There’s a theory out there now called the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. In a nutshell, it suggests that many discussions that previously took place on the public internet are now taking place in hidden, guarded corners of the web. This, the story goes, is a response to the waves of attention and exploitation that flow across social media on a daily basis.
If you want to discuss difficult or controversial topics, or if you need time to develop an idea before it’s ready for public consumption, or if you just want to build a more engaged and loyal community around an interest or activity, then you might well decide to turn your back on the mass audiences and dodgy practices of the social platforms, and choose instead a more closed-off, controllable space in which to grow your idea and its community. This could be as simple as a group chat on WhatsApp, or a Discord server, or something else entirely. Somewhere you can really speak your mind, without fear of being tracked, or bullied, or inviting unwanted attention.
“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviours,” wrote Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler in 2019, “we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.” Strickler’s blog post is perhaps the root of the theory, but it has had many advancements and evolutions since.
Researcher and programmer Nadia Asparouhova, who once wrote a book called Working In Public about the pressures of maintaining open-source technology, has just written another, called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. (It is being published through Strickler’s Metalabel operation.) The books together suggest a vibe shift in progress: a dawning recognition that scale and openness are not always unalloyed goods, and that exposing something to the light too early may in fact stall its growth, force it to mutate, or kill it. Maybe the strongest ideas – the most compelling, the most consequential – are those that will resist the kind of rapid online spread that so energised the social media era.
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There are political ramifications for this shift which I don’t have space to go into here. (I will say only: the classic opponent of democracy is oligarchy. Right now we are living through the most active battle between these two forms of thinking in recent history.) The question on my mind today is how the swing of this pendulum will effect what I do, as a writer, editor, and publisher. I want to think a little about what this vibe shift means for writing, and for the media.
I started Fallow Media in 2015, when the Buzzfeed listicle was at its peak, when everyone was supposed to pivot to video because Facebook said so. Just before the full revelations of Cambridge Analytica, before Trump and Brexit and the panic that followed. The goal was simply to use the internet for what it’s good for: cost-effective publishing of multimedia narratives. I wanted to combine the literary quality of existing journals like The Stinging Fly or The White Review, with the kind of compelling design and interactivity I was seeing at The New York Times, ProPublica and elsewhere. (This was somewhat ambitious given I had only the vaguest notion of how to code.)
Why use repetitive templates when you can design everything from scratch? Why track users when you’re not selling ads? Why chase scale and immediacy when you can craft unique experiences that reward time and focus? This way, I thought, you could give the work the attention it deserved, through the editorial process and in publication, and you wouldn’t have to exploit people or their data to do it. People might want that, might support it. I set out to publish something once a month, a cadence I thought manageable for a one-man team. I never managed to do it for very long.
The thing about the internet – like, the main thing really – is that it never ends. It expands much faster than it can be comprehended. There is always more of it. It is in the nature of the beast to be always pushing forward – the past is quickly left behind. What gets shared – which is to say, what gets seen – is what’s new. Thousands of opinions competing to be the hot topic of the day.
Even Google search has a recency bias, despite most of the useful information on the internet having been put there by anonymous message board users at least 10 years ago. This has only become more apparent as the amount of SEO spam and AI slop have exploded in recent times.
Even at the level of the DIY publication with few readers, one does feel the pressure for novelty. One does sense the fetid maw of the content machine, crying out to be fed. It is not unreasonable to ask, with all my efforts to slow things down – to pay writers properly, to take advantage of the platform, to create unique reading experiences – am I merely providing a kind of better quality food for that void’s insatiable appetite? At the end of the day, we’re all getting eaten.
That’s a thought that leads to burnout, to creative exhaustion. I certainly felt that after a few years. I felt the site was doing something unique, and that people were tuning into it, being inspired by it, but that I was running out of road. I’ve read enough Marshall MacLuhan to know that what works on the platform will be what best suits the platform, and what works on the internet today is regularity of output, whether that is consistency in a profitable niche, or broad appeals to a general populace in search of scale.
You have to keep grinding out those monthly subscriptions, those ad-friendly engagements. Few will ever make it to the promised land of sustainability, but everyone is forced to keep running nonetheless. I thought the openness of the internet’s basic technology could bring about a proliferation of digital gardens, tended with personality and care by the people who created them. Places that would grow and change and connect with others, archives of emerging thought, each in their own shape and colour. That internet exists, but it is not what thrives on the platforms which dominate the internet most of us actually use.
