Last year, a dozen writers (including me) published a book together about how we live online. No publishers, no complex arrangements. But also not quite self-publishing, something better. The project served as a kind of guinea pig for how far a fluid configuration of collaborators could take a project using only a shared vision, a shared treasury, and automatic splits to distribute money among the group.Turns out the answer is quite far, and getting farther.In its first year, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet was collected by nearly two thousand people; showed up in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and the Museum of Modern Art; and earned more than $60,000 in book sales, $30,000 of which were automatically paid out to the authors like a passive royalty stream. But how did it all work? How much did everything cost? Let’s dig in.Title: The Dark Forest Anthology of the InternetReleased: 02/22/24Collectors: 1,700+Sales: $66,000 gross volumeIn 2019 I sent a newsletter about why I no longer felt comfortable being myself online called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The essay struck a chord and went nerd-viral. Within days other writers were building on the idea.In 2023, I reached out to the authors of a dozen pieces written in the years since the original essay and suggested we come together to create a living canon of this idea. I shared a link to this proposal and suggested the following economic structure: I’d personally pay for the designer’s fee; initial sales from the book would pay me backThe costs of printing would be paid for by an advance from Metalabel; those costs would also be recoupedOnce costs had been paid for, we would split the money equally  Since the book contained pieces by eight sets of authors, each author set would receive 10% of the book proceedsThe remaining 20% would go to a Dark Forest Collective treasury of money we could spend on new projects (I donated my cut here too)Based on this structure, I projected each author set t