of artificial subjectification. Aa platforms pushed and pushed for participation and reproduction of offline selves into a digital version, pieces of data merged into the singular figure of the user, an afterimage into which people began to invest their own identity[3].
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What is taking place is a subjectification for which users form identities revolving around the content presented to them, identifying with a datafied reflection of themselves. Gillespie calls this a “production of calculated publics”[5], describing how the algorithmic construction of audiences shapes the audience’s sense of itself. The self then becomes entangled with online content production and consumption, in a recursive transformation through which online behaviour becomes a form of identity creation and self-presentation. As the internet transformed through platformisation, and as web data became platform ready, so did the self.
Therefore, mainstream social media platforms have advanced and accelerated a constant state of identity performance. On the surface, authenticity is the imperative of social media interaction. In practice, performance is inherent to the presentation of the self online. Arguably the “visual” platform par excellence[6], Instagram can be used to investigate the transformation in online self-presentation. Following a rough periodization, at first, Instagram was the place for #brunch photos and heavily filtered landscape photography. Minimalist feeds were carefully composed to reproduce mundane offline life. After users became more habituated in their use of social media, the late 2010s marked the beginning of the era of the selfie. Encouraged by the launch of the iPhone 4 front-facing camera in June 2010, social media users began looking at their device as a mirror. The new trope for the constantly online millennial was the one of self-absorption, concretised in the digital-first object of the selfie. For Lovink, the deictic selfie gesture is the message, “a repetition that defers to other selfies”[7], making it an image constantly referring to other images and to their digital existence. Content published on Instagram turned from referencing “real” offline life to becoming a feed of images constructed or performed for the online world.
Two events in particular can be used to pin down a change in perception of the online self. Firstly, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections performed online from April to September 2014, and secondly, Kim Kardashian’s Selfish book, a collection of her selfies, published in May 2015. Artist Amalia Ulman used her Instagram page as a site for experimentation with her online image. She began posting mirror selfies, shopping sprees, and plastic surgery interventions, using hashtags and captions contributing to the trope of a vapid Instagram girl. Ulman performed gender and staged a persona through experimentation with what she uploaded on Instagram. These posts were all “fake” in the sense that they did not truthfully represent the irl life of the artist. They were, however “true” in the sense that they referenced narratives already present in the online world, carefully constructing a fully url persona. The work invited to reflect how malleable presentation of the self online could be. At the time of this artistic performance, Ulman’s work was a sharp and unseen challenge to the idea of online personas, as her ability to fool her audience into thinking the change in mode of posting represented a change in her offline personality[8]. Online interaction was not understood as a performance yet.
Kim Kardashian’s selfie book titled Selfish became the quintessential object of the mid 2010s influencer culture. Kim Kardashian was one of the first figures to truly establish herself as famous for the fact of being famous. Her book of digital self-representations marked the beginning of a new phase of self-branding, influencer culture, and construction of online persona. Turning her life, her image, her body into a continuous spectacle, Kim Kardashian is the epitome of online persona production and performance. Her book concretized selfies as the ultimate form of visual self-representation in the age of digital media. The face irreversibly transformed into a site for play and commercialization, a tool for construction of a persona that can be digitalized, marketed, and profited from.
Today, the fictional creation of online personas is the standard, not the exception. As Lovink declares, the ego is no longer considered a work of art[9]. Filters, face swaps, and masks are integrated parts of social media platforms. A fictitious presentation of one's life online the norm. The question: “is this real?” seems to matter less and less. […]
All of these experimentations are bound by the affordances of social media, to which users reconfigure themselves. Internalising participatory subjectivity, art critic and writer Dean Kissick proposes that the self is “key unit of exchange” in the attention economy, an era marked by the transformation of the self into “consumer brands” and “consumer objects”[10]. Clout-chasing, the pursuing of social and monetary value through onliness, inherently entails some form of platform alignment, of making yourself platform ready. However, Kissick argues, we might be witnessing a destruction of this obsession with online performance, seeing traces of the “destruction of identity”[11] both in recent branding strategies of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, but most relevantly in the digital culture embodied in the subcultural spaces I will be analysing in the following chapters.
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[1] Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack, Software Studies (MIT Press, 2016), 9.
[2] Bratton, 9.
[3] Bratton, 261.
[4] Morgan Sung, “The Stark Divide between ‘Straight TikTok’ and ‘Alt TikTok,’” Mashable, June 21, 2020, https://mashable.com/article/alt-tiktok-straight-tiktok-queer-punk/.
[5] Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” 22.
[6] Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image, 2017, 14, http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image.
[7] Lovink, Sad by Design, 101.
[8] Cadence Kinsey, “The Instagram Artist Who Fooled Thousands,” BBC, March 7, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160307-the-instagram-artist-who-fooled-thousands.
[9] Lovink, Sad by Design, 101.
