Introducing the Public Domain Art Appreciators Keyholder Group

Welcome to the Dark Forest Operating System (DFOS) space for FAQ + Intro to the Studio Slowcore Dark Forest, a creative production studio that caters to sustained-attention interests. We write about slow culture, public domain art, and economic value flow in the context of artists' livelihoods.

DFOS opened its doors to the public just a few weeks ago, and our studio is fortunate to be amongst the pioneering DFOS spaces.

Today we're introducing the first of three keyholders-only spaces in our Dark Forest: the Public Domain Art Appreciators Group. The group is an extension of our daily gift-feed known as the An Intro to the Public Domain Art Portal (PDAP), which is a personal curation-by-slowcore-ethos project described as "a gentle open-ended daily inquiry into the placement of human attention, and an affirmation of enduring forms of value."

What is DFOS?

If you're just joining us, DFOS (which takes its name from The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet) is a kind of shared private internet with a customizable desktop. It's modular infrastructure that enables groups to collaborate, build trust, release work, and set up money inflows + outflows on their own terms — while steering clear of the extractive patterns that dominate the public internet. DFOS is free of the spam, scrapers, AI slop, ads, and data harvesting risks that drive many of us away from social media.

As Lena Imamura writes: "DFOS gives you digital space you control, built through trust. A shared desktop with custom apps and community tools to talk, publish, coordinate, and move money in one place. You decide who's in, what's open, and what stays private. It's built on a protocol, so you own what you make. No algorithm, no ads, no surveillance."

It's refreshing to be settling into what we hope will be our "forever home," since it's built by a team that is encoding antienshittification measures at the infrastructure level.

Read more:

• What if you could start your own internet?
• Metalabel Studios blog

What You'll Find in Our Dark Forest

Our Dark Forest space is organized into four main sections. Each section appears on the shared desktop in the form of a folder you can open and explore.

• Welcome + Chat - Studio main blog + chat, the slowcore canon, and our learner's guide to Metalabel + groupcore.
• Slowcore Press - Folder for our incipient publishing/curation entity, including links to contributor blogs.
• Slowcore Value Flow - A nerd talk space where the Sloth People (that's us) get deeper into the weeds about the principles of slowcore value flow, gift culture, and related topics.
• Public Domain Art Portal - Art curated slowcore-style, with care and sustained human attention.

Note: we do not use generative AI for writing or editing. Everything in our DFOS is written, edited, curated, and regularly maintained — with care and sustained attention — by humans.

PDAP Gift-Feed Benefits For All Space Members

The posts in our daily gift-feed will remain accessible to all members of our Dark Forest. Benefits include:

• A tasteful, human-curated gift-feed of art — delivered free of ads, subscription nags, algo pressures, AI slop, low-value filler content, and other attention-extractive patterns.
• Sources are always provided, so readers can learn more about the art and verify provenance.
• Art that can be repurposed for readers' own projects — commercial work included.

Additional Benefits For PD Art Appreciator Keyholders

Readers who'd like to subsidize the gift-feed — and instantly unlock additional benefits — can now join the PD Art Appreciators Group by purchasing a key directly in-app.

Price: $3.33 per month or $33.33 annually. Benefits include:

• Access to desktop folders organized for quick access and easy browsing of the archives by theme and artist name. (See screenshot).
• Quick access to all the posts that have conversation threads attached, since they're organized into folders. Keyholders can easily locate the convo threads, and revive them anytime with new comments.
• Occasional personal journals and behind-the-scenes process notes. Topics may include: finding high-quality public domain art; dodging AI slop; verifying sources; copyright and licensing questions; and commercial uses of PD art.
• Occasional mood boards. See samples in Same Energy Lives On (And It's Better Than Pinterest).
• The ability to submit custom theme requests.
• A PD Art Appreciator profile badge.
• Participation in a slowcore value flow experiment in a space that affirms the value of human curation, privacy, time, attention, gifts, and care — yours and the curator's. Ours will be among the first DFOS-administered experiments of its kind.
• Helping Slowcore Press (our incipient publishing entity) increase our optionality to enlist other professionals for our Metalabel projects and pay them fairly. We'll direct a portion of net income from key sales toward fulfilling that purpose.
• Supporting DFOS development: 10% of key sales proceeds go to DFOS, so key purchases will also support a great team that's building infrastructure to minimize the risk of enshittification and address the funding gaps for creative work.
• An interesting groupcore twist: funds from key purchases will be automatically routed directly into our DFOS desktop treasury in a transparent way. Inflows and outflows are visible to all members by default.

Notes

• As mentioned, we're among the first to use these brand-new funding features, so we're learning alongside our readers as we go. If we encounter issues, we may need to make changes.
• We're deliberately starting slow, with small amounts of money, so we can test the waters and iron out any issues that may arise. We may cap the number of keyholder memberships available at these early rates.
• We plan to document our reasoning processes and early experiences with onboarding paid keyholders (in a general way, without including identifying info), so other spacerunners can learn from these things right alongside us.

What's Next?

We're introducing the in-house commerce options because — as you might imagine for a studio with a name like slowcore — we're in this for the long haul. Our aim with DFOS is to establish a curated treasure trove of browsing libraries that we can maintain and improve sustainably and slowly, with an eye toward compounding both gift value and exchange value over time.

Work in progress includes two more keyholders-only groups:

• The Anticareerist (1998-2023) - Critiques of compulsory employment by a Professional Anticareerist. Toward a world beyond earning a living: unjobbing, dejobbing, decolonizing time, and cultivating a culture of leisure in an overworked world.
  • Keys for The Anticareerist are available for purchase now. A full list of essay titles is already posted, but we're keeping the group low-profile for now because the process of importing 25 years of published work has just begun.
• Slowcore Value Flow (SVF) - Deep dive nerd-snipe convos on an ethos and conceptual framework developed by Studio Slowcore to explain how we think about value, and how we prefer to work together. Includes some backstage workshopping of material for Slowcore Press releases.
  • Keys for SVF will be available soon when they're ready. If the first paid group experiment goes well, the SVF group may open sooner because we'll be able to give it more of our time and attention.

The big-picture view also situates our Dark Forest as one node in a much larger arts-and-culture reciprocity movement that's still in its early stages, but gaining steam thanks to the work of Yancey Strickler, the DFOS team, and our fellow DFOS spacerunners. Exciting new infrastructure for arts-and-culture funding is emerging through Metalabel, DFOS, and Artist Corporations.

Although we're glad we left the hustle culture of social media behind, we also hope DFOS can help us reach the right readers — i.e., those who appreciate and value our slowcore ways. Thus far, we've relied solely on word of mouth and the DFOS discovery tool. Our DFOS space is on track to replace our other publishing outlets, however, so we'll soon be inviting our readers from Substack, Paragraph, and Farcaster to join our Dark Forest.

Non-Keyholders Are Also Welcome

Keyholders help underwrite our publishing /curation efforts, and that's important, but space members are also welcome to explore the gift-feeds in our space without making purchases — and because this is happening in DFOS, our gift-feeds can deliver our unique flavor of slowcore-value completely free of ads, scrapers, AI slop, algo feeds, and other risks of public internet spaces.

In any event, thanks for joining us. Whether or not you opt to become a paid keyholder, your time and sustained attention contribute unseen but very real forms of value to our network — and we aim to acknowledge this value through mutual respect and non-coercion.

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