Digital Marketing for Creatives

You ever get the feeling you’re screaming into a void, but the void is just screaming back at you in the same five phrases it scraped from some other void? That’s not just your standard-issue existential dread, folks. That’s the “Dead Internet Theory,” and it’s less of a theory and more of a “have you looked at your phone today?”

The basic gist is that the internet, this thing we were told was gonna connect us all in a global village of shared humanity, is now mostly just bots talking to bots. It’s AI-generated garbage optimized not to inform or inspire, but to grab a fleeting second of your attention before you scroll past it to the next piece of algorithmic slop. It’s a hall of mirrors where nobody is actually in the room.

And for those of us trying to make actual, honest-to-god creative work? It’s a nightmare. You’re trying to put your soul into something, and you’re competing with a machine that can generate a thousand “soulful” paintings before you’ve even finished your morning coffee. It’s not art; it’s output. It’s content in the truest, most meaningless sense of the word. The whole thing is designed to please a crawler, not a person, and you can feel it in your bones when you’re scrolling. It’s the death of the weird, the personal, the real.

So what the hell do you do?

This is where the “Dark Forest” theory comes in.

You remember that feeling when you were a kid, and you and your friends would build a fort in the woods? It was your spot. It wasn’t on a map, the adults didn’t know about it, and you could say whatever stupid, brilliant, or weird shit you wanted without it being broadcast to the entire world. That’s the Dark Forest of the Internet.

The idea is that we’re all retreating from the “Clearnet” ,the ad-ridden, bot-infested, performative hellscape of Instagram and X, into smaller, more intimate, and often private spaces. It’s a reaction to the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and the general sense that you’re just a product being farmed for engagement. It’s where you go when you want to actually talk to someone, not just broadcast your curated life to a faceless audience.

Now, unlike the Dead Internet, which just feels like a cold, digital void, the Dark Forest is a place where creatives can actually, you know, thrive. It’s a return to the Gemeinschaft, that old sociologist term for communities built on emotional ties and shared experience, as opposed to the rational, goal-oriented Gesellschaft of the corporate web. It’s where we can be human again.

Need some examples? Here’s how you can get your ass into the woods.

1. Mailing Lists: The OG Underground. Yeah, remember email? Before it was all spam and newsletters from brands you don’t care about, it was the heart of the early internet. Creative communities like the Nettime list were where artists, writers, and activists built a global scene, not by optimizing for an algorithm, but by talking to each other. It wasn’t about self-promotion; it was about collective ideas. As one of the founders put it, these lists are “bridges between events and the Net,” best for mediating between the real and the virtual. Start one for your niche. It’s a deliberate, focused conversation in a world of noise.

2. Discord Servers or Slack Channels: The New Agora. This is where you find the hyper-niche communities. It’s not for the masses; it’s for the weirdos, the crypto traders, the artists, the IRL friend circles, all safely out of the reach of algorithmic overseers. It’s a backchannel where you can have a real-time, unfiltered exchange with people who actually give a shit about the same weird stuff you do. You can workshop ideas, share rough drafts, and get honest feedback without the public humiliation of a bad take going viral.

3. Newsletters and Podcasts: The Subversive Monologue. I know, I know. But stick with me. A newsletter isn’t a tweet. A podcast isn’t a TikTok. They’re mediums designed for depth. They live in a person’s inbox or earbuds, a “dark forest” space mostly free from the indexing and gamification of the public web. You’re not fighting an algorithm for a spot on a timeline; you’re invited into someone’s private space. Ian Maleney, who moved his literary journal from the web to print, realized he needed to abandon the “always-on, what’s-next world of the internet” for a rhythm that was more sustainable, giving him a sense of achievement and release that the relentless churn never could.

The point is, the culture isn’t dead; it’s just migrating. It’s leaving the mall and going back to the underground clubs. It’s realizing that maybe the only way to save your creative soul is to stop trying to win a popularity contest on a dying platform. It’s about creating work with a pulse in a world full of synthetic sameness. It’s about finding your people and making something real.

As my old friend Yancey Strickler said, we’re retreating away from the mainstream. And for those of us who need to create, to connect, to feel alive? Good. Find your dark forest. Build your fort. Start talking. Let the bots have the wasteland.

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Look, I’m not telling you to go full Luddite and smash your laptop. We’re in this mess, and we gotta figure out how to navigate it without losing our goddamn minds. The Dark Forest is where you go to breathe, to create, to be human. But you still need to poke your head out of the trees every now and then and let people know you exist. The trick isn’t to become another soulless marketer shouting into the abyss, it’s to market with intention, with integrity, and then get the hell back to your work.

That’s exactly what my book, Digital Marketing for Creatives, is about. It’s not another growth-hacking manual written by some tech bro who thinks “authenticity” is a strategy. It’s a guide for artists, writers, musicians, and makers who want to cut through the algorithmic noise, reach the people who actually care, and then spend the rest of their time doing what they were put on this planet to do: creating.

The world doesn’t need another marketer. The world needs artists. It needs your voice, your vision, your weird, beautiful, singular take on all this madness. This book will help you build a sustainable, low-bullshit marketing practice that works for you, not the other way around. So you can stop doom-scrolling, stop chasing metrics that don’t matter, and get back to the only thing that ever made any sense in the first place: the work.

Now go make something real. I’ll be in my studio.