[10] Dean Kissick, “The Downward Spiral: Persona (Part I),” Spike Art Magazine, October 13, 2021, para. 8, https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/dean-kissick-downward-spiral-persona.
[11] Kissick, 12.
5. Into the Lore
The Dark Forest internet is not easy to navigate. While certainly not as technically challenging as entering the Dark Net, the “murkey zero gravity space”[1] of Dark Forests is tactically gatekept by its dwellers. Resisting the Clearnet’s visibility imperative, the communities of this layer of the internet employ a number of practices to remain in the shadow. Paywalls, private newsletters, and private accounts are some of the ways in which content can be protected. Overall, however, subcultural capital is the larger barrier to entry into these spaces. If you do not show affinity to a certain subculture, then you won’t see any of its entries towards the backrooms of Dark Forests. In the following chapter I indicate a possible path to entry, exploring this nongravitational imaginary through the lens of a particular form of subcultural vernacular: lore.
Independent researchers Tiger Dingsun and Libby Marrs theorize that what brings cohesion in spaces such as Dark Forests is lore, a form of collective memory and self-mythologization. The authors are part of Other Internet, a decentralised research organization involved in the study and production of social technology regarding Web 3 communities and Dark Forest spaces. Their essays from The Lore Zone series engage with the folkloric dimensions of digital culture by updating our understanding of how oral cultures have transformed through technology. Such approach indicates a return to early cybertheory which saw cyberspace as a “locus for a primary oral culture and its attendant humanity and sociability in a simultaneously textual environment.”[2]
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[1] Marrs and Dingsun, “The Lore Zone,” February 28, 2022.
[2] Jan Fernback, “Legends on the Net: An Examination of Computer-Mediated Communication as a Locus of Oral Culture,” New Media & Society 5, no. 1 (March 1, 2003): 29, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444803005001902.
5.4. Concluding Remarks: Reading Lore
Since lore is built through collective reading and writing practices, it can be seen as a “networked narrative”[1]. Given the ephemerality of many digital spaces where Dark Forests thrive, visual patterns, sentence structures, sound bites, or any other type of reference is used as a way to recall a collective experience. Shared memory, then allows communities to collectively create and read lore.
Even though mnemonic devices such as memes are used by in-groups for stability, it would be wrong to impose any sort of concrete story onto these objects. To read the internet, one must learn to recognise its patterns, following their breadcrumbs into “hyperlinked, branching rabbit holes of lore”[2]. Specific signals, users, or accounts can be entry points into a rich lexicon, but one must first of all be close to where the language is first created. The authors sustain that proximity is then key to reading these internet spaces, following the lore straight to its rhizomatic origins. No amount of googling or of “knowyourmeme” research will be enough for reading the fragments of lore floating through the internet. Being in the right place at the right time is all it takes to begin to grasp the shapes and sizes of subcultural lore. But most importantly, argue Marrs and Dingsun, is to understand that at its core, there is nothing to get. The essence of many Dark Forest communities is much more often a “vibe”. Any form of interpretation, whether from inside or outside the group, is just one version of lore. The blurry picture and messy empty signifiers are all there is to get.
To read the internet, then, one must not assume or impose linearity. There is no “one path” for the internet[3]. Or more specifically, given the contingent nature of much of the web’s content, there are as many entry points into any networked narrative as there are users. Marrs and Dingsun point out that there is, however, one unique trajectory for each reader. The order and context in which one encounters pieces of lore will contribute to a subjective image of the digital subculture at hand. Marrs and Dingusn claim that our “gestalt-pilled brains”[4] will attempt to impose a pattern, a system to the chaos, a linear genealogy to the signifiers we encounter. However, they argue, this narrative or shape can only be an approximate one, which will act as a mirror of our own personal frame of reference.
While there are as many interpretations or understandings of lore as there are readers of it, in places where the difference amongst narratives is minimal, tight communities can form. Such places are socially rich, with layered communication making each user feel less lonely in their digital journey towards lore literacy. The investment of time and effort into being there in real-time produces online friendships, solidified by the shared ability to read the chaotic language of the internet. These relationships are elaborated through a common language, common histories, and common sensibilities. Such is the power of lore: establishing a narrative out of a fragmented internet. This aspect of mythicization doesn’t escape the communities of Dark Forests, as demonstrated by the meme shown in figure 3. However, sometimes there might be too many “tiny mythologies” to follow. The authors recognise that the speed and contingency of lore formation can make it difficult even for insiders to keep track of the granularities of in-group culture. Then, communities give up on maintaining consensus, deciding to simply embrace the ambiguity and chaos, and “celebrate the collapse of shared understanding, accelerating into our own incomprehensibility” [5].
[1] Marrs and Dingsun, par. 3.
[2] Marrs and Dingsun, “The Lore Zone,” February 28, 2022, par. 5.
