A long block of travel to sync in person with diverse nodes in my network has been invigorating but also exhausting. I’m sure some of the travel looks quite glamorous, but it is always in service of furthering my longterm goals.
Venkatesh Rao published an essay today suggesting that the dark forest theory of the Internet is over. Our digital public commons has been in retreat
For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous…
The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected univers
The ecosystem of private spaces were connected, but as they accreted power these cozy web communities saw their gravity increase. Eventually some collapsed in on themselves. And thus we have black holes of public collapse in the dark forest; out of which none of us are able to escape.
What Rao calls “inaccessible interiority” traps some of us. We may have visibility to other communities through the byproducts of our niches but that does not mean a shared reality where we can reach consensus with others outside of our space.
My strong fear is that without a possible consensus reality for larger groups like nation states citizens, we lose the basic capacity for productive interactions that move us forward. Only inside a community that has swallowed us whole can we progress. And if we find something novel inside those gravity sinks we have no way of sharing it. Only some of us enjoy progress.
Which might be fine for those who wish to live lives quietly out of sight. But it isn’t a world that enables strangers coming together through public global communication in a shared commons.
And this has serious consequences for investing, and especially so in venture capital where a diversity of worldviews is precisely what allows for uncorrelated returns.
Novel worldviews emerge from genuinely new observations of reality. If we all live in disconnected realities of collapsed worldviews what happens?
This is why, as an industry, venture capital is uniquely vulnerable to the seductive coherence of simple ideas, rather than complex truths. That’s unfortunate, because venture capital is also uniquely dependent on intellectual diversity, as evident in the damage done by group-think versus the extreme profitability of contrarianism.
This stacks on existing research which illustrates how social media creates echo chambers that amplify consensus ideas while filtering out unconventional or contrarian views — which in turn builds on existing theory that describes how individuals self-censor opinions when they suspect they are in the minority.
When the dark forest was scary but still possible to traverse, we still had a chance to explore and find reality, even if we lived in a consensus bubble most of the times. Dead forest theory means we are past the event horizon, from which we cannot escape. We are locked in whatever consensus reality emerged inside the event horizon.
And so despite its expense, its troubles and its costs, I still push my work into the public commons with the hope that I’ll circle the accretion disks but can fight against falling into one forever with a steady acceleration to preserve a visible orbit.
What both Venkatesh Rao and Dan Grey posit in different ways, is that it is worth understanding where we might be cut off from reality.
Further, who knows what new kinds of horrors we will endure as we lead separate lives online without any contact with real life and real people. We crave community with those whom we can maintain consistent context and contact. That’s why I still get on the airplane, or get in the car, or hop on the bus and show up. I want us to share reality.