I started off this year by taking a break from Instagram. Why just Insta and not all social media? That’s a bigger question than it might seem.
I remember back in college when The Facebook first became available to my university. That’s right kids, back then you had to have a .edu address to register a Facebook account and it was slowly rolling out one or two universities at a time. It felt exclusive. It also served a very different purpose than it does now. It was just a way to connect with your immediate friends and maybe friends from High School that had gone to different universities. There was no algorithm. There was no feed! You had to go look at individual profiles to see what people were posting. It was a great way to stay connected with friends and, lets be honest, a good way to stalk your crush. It’s a far cry from what it is now: a service that serves up endless misinformation and AI slop trying to keep you glued to an app and on a treadmill of engagement meanwhile constantly surveilling and sucking up every bit of information about you it can so it can re-sell that to advertisers or whoever the highest bidder might be.
Over the past couple of decades, I’ve noticed science fiction becoming more and more cynical. We’ve always had this in sci-fi, it’s a major component of the entire cyberpunk genre. I grew watching a lot of Star Trek and its utopian vision of the future where we meet alien races and go where no one has gone before. Maybe we had a little first contact war, but eventually we get a United Nations of outer space, cool cultural exchanges, and everyone has their physical needs met.
Contrast this with more recent cynical views of outer space science fiction like The Expanse, Imperial Radch Trilogy, or the Three Body Trilogy. It’s the latter of which that proposed a very interesting counter argument to the Fermi paradox. The Dark Forest theory. The Dark Forest hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As Liu Cixin, the author, states it a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". In this scenario the best way to stay safe is avoid going out in the open.
In the past few years various bloggers have seized upon The Dark Forest theory as a means to talk about the way we’re retreating from the open web, driven by big tech and other corporate monsters, to stay in our little corners of the forest where we are hidden and safe.*
Big platforms care more about monetization than investing in the platform moderation required to protect its users from things like AI slop, disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories, and are opting to sell user generated content to AI companies for training data. We’ve reached a tipping point where the owners of these platforms have far more incentive to extract maximum value out of the users without providing any value back, whatsoever.
An open web held the promise of the utopian vision shared by Star Trek. It was built on open protocols. Now security and privacy are a premium and that’s if you can purchase them at all.
Take Google for example – the introduction of Manifest V3 into Chrome is killing ad blockers while Google is simultaneously removing the requirement that ads sold on its ad network prevent individual device finger printing.**
So if these platforms provide no value AND provide no privacy what incentive do I have to keep using them? Is the occasional funny cat video worth dealing with all the garbage while these platforms monetize me? Or would I be better off retreating to my own corners of the Internet and building more personal communities? For me, the answer to that last question is ‘yes’.
I deleted my Facebook account almost a decade ago. I deleted Twitter a couple of years ago and now I am considering doing the same with Instagram. In their place I’ve joined various Discord servers with friends. I’ve connected with a lot of professional colleagues on LinkedIn. I’ve found great writing and journalism on topics such as sports, video games, and news all on a new platform without an algorithm, BlueSky. All these platforms provide VALUE. That’s not to say some of them still aren’t monetizing me in some ways, but the trade feels a lot more even.
The other upside of these platforms is that I control the content I see. I control the speed of the content. There is no algorithm trying to determine what content will give me the biggest dopamine hit and to keep me engaged long after I should have moved on to more productive uses of my time.
I’ll have more thoughts to share on this topic in the future, but I am going to leave it here for now. How about you? Are you retreating from the Dark Forest of the Internet?
Sources:
*https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/
**https://www.pcworld.com/article/2423294/google-is-killing-one-of-chromes-biggest-ad-blockers.html
**https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/uk_ico_not_happy_with/