The Dark Forest

Orbital Operations for 13 April 2025

Author

Warren Ellis
April 13, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

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Image credit: JuanCholo / CC BY-SA 4.0


Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. The surge of spring is speaking to me, this year. Not all springs are equal. I mean, last year, there was barely a spring at all, it was winter until the first week of July. I feel all woken up. I’m also covered in scratches from cutting down a holly, a privet and a viburnum. Just because I needed to let the light in while it lasts. How are you doing?

In this letter:

  • The Method

  • Operations

  • The Dark Forest Theory

  • The News

Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here for free.

THE WORLD SERVICE

THE METHOD

I’ve taught a few people this method over the years. The method has undergone a lot of addition and adaptation across the decades, pulling in useful stuff from other people. It doesn’t work for everything, and nor should it, but, when all else fails, it can be a handy foundation.

So you’ve had your idea. Grab a notebook or open a plain text file and empty out every thought you have about and around the idea. This can take a few hours, this can take weeks. This is fine. When you think you’re done, or nearly so, open up a word processor file and transcribe or copy it all over. It’s fine to rewrite or tweak as you go. You’ve just done all the hardest work in the method. From this point on, you will never have to start with a blank page. That’s the point of the method. You’re always writing over what you already have.

All your notes are copied down. Save them. Copy the whole lot and paste into a new file with a different name. Now start assembling them into a shape, deleting anything that doesn’t fit (you already saved it all), adding whatever you need, surrounding the whole thing.

Copy and paste into new file. Break it down into episodes. Again, rewriting as you go. Go as deep as you like. Some people like a skeleton framework, some people go full “scriptment” style and lay in dialogue and colour.

By the end of it, you should be able to see everything that happens in every episode, in order, having kicked out your timing errors and your broken connections.

When it comes to scripting, copy and paste the outline for your episode into a new document. Bang. You’ve got a complete breakdown of your episode right there, and all you have to do is expand it out into script. All the difficult work of, you know, having your story make sense is done, and you’ve left yourself the juicy work of actual writing, character and setting and action and dialogue.

Sometimes, the method is what saves a piece.

OPERATIONS

OPERATIONS

So, if you go to https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/ on your phone and log into the site with the credentials you signed up with, when the page reloads it may offer you the option to install the page as an app on the home screen on your phone. This is what my newsletter host says:

Apple devices will have the install instructions presented in a few steps. When clicking the Login link from an email, we recommend opening Safari to complete the installation process for best results. 

Android devices will just need to click on the Install App button and then click Install. 

The installation popup will appear only on a visitor's first visit. After that, the option to 'Add App to Home Screen' will be available in the dropdown menu at the top right corner of your mobile website. This menu will appear as a profile icon if the visitor is logged in or a hamburger menu if not logged in.

I have no idea if notifications of any kind will happen! Probably not! It’s an experiment! Beehiiv introduced the function last year and I have no clue what will occur!

Beehiiv have rolled out a ton of new functions that I haven’t really looked at yet, because I am a simple creature who just writes words down and then pretty much does this:

go do it GIF

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ORBITAL

THE DARK FOREST THEORY

This is why I can’t find anything on the internet any more.

The Dark Forest theory, from Cixin Liu’s excellent THE DARK FOREST, goes a bit like this:

We’re all creeping around a dark forest. Everything is a threat to you in a dark forest. If you make a sound, everyone else in the forest will hear it, turn your way and kill you before you kill them. Even if you had no intention of hurting them. Because the rule is, everything is a threat to you, so you shoot first, every time.

A guy called Yancey Strickler inverted the analogy for his Dark Forest Of The Internet (1)

“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. 

“Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. 

“An increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.” 

I watched this mangling of the Cixin Liu idea (and Venkatesh Rao’s associated “Cosyweb”) become The Dark Forest Collective and The Dark Forest Anthology Of The Internet (2).

I get it. I’ve been telling people for years to find their friends, get off the streams and find private spaces away from all the brainworm-infested shit out there.

But now, as I click around looking for the interesting new writing and the new digital publishers, I run into two problems. One, as I’m sure many of you know, Google doesn’t really work well any more. And two, all the interesting writers are hiding in internet spider holes with their friends and they ain’t coming out. Who can blame them?

Time was, I could browse Strelka (RIP) or a dozen other little digital-first indie publishers like that, and could surface a lot more. But now, search is broken and nobody’s talking out loud any more.

I was reading the transcript of a talk by Erin Kissane (3) the other day, where she talks about tying together an ad hoc network to track COVID infections in the earliest days of the pandemic. She notes that that simply couldn’t happen now, because social software has become so degraded, but she also comments on the Dark Forest of the Internet contention:

My fundamental discomfort with that conclusion is that when those of us who have found our people and managed to get even semi-stable retreat into private spaces, we are slamming the doors on all the people who haven’t got there yet. In Dark Forest terms, we’re leaving them up there to get eaten.

Now, that can’t be helped. But with search and discovery more busted than they’ve been in years and they are not going to become unbusted, people, we’re back to what we had before Google and social network services. Curation.

Might as well be saying “good luck we saved those buggy whips and flint knives!”

Fucking blogs and Yahoo. You want to see what Yahoo looked like thirty years ago?

There was no fancy algo. It was an entirely human curated search page.

I mean, sure, part of this is, I’ve been away for a while and the internet has remodelled while I was out and now I can’t find anything. But also? Jesus, the place got shabby and they moved all the aisle shelves and nothing’s in fucking stock.

There’s work to do. Socials bury you if you post links. So what happens next?

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

THE NEWS, With Lordess Foudre

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

THE LOVECRAFT INVESTIGATIONS: CROWLEY is an audio series launching a crowdfunding round. It’s created by Julian Simpson, who longtime readers will know, and many of you will know from all his other BBC radio and podcast series.

The curious mix of fact and fiction that goes into the Lovecraft Investigations repeatedly throws up one name: Aleister Crowley. The so-called "Wickedest Man In Britain" was an artist, writer, occultist and adventurer who packed a hell of a lot of different, and strange, things into his seventy-two years on Earth. And so we thought, for our first fan-funded adventure in this universe, it would be good to look a little closer at the glue that sticks the world together.


"The Lovecraft Investigations presents Crowley" will be a first for the audio form; a factual account of Crowley's life and adventures, presented by fictional characters. Show hosts Matthew Heawood (Barnaby Kaye) and Kennedy Fisher (Jana Carpenter) will be joined by esteemed professor of folklore Dr Eleanor Peck (Nicola Walker) to dig deep into Crowley's life, and to contextualise him in twentieth century history and within the occult world that he came to dominate.


Far from being a dry history, Crowley will be presented with all the wit, intrigue and irreverence that has made the Lovecraft Investigations a fan favourite. It will be an essential companion to the existing seasons, and provide a bridge into the forthcoming Season Five.


Rewards include exclusive access to the show, scripts, signed stuff, merch, the digital "Beast Box" and the awesome box of swag known as the Department of Works Field Kit.

Here’s the link. You go look now.

Find out more about the Lovecraft Investigations here.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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It’s a whirlwind of bullshit out there, and there is no reason why you have to stand in the middle of it all the damn time. Get a chair in the shade and read a book. Breathe and relax, my friend, and I’ll see you next week.

W

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