Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary - out now 🦦

Network Notion #2 w INC + excerpt + link to get your copy + poster

I’ve been bothering you all for the past weeks with it, but here it finally is! My publication “Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary” is finally out. Wrote this originally as my master's thesis and reworked it for the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) as the second issue of the Network Notion series; this little book is a possible, probable, and personal narration of the Dark Forest scene. I draw on academic new media theory to paint the picture of a commercialized and controlling social internet, moving on to case studies and research coming from the fertile soils of dark forests themselves. All of it is guided by my own personal experience first as a lurker then as a participant, and then as a critical observer of some of these spaces 🤝

Read this if 1) you know what dark forests are 2) you don’t know what dark forests are 3) you ever followed an incellectual meme page 4) you think you know lore 5) you want to see me name drop Kim Kardashian, Amalia Ulman, Dean Kissick, Angelicism01, Dimes Square all in one place 6) you want to make fun of me for bragging about terminally online stuff :o

The book is Free! And distributed/shipped for Free! by the INC. You can order a physical copy or get it as pdf/epub here:

PUBLICATIONS: Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary

I also made a poster. It’s from one of “my favourite memes” which had been circulating at the time of writing and which had followed me around in different forms through time. It gained even more value when I found out the original author was one of the url friends I had made.

~it’s super limited edition ~ and it can be purchased+shipped [both pouch and reg poster version] through Europe [and USA in the next 10 days] - DM me for more info 🕊️

Last week, I had a little get-together in Amsterdam to talk about the publication s/o Amie for hosting, Noah for very spontaneously guiding the convo, Tonya for the not cake-cake.

Thank you to everybody who came and also to all of you who have shown interest! Read and tell me what you think ! DMs are always open :)

As a teaser, here are a couple of excerpts, but I trust you’ll read it cover to back colophon included:

Somewhere along the journey of my online life, I found myself in a Dark Forest. Deviating from my one path for the internet, I entered a foggy shadowland. Looking back at it is not easy, but to treat the good I found there, I must recount the entirety of it. Truthfully, I do not know exactly what led me down the path of Dark Forests. At first, it did not look like a path at all, it was only later that the nebulous online activity I was engaging in revealed itself to be patterned. Only once I had reached my destination, I realized it wasn’t a place at all.

…

Dark Forests do not really exist. What exists, is an internet imaginary captured by the metaphor of a dark forest. An imagined layering of the internet, which divides the web, an intangible and boundless object, into distinct categories. While Dark Forests and the Clearnet do not exist in a definite or material way, they do exist in the sense that they are one version, one view, one imaginary of the internet.

My journey through the Dark Forest was, as it always is, non-linear, rhizomatic, accidental. I had been following a few Dark Forest-y spaces for a while, without ever getting involved. I would listen to their podcasts, see their memes, encounter the various forms of content they produced in different mainstream spaces, but I only ever felt like an observer. These spaces felt ripe with hidden activity and inside jokes, as well as potential for artistic and critical expression. At the time of the global increased onlineness brought by the pandemic, those corners of the internet began to feel much more important.

..

To travel through the Dark Forest space, I had to lose my online self to truly find it again. I had to give up my online persona and build a new one. I had to recognize that what I thought was my real online self wasn’t real at all. I had to drop my name, my picture, my email, my longitudinal data set. I had to adopt a pseudonym, an avi, a parlance. I had to give up on being recognized as one, to give myself into the collective. I had to renounce the urge to tell the Clearnet that I was part of the Dark Forest and I had to renounce the urge to tell the Dark Forest how to find me on the Clearnet. I had to give into the collective mask, but soon enough I felt like I was getting lost.

.

The sprawling environment of specifically the Dark Forests signaled a need for finding community, belonging, organization around subcultural interests. While the internet brought about the possibility of creating hyper-active hyper-niche interest groups, we have to question the extent to which these para/pseudo social conformations are functional communities. Has the community become trivialized? A meme? Defeated and powerless? Have we lost the ability to create these communities offline?