a month ago
- The internet is transitioning from a 'Dark Forest' where people strategically withdraw from public spaces to a 'Dead Forest' where cozy communities become causally disconnected black holes.
- Cozy communities now have event horizons: outsiders cannot truly understand their internal culture, jokes, and ongoing history without being part of them, leading to a loss of shared contemporaneity.
- The public internet now consists of three observable phenomena: AI thermalizing the 'fossil public' (recycling old public data), accretion disks (boundary objects like essays and podcasts), and zombie publics (visible but lacking interior life).
- The collapse was driven by unchecked forces like algorithmic manipulation, surveillance capitalism, culture wars, and remote work, accelerating during COVID, leading to a phase transition rather than a new equilibrium.