The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web

The Cozy Web is Venkatesh Rao's term for the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet, such as Slack channels, WhatsApp groups, Discord chats, and email, where people retreat from the public web. The article presents it as a complement to Yancey Strickler's Dark Forest theory of the internet, in which users stay hidden because advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, influencers, reply guys, and trolls act as predators. Rao first proposed the term in one of his Breaking Smart emails, and the article describes its spaces as non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments where conversation can be less pressured.