The Dark Forest of the Internet

and the dark forest outside your door.

Not too long ago, on a little known but excellent podcast called The Great Humbling, Dougald Hine spoke with Ed Gillespie about something called The Dark Forest of the Internet.

Based on an article by Caroline Busta, a core idea with the dark forest is that the most vibrant and authentic conversations happening around counter-culture are not taking place in the most exposed zones of the ‘clearnet’ (like Facebook and YouTube), but instead are occurring in more hidden places, such as obscure message forums, discord servers, newsletters, and your actual local woods.

“…dark forest dwellers build their primary communities out of clearnet range—or offline in actual forests, parks, and gardens.”

I love the idea of moving between the real woods and the Internet’s dark forests as a way of helping to grow the kind of communities that have an interest in bringing magic back into the world. And for me, magic is simply short hand for the infinitely deep, wildly complex constellations of interconnected beings that make up the unfolding story of the cosmos, egrets to electrons and snow geese to galaxies.

But it’s interesting to see that when dark forest communities exist online they are often protected by a paywall; one low enough for most people to step over, but high enough to keep out those strange human beings who spends their hours dishing out venom in the comments sections.

This newsletter aspires to move itself further into dark forest territory, though I’m not quite sure how this will happen yet. The thing is, soul-making needs shadow. The high exposure of mainstream social media platforms are not conducive to the states of mind and qualities of attention that Talismans Against Boring Culture wishes to be influenced by and contribute to.

The most beautiful moss requires darkness to grow; requires darkness to fully express itself.

Schistostega (‘Goblin’s Gold’) ^

Upon discovering this enchanted moss, the Austrian botanist Anton Kerner wrote:

“If we reach curiously into the depth of the grotto to snatch a specimen of the shining objects, and examine the prize in our hand under a bright light, we can scarcely believe our eyes, for there is nothing else but dull lusterless earth and damp, mouldering bits of stone of yellowish-grey color.”

This sounds like the thought process of a marketing executive who cannot understand why the artist he has plucked from the counter-cultural underground has lost their juju in the mass market.

It’s what we can expect to happen if our most authentic offerings linger too long in the searing daylight of mainstream social media.

This invites the question: 'how much of yourself are you going to show online?

A key idea Dougald brings up in The Great Humbling is ‘minimum viable presence’, which I take to mean that we do the bare minimum on mainstream social media channels in order to create gateways into our dark forest communities, which may exist online, but should, if we have any sense, also lead back out into the full-blooded world of our sensuous localities.

Unfortunately, if you’re a creative person who wants to make even a bit of their income from writing, music, painting, whatever, then this bare minimum turns out to be quite a lot.

When people as different are Stewart Lee and Eric Weinstein both recommend seeking out the few thousand people who love what you do then it’s probably worth listening to. The comedian and the mathematician both suggest that this small community of people is enough to help you pay the bills if they all buy one thing a year, or support you on Patreon or whatever.

This is an excellent tonic against the levels of fame that now seem normal to court (‘Oh, that only got 90,000 views, my mate got a million’), but because we’re all so inundated with things vying for our attention, the noble quest of finding the right three thousand people who love your work takes a huge amount of effort.

The result is you need a minimum of three jobs.

1. Day job (to pay the bills)

2. Creative work (which probably won’t pay the bills, for a while at least)

3. Consistent and inventive seeking of the small group of people who love what you’re making

But if you feel drawn to live the essence of your story, then some kind local, real-world culture-making is also necessary, otherwise you just exist online and perpetuate the big spell of mass-hypnosis, casting us deeper into a future where we are hopelessly wedded to our own technologies, cut off from the breath of the world in our hermitically sealed hall of mirrors.

A couple of days ago I published this: https://livingwoodsnortheast.org.uk/inwoods/

The vision here is to create a constellation of inspiring woodland-based workshops which, taken together, amount to a sort of mycelial college for growing hedge wizards and green witches.

This is dark forest work, growing community and resilience through awe, wonder, and a deepening knowledge of nature. Sounds cool, and it is, but it’s also a fourth job. Add to that the demands of being a parent, which for me is about to intensify with the imminent birth of my second child, then you’re looking at no less than five different jobs, not all full time, but still… five.

The impossibility of this is interesting. We can’t join all the dots because there aren’t enough hours, but we should still try.

What’s most exciting is how it all feels like part of the same work, whilst offering an enormous potential for creative flow between clearnet endeavours like Fantasy Creates Reality and dark forest work like InWoods, and the stories I’m working on.

I’m just one person trying to do his bit, but what’s keeping me fired is that I know there are others out there doing the same, in the ways that makes sense of them. Perhaps you, reading this, are one of these people. Or perhaps, like me, you’re in the process of trying to become one… someone who can rise to challenge set by their own daimon.

Dare we imagine what our culture would look like if we pursued ours callings with relentless courage, if the right and left hemispheres found dynamic balance as they did in Da Vinci’s Florence, and if, somehow, against all the odds, our grandchildren grew up in localities where the soul of a place nurtured them as much as they nurtured its soil?

I dare if you do.

The dark forests are waiting.