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The public has undergone gravitational collapse.
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. Search, recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, culture wars, and cancellation dynamics transformed the public sphere into a hostile environment. 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 universe. People simply stopped talking across it.
This picture no longer fits.
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.
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A dark forest is still one forest. Signals travel. Creatures remain connected by the possibility of encounter. Silence is strategic. The Dead Forest begins where the silence becomes irreversible. The inhabitants are no longer choosing not to speak across the public sphere. Increasingly, they cannot speak.
The defining feature of a black hole is not infinite density but the existence of an event horizon: a boundary across which causal influence becomes one-way. Once crossed, no signal returns. Outbound communication is not forbidden or unwise. It is impossible.
A mature cozy community increasingly resembles such an object. Its defining characteristic is not privacy but inaccessible interiority. It possesses an evolving local culture, cadence, trust structure, hierarchy of attention, stock of shared assumptions, repertoire of jokes, vocabulary, and ongoing history that cannot be reconstructed from outside observation. These are not simply hidden facts. They constitute a living dynamical state. To understand them requires inhabiting them. Outsiders may observe artifacts, but they do not share the community’s present.
Crossing into such a community is therefore not simply gaining access to more information. It is crossing into another causal universe.
This is why the metaphor of secrecy has become inadequate. Secrets can be revealed. Documents can leak. Membership lists can become public. Event horizons are different. What lies beyond them is not a collection of hidden documents but a continuing history. The defining loss is not information but contemporaneity. Outsiders no longer participate in the same unfolding present.
This mixed metaphor of an arborescent digital cosmos entering its death-arc phase of evolution immediately clarifies several otherwise puzzling features of the contemporary internet.
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The first is the accretion disk. Every black hole is surrounded by a liminal region where matter has not yet fallen across the horizon but is already gravitationally bound to it. This is where enormous amounts of observable activity occur. The accretion disk is the liminal zone.
The modern public internet increasingly consists of such liminal objects.
Books. Conference talks. Substack essays. Open-source repositories. Journalistic profiles. Podcasts. Public talks. Screenshots. Occasional bridges built by individuals who inhabit multiple communities simultaneously. These are not the interior life of cozy communities. They are matter orbiting their boundaries. They remain visible precisely because they have not crossed the horizon. Some eventually escape into the broader public. Some spiral inward and disappear forever. Most spend long periods circling the boundary between publicity and interiority.
A common mistake is to confuse the accretion disk for the black hole itself. Increasingly, the public mistakes public-facing artifacts for communities. But the relationship resembles that between sunlight reflected off an accretion disk and the interior of a black hole. One cannot infer the character of one from the other.
The second feature is what might be called zombie public life.
If the living public has largely collapsed into compact informational objects, why does the public sphere still appear so active? Because visibility has become detached from shared reality.
Politics, celebrity, institutional media, brands, influencers, and platform-native personalities continue to generate immense volumes of public content. But much of this activity no longer serves the historical function of public discourse: creating common knowledge among strangers. Instead, it functions as a perpetual visibility engine. Attention circulates. Narratives recycle. Audiences become increasingly parasocial. Public performance continues while public life gradually disappears.
Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.
The third feature is artificial intelligence.
The emergence of large language models has often been interpreted as the culmination of the public internet. It is almost the opposite.
Black holes are not entirely black. Quantum mechanically, they emit Hawking radiation. This radiation does not consist of messages sent from beyond the event horizon. It is the long thermodynamic aftermath of gravitational collapse itself.
Artificial intelligence increasingly occupies an analogous role: That of a thermalized fossil public.
Its training corpus consists overwhelmingly of the accumulated public internet that existed before blackholification reached its present stage: books, websites, Wikipedia, blogs, forums, public code repositories, digitized archives, public conversations, and institutional documents. Models continuously remix this material into fluent statistical syntheses. They possess extraordinary knowledge of the fossil public.
What they fundamentally lack access to is the living interiority of today’s blackholifying cozyweb.
This is not a temporary engineering limitation. It is a consequence of the causal geometry. The defining conversations of mature communities increasingly occur beyond event horizons inaccessible to public observation. AI therefore becomes the thermalization of the fossil public: the ambient informational glow emitted by a civilization whose most vital conversations have already disappeared into causally disconnected interiors.
This also explains why AI often feels strangely omniscient yet oddly lifeless. It has absorbed the archaeological record of public civilization while remaining largely excluded from its present tense.
This distinction also clarifies the status of genuine leaks. Screenshots from private Discords, leaked Slack logs, internal documents, accidental recordings, whistleblower disclosures—these are not Hawking radiation. They are better understood as fragments of the surrounding black-hole system that never fully crossed the horizon: material lingering in unstable orbit within the accretion disk, occasionally perturbed outward before finally disappearing. They are exceptional precisely because they do not violate the causal integrity of the interior, and can be flexibly narrativized in ways entirely disconnected from the interior narrative. The event horizon remains intact.
