The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

Nearly every civilization has imagined a cosmic tree: the Norse Yggdrasil, the Indian Kalpataru, the Mayan Ceiba, the Persian Gaokerena, the Biblical Tree of Life. Their details differ, but they share a common structural intuition. The cosmos is not fundamentally a collection of disconnected places. It is one living organism whose branches connect many domains without erasing their differences. The tree is neither a centralized empire nor an archipelago. It is a common living medium.

The public internet briefly approximated such a structure. We mistook it for a permanent feature of technological civilization. It now appears more likely to have been an unusually low-entropy historical accident.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

The first concerns media.

The next public medium cannot simply optimize engagement more efficiently than its predecessors. Nor can it merely federate today’s cozywebs. It must possess intrinsic anti-cozy properties: mechanisms that continuously regenerate encounters between strangers without collapsing into algorithmic extraction or culture-war dynamics. Publicity itself must become renewable rather than exhaustible.

The second concerns politics.

The internet cannot recover a public if politics remains organized around permanent mobilization. A society in which every public utterance is interpreted primarily as coalition signaling cannot sustain common causal space. Any successor public must make disagreement productive without making identity existential. It must allow for mutual co-existence in citizenship rather than a condition of endemic armed activism.

The third concerns artificial intelligence.

Today’s models increasingly thermalize the fossil public. A future public intelligence would instead require access to continuously renewed living culture without simply consuming or exposing it. This is not merely a data problem. It is a civilizational design problem. Intelligence must become metabolically coupled to public life rather than archaeologically dependent upon its remains.

The fourth concerns institutions.

Public institutions once served as long-lived repositories of common knowledge whose legitimacy exceeded that of any particular community. Most now either retreat into cozy interiors themselves or perform zombie publicity in order to remain visible. A new arborescence requires institutions capable of producing genuine common reality rather than merely broadcasting legitimacy.

The fifth concerns public life itself.

Zombie publics cannot simply be replaced by better influencers, healthier discourse, or more responsible platforms. The problem is ontological rather than behavioral. Public life must once again become a place where significant interiority can develop rather than merely be represented. People must once again possess reasons to conduct meaningful portions of their intellectual, artistic, scientific, and civic lives in public.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

The task, then, is not to restore the internet we lost. It is to preserve enough living matter outside the horizons that another cosmology remains possible. The myths of Yggdrasil and Kalpataru remind us that civilizations have long imagined worlds held together by living connective tissue rather than by force or by isolation. Whether technological civilization can grow such a tree again is the defining grand challenge of the twenty-first century.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

This was the first vgr article that I found really hard to read through. Maybe I am getting dumber. However, I posit that this wasn’t fully human written. Please correct me if I am wrong, Venkatesh.

However, after a couple attempts, I got through. VGR presents a strong case on why the internet - in its current state - one that’s driven by SEO, large platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc - is a rotting corpse (apologies for a morbid metaphor).

He ends with:

Dead Forest Theory suggests that this forest cannot be saved, but holds out the possibility that a new one can still be planted before it dies.

I believe that the indie web is the seed of life that’s planted.

Connecting it back to the comparison of the death of the Google Reader versus Google+, there’s also an argument to be made that VGR’s metaphor - of a blackhole that’s about to collapse on itself - while brilliant - is actually wrong.

The blackhole converts everything that’s matter into nothing. However, in this dead forest that VGR proposes, the open protocols of the web continue to live and connect.

Granted that it’s still not driving attention, interaction and contribution like the cozy-web but that is no different than when majority of the interaction wasn’t digital.

So, rather than a blackhole, continuing the metaphor of tree and organic life, the current dying web is a line of evolution that is mutating itself to its detriment.

However, beneath that, the content, the things that people still publish on the web - still exist. I am not trying to say that we can recreate the web of yore. I agree with VGR - that’s dead.

The new web is still built on the same open principles. The question is - can we create a new set of interaction mechanics on top of that can arrive at more helpful, thriving mutations than the current web.