[3] “One path for the internet” is a meme shared on Twitter by Dean Kissick which Marrs and Dingsun, following critical reflections by substack blogger Paul (from bible), use as example of how mapping the internet and imposing linearity cannot work
[4] Marrs and Dingsun, par. 18.
[5] Marrs and Dingsun, par. 34.
6. Incellectualising the Clearnet
Accelerating incomprehensibility perhaps best describes the practices of this next case study, the Instagram meme page phenomenon of Incellectuals. In the previous chapter, I investigated the language of Dark Forests. Lore brings to niche communities a form of collective history which gives meaning to fragmented media artefacts. Such form of vernacular offers a way for information to be channelled to specific audiences only. Providing a sheltered pathway for communication, lore allows targeted communication to happen even in the most visible parts of the internet. Such characteristic is important because there are no purely Dark Forest or Clearnet spaces. As explained before, the barrier between the two is permeable, for solid boundaries cannot be placed between leaky digital communities. The two imaginary layers of the web are always in communication, exchanging materials like in an open ecosystem.
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6.6. Concluding Remarks: Clearnetcellectuals
The idea of what a meme is supposed to look like has been expanded to the point of no return. If early meme theory claimed that anything on the internet, no matter how tragic, violent, or seemingly meaningless, had the potential to become a meme, Incellectuals demonstrated that a meme page could itself become a meme. While seemingly accidental, the development of this online scene of multi-admin meme pages points toward the existence of an attitude or sensibility opposed to what one expects on Instagram. The subcultural ethos which seems to run through much of the -cellectuals space is a counter-hegemonic one. While perhaps not always explicitly, the discursive, vernacular, and aesthetic practices of these communities propose an alternative mode of being on the Clearnet antithetical to its expectations. In a constant game of reclamation of space and playful, unserious, meaningless yet necessarily counterhegemonic actions, -cellectuals display critical subjective dispositions and modes of sociality. Anonymity plays a big role in this type of subversive acts. Constantly and collectively experimenting with elements of self-presentation. Such aesthetic and vernacular phenomena demonstrate a new relation to the cult of individualism which seems to be at the centre of the platformised web. In a continuous ironic process of erasure and enhancement, digital subcultures are enacting a redefinition of the self, achieving “ego death through posting”[1].
In an “increasingly hegemonic platform economy”[2], vernacular offers the possibility to sneak through the tightening grip of the Clearnet. Beyond Instagram, looking at other Dark Forest projects one can see how the cultivation of parallel languages and attitudes alone brings a new character to otherwise mainstream spaces. Take Substack, for example. There is nothing inherently subversive or subcultural about the newsletter and blogging service. Yet, subversive and subcultural projects like Angelicism01 enrich the space with new meanings, proposing new imaginary, yet real, desirable vision of the platform. The phenomenon of Incellectuals points to a dire need within the contemporary internet ecosystem to create alternative sheltered pathways leading towards smaller, cosier webs; towards spaces for play away from constant scrutiny, value extraction, algorithmic governance. While esoteric shitposting might not be enough to truly counter the seemingly ever-expanding powers of platforms, it is fun to incellectualise the Clearnet.
[1] Kissick, “The Downward Spiral,” November 10, 2021, para. 22.
[2] de Zeeuw and Tuters, “Teh Internet Is Serious Business,” 214.
7. Discussion
Dark Forests might invite alternative and counter hegemonic modes of being online. However, the perpetual onliness required to keep up with their developments ultimately benefits the platforms which mediate or supplement access to Dark Forests themselves. Lore especially invites a constant interaction with the internet, being logged on at all times so not to miss out on anything. Active Dark Forests communities are like rivers in full flood, and one must be online as much as possible to be part of all of the ever-evolving mythologies. Dark Forests seem to be continuously creating so much noise, visualized in memes such as figure 13, lore being more about the process of collective memory creation than about the granularities of the memories themselves. Establishing common languages and histories for the sake of collectivity demonstrates an unyielding need to feel connected. The machine of Dark Forest is always on, constantly updating its vernacular, memes, references, constantly online, constantly logged in, constantly falling into the trap of interaction set out by platforms.
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The Dark Forest’s modes of negotiation and resistance will always remain partial solutions to the problematics casted by technological hegemony. As a dominating force, the Clearnet will continue to maintain and reproduce mechanisms of dominance over the internet. Subcultures can negotiate this through various means, such as appropriating spaces by marking out territories through gatekeeping, developing their own rituals and mythologies, adopting and rejecting vernaculars and aesthetics. Memes, tropes, and personas culminate in a collective subcultural memory. Yet these will remain mental images of the internet, immaterial and unconcreted solutions to material and concrete concerns posed by the Clearnet. Dark Forests, then, are most effective on a symbolic level. A level which always runs the risk of being appropriated by the mainstream and by the commercialization forces which might want to profit from the trusted networks these communities have established. An example of this risk comes from a marketing strategy predicted in a 2020 column by brand strategist Colin Nagy. He notices that brands see a “business opportunity in making conversations feel more intimate and personalised”, as trusted one-to one interactions and micro-communities of Dark Forests might become the new site of branded content[1]. In a constant process of appropriation and reappropriation of spaces and symbols, how can Dark Forest survive the seemingly ever tightening grip of the Clearnet?