Taken together, these three phenomena define the observable universe of the Dead Forest.
First, the thermalized fossil public continuously recirculated by artificial intelligence.
Second, the liminal accretion disks of boundary objects orbiting living communities.
Third, the zombie public whose endless performances preserve visibility while generating progressively less shared reality.
What is conspicuously absent is the thing that once defined the internet itself: a common causal manifold in which strangers could reliably become contemporaries through public communication.
The internet has not become private. It is dying with cosmological grandeur.
The public did not disappear because everyone retreated into private spaces. It disappeared because those spaces underwent gravitational collapse into compact worlds whose interior histories increasingly belong only to themselves. We still observe their radiation. We still see the debris orbiting their boundaries. We still mistake the theater of zombie publicity for public life.
But we no longer inhabit a universe in which the public is the primary medium through which reality is jointly constructed and enacted.
The Dead Forest is what remains after the public has collapsed into black holes.
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The Dead Forest did not emerge because a new force entered history. It emerged because the forces that produced the Dark Forest were allowed to operate uninterrupted until they exhausted the geometry of the public sphere itself.
The original diagnosis remains largely intact.
Search dissolved into recommendation. Recommendation dissolved into algorithmic manipulation. Surveillance capitalism transformed every public utterance into extractable behavioral data. Culture-war dynamics converted visibility into permanent reputational exposure. Institutions lost the capacity to sustain neutral public ground. Politics ceased to be one domain among many and became the organizing logic of nearly every public conversation. Social media steadily rewarded identities optimized for conflict rather than curiosity. The internet of beefs expanded until it ceased to be merely an internet phenomenon and became a general model for social life.
The cozyweb was the rational adaptation.
People withdrew into smaller spaces where trust could once again be accumulated rather than continuously spent. Communities became increasingly bounded, invitation-based, contextual, and difficult to search or index. Public writing increasingly served not as participation in a common discourse but as boundary maintenance, recruitment, diplomacy, fundraising, publishing, or reputation management on behalf of private interiors.
The public sphere was no longer where life happened. It became where communities advertised their existence.
Nothing fundamentally changed after this decade-old diagnosis. No creative response took shape to check it. The dynamics simply continued unchecked as the no-treatment prognosis suggested. Cozy spaces simply accumulated enough cultural matter to undergo gravitational collapse.
COVID accelerated the migration of meaningful relationships into digitally mediated private spaces. Remote work replaced organizational corridors with Slack workspaces. Institutions weakened further while informal affinity networks strengthened. The second Trump era completed the normalization of permanent political mobilization as the background condition of public life. Meanwhile, every advance in generative AI increased the economic value of public text while simultaneously reducing the incentive to produce genuinely new public writing. The public web became both more extractable and less generative.
The result was not a new equilibrium but a phase transition.
Dark Forest Theory described a world in which everyone remained connected but increasingly chose silence. Dead Forest Theory describes the world after enough silence has accumulated that the public itself loses coherence as a shared causal medium.
AI did not produce this transition. It merely paved the dead cowpaths. Large language models arrived only after the living public had already begun collapsing irreversibly into cozy interiors. It industrialized the recycling of the fossil public while accelerating the exhaustion of what remained outside the horizons.
The internet did not die because of AI. AI is inheriting the remains as it dies, and the cycling of archival and carnival time winds down into a terminal archive.
***
If the Dead Forest is the endgame of the internet we inherited, the obvious question is whether another public sphere can ever emerge.
Not whether this public can be repaired. Cosmology suggests it cannot. Black holes do not become stars again. Gall’s law strengthens this intuition:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
The question is whether history can produce another arborescent digital cosmos and whether we can seed a new forest right now.
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.
If another cosmic arborescence is to emerge, it will not do so by reversing the gravitational collapse of the present one. It must grow from whatever remains outside the horizons before those remnants themselves disappear.
This suggests less a legible program of obvious actions than a set of six simultaneous grand challenges that require genuine invention to address.
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.
Finally, there is the challenge of time.
Every year, more communities pass beyond their event horizons. More knowledge is born irretrievably private. More institutions become performative. More AI systems are trained on increasingly recycled corpora. More of the accretion disk spirals inward. More of the fossil public becomes thermalized.
The urgency is cosmological.
Dead forestification appears to possess positive feedback loops. Every successful retreat into interiority increases the incentives for further retreat. Every reduction in the vitality of the public increases the relative value of private worlds. Every increment of AI-generated public text reduces the density of genuinely renewable public culture available for future intelligences. Every new black hole slightly alters the geometry through which subsequent ones form.
If there is a threshold beyond which no new cosmic tree can grow, we do not know where it lies.
Nor do we know whether we have already crossed the ultimate event horizon on the trajectory to collective social heat death of the forest we inhabit now.
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.
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.
