Over the past few months I have discovered and written about the idea of thickets and have been wondering what the practice of thicketing looks like. At its core the idea behind thicketing is to create and dwell in systems that resist capture and defy legibility. Weirdly this is not some anti-establishment move but a simple desire to just be and return to a state where you had your own corner, your friends, and your thoughts. Over the past few hundred years, with the ascent of modernity, legibility and legibilizing have been treated as the norm and a default good thing. However the pattern which has emerged (not just on the internet) is that systems position themselves as commons, invite people to enjoy themselves and slowly initiate capture mechanisms under the guise of some or the other security. Not all of this is bad, much of the modern world would not function without security and minimal enclosures.

The internet however, is unique. It gives us the ability not just to connect to anyone in the world, it allows us to just be. It can be as public or private a space you want it to be. Besides adherence to laws there are no permissions needed, you get to be you. As an elder millennial, having lived a life that criss-crossed Internet-rich and -poor parts of the world, I have been online since the mid-90s. I love and adore the internet. However, I have been using it wrong.

Enclosure by othering. I’ve either left or had to leave platform after platform over the past 30 years. I lost AIM, because I moved to an internet-poor zone, orkut came and died, Google Reader was a golden gleaming moment that was ripped from our hands, Facebook could have been wonderful but as we learned later it could never have been, twitter was wonderful for a very long time. Keeping aside the platforms that died, the platforms I abandoned, I abandoned for a specific pattern which I had not quite nailed down until today, which I will get to. All the platforms created some kind of an othering system, my guess is that this was the most reliable way to ensure engagement and eyeballs for ads.

The othering dynamic, invents reasons to create the other or simply introduce systems that make othering trivial. I don’t particularly care to tackle the socio-political aspects of othering but it’s something which I dislike in a platform. I suspect many people do, and once it becomes noticeable most people will. Othering is a specific kind of enclosure, it creates patterns to enclose your mind, defines what is allowed, what is shameful. It creates targets out of a minority of users and points an aggressive majority to those targets. I have never experienced any kind of internet flaming, but this was because I had left long before the platforms became awful, and I was never very active.

The most obvious phenotype of this othering is the absolute aggression that it brings about. This is what the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet is about. If you poke your head out someone will eat you. But it seems like much of the wild animals have been enclosed in the platforms, and it’s pretty nice outside to re-thicket. So what happened today? Substack is sort of the last platform I was willing to be on, and that too only because my favorite internet people were active there. They have already done distasteful things like introducing betting apps, but today affected the medium of writing itself. Substack introduced the checking of posts to identify if they were AI generated. Ironically, the process itself is handled by an AI company.

This is Dark Forestry in action.

Substack has now introduced a mechanism to impose shame and disgust on people, it’s the classic target creation approach. Again it is under the guise of giving better quality of posts. But it is insulting in multiple ways:

1. People who want to do nefarious things will still.
2. This will impose shame on those people, including me, who largely published AI-generated articles that were products of lots of reading, and AI-assisted exploration. I could write these things, but I lack the time.
3. It treats the readers as children who need to be protected and warned about the bad people using AI. In reality this is just hijacking existing (not entirely unfair) anti-AI writing sentiments and gives it fangs. What would have been an otherwise gently evolving discourse suddenly gets super aggressive because one side was handed weapons.
4. This is not school. So what if I or anyone else generates and posts complete blithering slop? If someone doesn’t want to read it, they won’t. There have been terrible books, terrible people, and terrible ideas since forever.

[For some reason if you are reading this in the future and Substack is dead, Substack started off as a newsletter hosting site and eventually positioned itself as a general purpose social media platform with some very interesting people.]

In my last essay I mentioned how interregnums are also a spatial phenomenon, in the sense of Space-making. Unlike temporal interregnums, you don’t need to wait. You can just go and sit where the platforms are not, which is the rest of the internet. The internet is infinite, you can create whatever Space you want, so why shouldn’t you. Heck the internet is created because someone creates something, without a platform business being required. The soul of the internet is based on the idea that you can and should escape the legibilizing forces of the modernity. I mean yes, your website is where you are maximally legible but no one can do anything about it. All we need to do is to actually use the internet the way it’s supposed to be used. And using it the right way, directly getting your hands dirty is ever easier with AI. Refuse to even address the issues of the platform and just get on with doing the things you want to do. Unlike the Gramsci Gap you completely avoid the morbidities by letting them fester in minds you want to do nothing with.

I actually edited out a bit out of the last essay because I didn’t like the word coppicing. But what the heck it’s an important idea, so let’s bring that back in. Coppicing is how physical thickets are maintained. You allow the natural ways of life to take place and life to grow, then you come back periodically and trim in ways that encourage much more vigorous growth. Specifically, the trees don’t lose their roots so when they regrow the young shoots are being fed by a tank of a root system. This prevents the creation of a forest but does not take away the generativity of nature. My father has practiced low-maintenance agri/horticulture for all his life, most of my childhood was spent in literal thickets with plants and critters that held each other in balance. Thickets use the temporal security of periodic trimming, the “Places”, to give freedom and indeed illegibility to the life that unfolds in the Space inside.

This is how you work with nature and reap huge rewards by working with the material using the affordances it provides without needing to force anything.

So, I find myself simultaneously wondering how to do thicketing properly and actually doing it. You just do the thing you want, by using boundary Places, creating Space, and resisting enclosure. Coppicing will be the activity that prevents the site from becoming a brand with an audience to serve, essentially doing what I do which is to pick and abandon things on whim. Unlike leaving platforms or them dying, my material does not lose its “roots” my thoughts and friends aren’t lost forever, they will sustain all future growth. So, inside this space, life, and Liveness will thrive.

I have made all the friends I have made away from platforms. My most active internet communities were either sourced from direct interactions or through blogs. So, I ask myself, why bother to stay on these platforms at all? I have this website, which is great, mastodon and ActivityPub for all their shortcomings are good enough. The IndieWeb, if I choose to participate, seems like it’s made up of nice enough people, my apologies for the occasional jab at weird terminologies. What else would anyone want? So, I choose to leave and just stay in that off-platform zone. The OG internet natives with their decades old websites (mine is too, just with large gaps) have always said that this is the way to do it. It just felt like a major disadvantage to abandon your friends and live in the FOMO. But looking back, half-way through life, I suspect I lost chances to make more friends by not leaving earlier. I was too much of a lurker on the platforms not wanting to draw attention, and absent from the rest of the internet. So, hi, here I am, where I always have been I suppose, let’s have fun.

— PS: As I’m sure you noticed the whole post is handwritten and barely edited, this is because there is little conceptual complexity. Normally 4-5x the length of the post would be my notes and exchanges with AI to figure out what I was exploring. This is why AI-assisted writing is powerful, anyone shaming it is… well they aren’t here :D.