The Ghost of Somebody's KPIs Are Rattling Their Chains in My Forest

against the dark forest

On one hand, the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platforms themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and feeling into saleable data objects.

On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice and swarms of people looking for ideological opponents to mob, largely as a way of claiming or defending quasi-spatial territory: This is ours, not yours. We don’t do that here.

…

The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play.

The obstacles to these life-sustaining internet forests are fundamentally the same forces that threaten the real forests and our whole living world: unbounded extraction; unaccountable leadership; societal refusal to take on the responsibilities of governing our increasingly complex commons, instead of burying them deeper and deeper in pretenses to action.

I no longer think that it’s possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks. I find this both terrifying and clarifying.

(emphasis mine)

Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash

I’ve read this essay twice now, extracting the above quotes and many more—I removed large swathes of my highlights from this post as a matter of decency, meaning: you must go read the entire post (and pray it does not linkrot, as ironic as that would be for a piece with an organic metaphor at its core). 🌳

My very first thought after my first reading was, “This is amazing writing (even apart from the message).” I am not sure a more eloquent takedown of Mastodon reply-guys could be penned now that we have: “…people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice…” …and there are a number of other poetic descriptions of our state of online affairs peppered throughout. 🌶️

My second thought was, “Now what?” I returned to the piece not just to enjoy again the poetry and understand the premise, but to try to find the call to action I seemingly missed the first time. But I found none. 🕳️

In theory, the entire website is about that call to action. “safer places, now”, for example, discusses how to form guidelines for successful fediverse governance. But is the fediverse even a majority of it? Surely not. And do we need complex documents to understand if our Mastodon server is a safe place? The server hosting my account is administered by someone I’ve judged—almost entirely by their posts on the same server—as responsible, reasonable, and concerned with the safety of his server’s members.¹ 👷

However, the normal people I know are not creating Mastodon accounts, and it is not because it is too complex, difficult, or seemingly unsafe. Most normal people I know are still on the established, corporate, centralized, value-extracting, slop-filled, ad-bombarded social networks. A few have fled to Bluesky during this most recent mass migration from XTwitter. They did so because they perceive it as a safe place for progressive thought, simply by virtue of the fact that it was progressives who were flocking there. It is not that they don’t care about the facts—it is just another centralized network, it was started and funded by billionaire libertarian nutjobs, or that surrounding ourselves with homogeneous thought has been our movement’s undoing—they do not have the capacity to care or even understand them. 🤷‍♂️

The other day my wife said something about some social networking platform—I forget what but it was a vague complaint—and I started to say something like, “That’s because these social neworks…” and she quickly and firmly said the equivalent of, “I’m going to stop you right there.” I was an IRL reply-guy, blocked for never shutting up about how obviously gross and destructive the whole thing is. She has children to feed and drive to practices, rehearsals, and tutoring, all while running a continuously growing photography business. She just wants to post her photos and enjoy the accolades of her peers. Her real local network is a series of iMessage group chats.² 💬

My point is, people don’t care about this stuff. They don’t care that these networks, as so perfectly described by Erin, are a significant part of the systematic rise of racism and fascism across the world (and now in an alarmingly very real way, in this country). So how do we create the networks and systems required not just by those of us in this tiny minority that want to enact change, but for the larger minority that equally won’t enjoy the inevitable outcomes of their own ignorant compliance or simple indifference? 🪖

Idiosyncra

But the biggest reason is: this is my computer. A monument to some weirdo’s idiosyncrasies, sure, but I’m the weirdo in question.

It never feels like the ghost of somebody’s KPIs are rattling their chains in my attic or some sort of business-model chiropractor is about to refault my settings that are just a little too misaligned with their getting their bonus. But it’s not just the directed corporatist effluvium; so much of ostensibly-free software’s ideological mindshare has been neutered by rentierist collaborati that designing for informed consent barely exists. Is anyone out there hoisting the black flag and yelling “give me versioned fleet management or give me death?” “Standardize developer toolchains, to the barricades!”

No. Absolutely not.

Once again, I’m a sucker for a nerd with a grandiloquent poetic prose pen. 🧑‍🎨

These two articles feel related, but I don’t have the time (or attention?) to connect the dots. It looks something like a cyberpunk teen banging on a 1970s keyboard in 2055, precariously sheltered from the perpetual downpour outside. I grew up reading Neuromancer and playing Cyberpunk 2020, didn’t you? 🧑‍🎤

Or maybe, someday far in the future, after I’m gone, it looks something like this:

Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash