I was a young child in the 90s, and I barely used the Internet then, but I remember how people talked about it. It was Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway. It looked like blue and purple grids suspended in black space. It wasn't real in the same way a pen was real. It was an alternate reality.

At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that. The Web became an extension of the real world. Now, in 2024, the Web seems to have displaced the real world as the locus of public discourse.

> It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the end of the 2010s was widespread among people with meaningful connections between their online personas and their ability to maintain their standard of living.

This kind of thing always struck me as a poor choice. The great thing about maintaining one's anonymity on the Web, or, to be more precise, adopting a collection of alternate identities, is that they can be discarded easily. A faux pas needn't follow you around, and can't follow you to where you make your living.

> The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.

> On the level of the individual, this is true for certain values of “we”: for people who are, in any sense, established; people who already have the social status they required to succeed in their field; people whose work doesn’t depend on them needing to find (and re-find and re-find) readers or customers; people whose professional and personal networks are already strong enough to catch them if they slip; people with money.

> So what about everyone else? Should people without those forms of access and capital simply forgo all the benefits afforded by access to broad networks?

Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.

> This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a collective one when bad products of the social internet get worse, as when platform turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one.

Conflict is coming. We've reached a point, I think, we're it's inevitable. I don't think it's clear exactly what the ideas underlying the conflict will be, or what factions will contest it, or in what spaces it will be contested, but there is a range to choose from. The winning move in this situation is to keep informed about events, but otherwise to keep one's head down. Don't challenge ideas you find objectionable, but agree in a mostly-disinterested way. Take it from someone with family members who still have the machete scars.

> Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.

I feel the "american dream" got that part right. Social mobility works best when you can start working locally to move up. That is, very low barrier to entrepreneurship. "Who you know" stops being a problem then, everyone can work their way into larger and larger networks.

For better or worse, I don't think we can get rid of "who you know" issue, because it's 100% natural. When you start a venture - whether it's a local shop or an Internet company or just remodeling your dog's kennel - you don't go to Global Employee Search Directory and look for potential co-founders; you just do it with a friend. Now, even the largest corporation, when you go all the way up to the top, is still a glorified version of neighbors building a common tool shack. So is almost every subgraph in the corporate ladder, if you zoom in on it.

So the problem, as I see it, is with an economy where most people have to effectively beg strangers for a job - i.e. employees (myself, I am such a person too). In this scenario, "who you know" at the lower levels becomes unfair to the larger whole.

I'm not sure what should be done about it, though.

(This is just some random thought I have, I haven't managed to sort them into a coherent whole just yet, sorry.)

> At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that.

September.

> It was Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway.

Regular people almost never used those words. Only the media did.