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[1] “Comment: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” Courier, September 4, 2020, https://mailchimp.com/courier/article/comment-dark-theory-internet/.
8. Conclusion
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In my research, I aimed to answer the question of how Dark Forests construct such alternative imaginary, exploring its function and contents. I began the investigation by exploring specific histories of the internet connected to the imaginary at hand. Such analysis concluded that at the origins of the current state of the Clearnet was the need to render the newly privatized internet profitable. Experiments such as AuctionWeb demonstrated that the social nature of the web could generate traction around this new and developing technology. What followed was a process of for which the metaphorical idea of a “platform” began to dominate the internet. With it came new mechanisms of monetization and governance, and as platforms expanded onto the web, users also aligned themselves to their logics.
Accelerating artificial subjectivity, practices of performance are now fully embedded into the platform experience. Their mechanisms supercharge the individual and the data double, creating one single multifaceted content stream subject. Through selfies and filters, the online leaks into the offline, material, and digital elements melting into each other. Over the course of the past years the self has become the ultimate form of monetary value. Finally, as Pierre Omidyar had wanted, everybody is now a consumer and a producer, identity becoming the object sold to the highest bidder. Turning themselves into brands, making their digital and offline self always platform ready, humans are embodying onliness. Users align themselves with the content presented by algorithms, believing that the internet acts as a mirror. However, the image that it presents in this mirror is a fragmented one, a broken screen refracting one’s reflection as shattered data traces. All of the internet is a stage, performances for audiences and algorithms, scripted through casual photo dumps, set on the stage of our feeds, waiting for a double tap applause. Online personas becoming the only currency left for people to accumulate.
This is the Clearnet which Dark Forests aim to propose an alternative to. The axioms which constitute the imaginary are dual, with each Clearnet condition being met by a Dark Forest one. Such conditions regard data extraction and alternative monetization systems, algorithmic and community curation, terms of service and internal moderation, face and mask culture, visibility and sheltered spaces. Together, these elements construct a layered internet imaginary, both of desirable and undesirable futures.
The employment of lore helps Dark Forests elude or reappropriate Clearnet mechanisms. Developing communities through such form of vernacular produces a form of resistance against the deterministic logics of platforms. Returning and renewing forms of oral communication, collective mythologies carve space into the internet’s shadowlands. In a collective process of embracement of the leakiness and intangibility of the internet, connections are forged with who speaks the same subcultural language. Lore is able to create alternative paths for information to travel through, untouched by the mechanisms of platforms. Ultimately, it acts as the glue of for a leaky mediascape, providing a composite narrative from fragmented artefacts.
Similarly, the case study of Incellectuals provides further example of how subversion and reappropriation can win hegemonic space. The meme page phenomenon also contributes to understandings of identity and self-presentation. Through anonymity, masks, collectives, clones, aesthetics, enhancements and erasures, these communities are enacting a new form of separation between the individual and its data double. Even though ego death through posting might not be enough to overthrow the powers of megalithic platforms, it might slowly chip away some of its elements, redefining and reclaiming both individuality and collectivity through such process.
The conditions of the Clearnet which have been often criticized in media theory can be and have been contested from below. There are places on the internet which discursively, vernacularly, or aesthetically counter platform hegemony. The subcultural scene of Dark Forest internet does this by crafting an alternative imaginary. Rather than taking at face value the metaphor of the platform, it proposes another one, actively engaging with wider discourses of media critique. Enriching certain digital spaces with subcultural meaning, developing parallel literacies, cultivating attitudes antithetical to the Clearnet, and subversively appropriating digital infrastructures, Dark Forests build their own digital other-worlds. These, however, are only temporary solutions to the hegemonic hold that platforms appear to have on the internet. Dark Forests run the risk of getting lost in their own isolating and unintelligible noise, as well as of being reabsorbed into the machine of the Clearnet. The spaces will need to constantly reinvent themselves if they want to survive. Still, their efforts remain important starting points to reimagine the internet as a whole. Future investigations could then continue to reflect on the counter hegemonic potential of these communities. However, researchers must be careful not to fully expose these sheltered spaces, elevating their critical dimension while respecting their choice to remaining only partially visible.
Link to full version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dPT6xcR1SgxwF0O4LcLxtZPZJsEcJt9u/view?usp=sharing