Looking back on it now, I really began to feel the writing was on the wall for the kind of internet culture I was longing for when, in 2019, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested in what was then a scrappy new publishing platform called Substack. I could see then that the era of social media, which had prompted the foundation of Fallow Media in the first place, was coming to an end – and the gated communities of subscription-driven blogging were going to muscle in on its territory.
Substack was going to do what Medium had tried and failed to do: make online publishing a commodity by radically simplifying the process of becoming a one-person media entrepreneur. All for a 15 per cent cut of the revenue.
Inevitably, Substack soon began to engage in the same kind of algorithmic suggestion and “social feeds” that had defined the earlier social media sites. The logic of retention and engagement is simply too strong for VC-backed enterprise to avoid. (It is a truism that all tech platforms tend, with scale, to become a form of social media.)
Many good things are published on Substack every day, but if you spend any time at all on the platform you will quickly notice the communicative tics and distortions of language that give the place its particular atmosphere. The “lessons” of earlier social media have been well learned. Including, of course, a need to make it all about community.
Community is the magic word when you’re trying to sell its negation. Community is a spell you cast when you’re trying to scale up a platform to monopolistic global dominance. Community is supposed to make people feel good about participating in (and maybe even benefiting from) the enclosure of what was once open pasture. This played out with Twitter and Facebook, and now it is playing out again. And again, 10 years on from its establishment, I find myself wondering how Fallow Media can resist those imperatives. How can we work towards an alternative?
The first step was to find a way of working that was more sustainable. The internet is always on, always inviting, always demanding. Wanting to publish regularly, I felt that I could never switch off, that there was always something to be done – something in fact overdue, which ought to be done now. I realised, in the way that the proverbial tech-bro realises that he has reinvented the bus, that publications generally had deadlines and schedules based around each issue, which bunched work together in ways that made it more manageable. Questions followed: what if we moved to a biannual publishing schedule? What if we did it in print?
So, thanks to the support of the Arts Council, we made fallow, the first issue of which is available now. It’s a literary magazine in the classic sense: fiction, poetry, essays, interviews. It brings together an international cohort of writers who are inspirationally good at what they do. I believe there’s extremely good work in there which will reward close, attentive reading. In time I hope the magazine will develop its own voice, its own atmosphere. For now, it is a foal struggling to stand on new legs. But my, isn’t it pretty?
Publishing a magazine like this allows you to make a big deal out of whatever you’re bringing into the world, which is actually kind of hard to do if you’re publishing all the time, or if you’re publishing one small thing at a time. It gives you a sense of achievement and release which is lacking in the always-on, what’s-next world of the internet. There is a rhythm to it which allows you to bring people in, give them reason to care, even to join you in celebrating what has been made. (People love to celebrate, and we should unashamedly take every opportunity we get to do so.)
Being in print also gives you reason to work within the ecosystem of an actual, physical community – of writers, readers, booksellers, festivals – who share your interests and goals, rather than being dependent on the whims of platforms. You reach people in a different way with something tangible, there is a stickiness to it. After 10 years in the frictionless space of the browser, it’s honestly kind of fun to be worrying about ink and paper and postage. There’s a freedom in hard deadlines, and knowing that when it’s done, it’s done.
For me, making this magazine meant learning a whole new set of skills and tools. There is a joy in this kind of learning – feeling yourself growing, testing yourself, trying things out, making mistakes, connecting to others who are similarly engaged. It’s a complement to making things online, not a replacement – online publishing has its own set of affordances that we will continue to explore as creatively as we can. As the internet continues to become polluted and controlled, it feels just as urgent to offer other ways of being there.
Ultimately, I like making things, whether I’m printing magazines, writing books, programming, building furniture, or cooking; it is one of the great pleasures I have in life – I want to do it as much as I can, and learn a little more every time I do it. It is a commitment to curiosity over time, a humbling dedication to desire and imagination and the pursuit of beauty. It’s also the most basic form of resistance: to look at the world and say, what if it was different? What if we made it look like this? I guess that’s another political statement I’ll have to leave unexpanded.
