Hello friends,
Welcome back to your fortnightly missive of sharp reframes and tiny experiments loving crafted by me (Adam Thomas, founder of Evenly Distributed). It takes five minutes to read and is here to help you build an organisation that funders trust, teams love, and communities actually need.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how organisational communications feel loud and desperate right now. Everyone is building in public, half of it is AI-infected, and even the sincere stuff lands badly because folks have developed a serious immune response to self-promotion.
At the same time, we're all exhausted as individuals and all feeling the pressure to pump out think-pieces and develop our personal brands on TikTok or Kick or wherever.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s my case for going Dark Forest.
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WHAT IS IT?
In 2019, Yancey Strickler wrote an essay called The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (inspired by one of my favourite sci-fi authors Liu Cixin). The idea: a dark forest looks silent, but it’s actually full of life. Things stay quiet not because of an absence of life, but because predators are out.
Strickler’s point was that the mainstream internet has become so hostile (ads, tracking, volume, trolling, hype cycles, outrage) that people have retreated to “dark forest” spaces where communication is non-indexed, non-optimised, and non-threatening. Think newsletters, podcasts, group chats, private communities.
This isn’t niche behaviour, it’s a rational response. We see it play out in news avoidance and we also see it as a reaction to AI slop - people are opting out of feeds and public fora, choosing to consume or communicate away from the algorithm.
If your real job isn’t to win attention, but to build trust over time, then this shift can actually benefit you. You can stop trying to out-shout the internet and build smaller, calmer spaces where people actually listen, and where you don’t have to market your own existence (as a leader, or as an organisation) on LinkedIn every Tuesday.
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HOW IT WORKS
Going Dark Forest means building small, intentional spaces where the right people can hear each other. Strickler describes these spaces as “depressurised.” Everyone relaxes because no-one is trying to sell each other anything.
This might be a WhatsApp group, a community Zoom call, a coffee morning, a side-event at a festival. A Dark Forest space isn’t a one-off community moment. It’s a rhythm: a monthly briefing, a quarterly funder salon, weekly 30-min office hours for partners/alumni, the occasional we’re thinking out loud, come help thread.
It needs memory. You need notes, short write-ups, recordings, a living doc, a lightweight archive (this is the bit many leaders miss - they build a container, but no momentum builds inside it).
And it also needs a porous edge - think of it as a membrane, not a wall. That might look like open resources anyone can access, a public “start here” page, occasional open calls, transparent how to join / how we work descriptions. This is how you stay values-aligned and avoid invite-only cliques.
The real benefits come from what you can stop doing. No more LinkedIn grifting (Congratulations on your 4 year work anniversary!). No expensive social video production hitting precisely 35 views each time. No weekly scramble for something - anything! - to promote in the weekly newsletter you regret committing to.
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GET STARTED
Two tiny experiments for ya.
1) Replace one public, organisational update with a private briefing.
Instead of your usual monthly socials post, write a one-page memo:
• what changed this month
• what you learned
• what you’re worried about
• what help would actually be useful
Send it to 15–30 people: funders, partners, community stakeholders, sceptics, friendly rivals. This is Dark Forest communications in its purest form: small audience, high signal, higher trust.
2) Make one thing heavy (and let the light stuff point to it)
Choose one “heavy” asset to build over 2-3 months: a proper field guide, a podcast series people will cite, a candid annual letter (not the thrilled to announce kind), a mini-briefing for funders on trends in your space.
Then use public platforms lightly as signposts towards that thing.
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WHAT TO AVOID
To be clear, I’m not telling you what to do or not to do. Not all social media is bad. There are 1000+ folks subscribed to this newsletter, and you've all got your own thing going on. But if you are Dark Forest curious, I'd encourage you to give it a go, with a gentle warning to avoid the following:
1) Turning dark forest into elitism. Invite-only can become self-congratulatory. If your work claims to serve a community, your comms need those permeable edges: ways for new people to enter without knowing the secret handshake.
2) Mistaking reach for impact (or vice versa). Vanity metrics are nonsense, but so is pretending public platforms don’t matter. Strickler’s essay includes a warning: if thoughtful people abandon the mainstream entirely, you leave the arena to whoever enjoys shouting. 
3) Treating gatherings like logistics. If you do decide to bring people together, Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering is a good corrective: purpose and design matter more than scale. (Too many community events are just disorganised meetings with name badges and biscuits). 
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🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊
As I was writing this, I realised it connects very closely to two other ideas I’ve been obsessed with in recent times. The first is Jenny Odell’s core argument in How to Do Nothing: resisting the attention economy isn’t about becoming a hermit, it’s about reclaiming attention and choosing what you orient towards. 
And the second is this essay by Anu Atluru, who talks about creative weight.
The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production.
Both tell us the same thing.
When we are more intentional with our organisation’s attention and output, magical things happen. We forge better connections, we create things that stand the test of time, and we actually end up working less because we’re not just spinning in place the whole goddamn time.
Sounds good, eh?
As ever, if you liked this - send to a friend! They will hopefully thank you.
Take care,
Adam
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p.s. If you were forwarded this, welcome! You can subscribe over at my website.
p.p.s If you've been here for a while, thank you too! If you'd like to support the making of our own patch of Dark Forest, you can tip me and I will be happy and validated and I can tell my mum.
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Where to find me (AKA my many, many hats)
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