The cozy web is Venkatesh Rao's term for the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet we have all retreated to over the last few years. It's the โhigh-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.โ The informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven't infiltrated yet.
Venkat first proposed the term in one of his Breaking Smart emails on The Extended Internet Universe. He builds off Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web. The โdark forestโ is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life. All the living creatures within it are hiding. Because โnight is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent.โ The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces.
We hide in the cozy web.
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
