Forest As System

Kinda along the lines of Paradigms Are Strategic Tools:

The social media researcher Erin Kissane reminds us that the current terrible landscape of the public social internet is made and sustained by people and that this too shall pass:

The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world’s big platforms are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software. […] But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn’t guaranteed. […] So the necessary counterpart to understanding that the Dark Forest Internet complex obscures the arbitrary and temporary nature of the current situation might be accepting that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bend toward justice when we bend them, and keep on bending them, forever. — Against The Dark Forest

The article is well worth a read.

I did not agree with everything in it though. The dark forest framing is, I think, less flawed than is claimed. I especially think that Maggie Appleton’s framing as expressed in her drawing is great. Because it incorporates not only the forest and the cozy web, but also an undergrowth made of digital gardens, newsletters and RSS Feeds. So public spaces that are nonetheless somewhat hidden. This layer is missing in Kissane’s text as is the dark web (where morals are decomposing) under the cozy web.

I think the impulse here is to point out that the forest was planted and won’t last forever. And I think that is a missing piece in this metaphor.

But. What I will always disagree with is to frame the expression of a system as a simple question of choice, of good vs. bad intentions. A system as is described in this image is not easily changed.

Given all of this, it seems questionable for technologists to cede the territory of the public internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the predatory forces they assemble and arm. […] The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn’t between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.

I find the insinuation here questionable. I am a being of the undergrowth. I love the small and indie web. Calling me unpolitical or a non-combatant because I am not re-inventing or re-design social platforms and am therefore basically an enemy, seems wrong. Maybe this is not what has been said, but I kinda got the impression. “Don’t be a badger!”, it is demanded. But what if you are a badger? I am all for digital spaces reimagined as public goods, but to think that it could only happen in the forest layer and if you’re not into forestry (but rather into gardening or whathaveyou) you’re doing it wrong, is naive to me.¹

Furthermore it seems that just because current iterations of the big social media platforms might die, that we’re not finished dealing with the nature of complex systems itself and therefore the flaws of platforms - the hate, the predators, the data capture, etc. pp. - are not something you just “design out” of them in the next iteration. Because you can’t. And I don’t mean that you couldn’t make changes to the current crop of platforms, but change in any direction you want to take this, is a fickle thing: Exert too much control and it becomes oppression and people will switch platforms. Exert too little and it turn into a free for all and people will switch platforms. Give too many tools to people and the platform will appear too complex. People will switch platforms. Give no tools (or not the right ones) and the platform will appear too restricted. And on and on. Current platforms form a delicate balance. They are the result of a lot of fine-tuning and what is a viable social network will have to play within the realm of possible viable platforms.

So as I said above: Just “unfuck the networks” is a naive notion. It’s a systems as imagined vs. systems as found “fallacy”: A distinction made by Richard Cook that I’ve found very helpful to explain what is missing from people’s arguments who are about ideas and propose solutions mainly based on (new or reframed) ideas only: A system found is a freaking mess. And so is the dark forest that is the publicly visible internet.

So, I guess, what I’m saying is that a forest is not designed but maintained by its inhabitants. And this maintenance is also not done on the whole thing at once by only well meaning, well educated and wise deers and squirrels (people and institutions). The internet is a wilderness. And as such it will always include predators: skilled and unskilled ones, big ones and small ones. Some we recognize as part of the forest, others we think of as “meta predators”. It is therefore also not a controlled or a flawless place where you can just be and do, guaranteed free from harm. This is exactly a thing that is more possible in smaller, more constrained places.

The social internet doesn’t “simply exist” for us to just inhabit, true. It is made, yes. By us. Partly yes. But it being made doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exhibit the qualities of complex social systems.