In Peter Watts’ 1999 novel Starfish, the workers who live at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean are called “pre-adapted.” The word is careful. Not trained, not modified, not conditioned — pre-adapted. It implies the adaptation was already there before anyone went looking for it. The deep sea didn’t make them what they are; the surface did.
The workers at the Beebe Station — the rifters — were selected from people who failed on the surface. Abuse survivors, the traumatized, the dissociated: people whose psychology had already been shaped into something alien to normal social life. That alienation made them viable for an environment that would destroy anyone the surface had treated well. The deep sea doesn’t need workers who thrive; it needs workers who can endure. What had been damage on the surface became function in the dark.
Fischer, one of the new arrivals, sits in the station lounge after descent and doesn’t know what “pre-adapted” means in practice. He doesn’t feel at home. He doesn’t know why he was selected. The light is wrong, the atmosphere is strange, and one of the other workers — Brander — keeps looking at him in a way he can’t read. The station is a place configured for people it took years to produce, and it isn’t clear yet whether he’s one of them.
The mechanism at work here is not recruitment. The selection happens upstream, in an environment that creates its own excluded population by the act of selecting against it. The corporate interest that built Beebe Station didn’t invent the psychological profile it needed — it found it, already assembled, among the people the surface had organized itself to expel.
A TownSquare is a strip of stick figures at the bottom of a webpage — each figure a visitor currently on the site. You can see which page they’re reading, walk your figure around, send messages that disappear when the people reading them leave. No accounts, no profiles, no follower counts, no permanent history.
The developer who built it describes the goal as restoring “a small feeling that the web used to have: the sense that there are actual people on the other side of the screen.”
What the mainstream web currently offers instead: a page visited in isolation, no indication of who else is reading the same thing at the same time, every interaction preserved and attributed and, if the platform has done its job, monetized. The architecture of accounts and social graphs and permanent records is not accidental. It’s the mechanism through which attention becomes measurable and therefore saleable. Ephemeral, anonymous, low-stakes presence — the kind of presence that can’t be monetized because there’s no identity to attach the engagement data to — gets selected against, not by any single decision but by the accumulated logic of systems that reward what they can count.
The people TownSquare is built for were excluded by that logic. Not deliberately expelled — the way the rifters were deliberately recruited — but structurally outcompeted. They’re the interaction type the mainstream web architecture has no representation for. Its profiles and follower counts and engagement metrics don’t capture what they want; the system’s affordances push them away from the kind of presence they’d choose. TownSquare is built on the negative space left by those affordances.
In Starfish, the dominant environment’s selection pressure produces a specific excluded population and a specific counter-environment shaped around it. In TownSquare, the dominant web’s selection pressure produces a specific excluded interaction type and a specific counter-environment shaped around it. The structural relationship is the same: the dominant environment’s exclusion mechanism serves as the counter-environment’s founding specification.
Neither counter-environment designed itself into existence from principles. The deep sea station wasn’t built by figuring out what a good deep-sea station would look like in the abstract; it was built by recognizing what kind of person could survive down there and then building for them. TownSquare wasn’t built by theorizing the optimal social web; it was built by someone who wanted a thing the mainstream web had stopped providing and who knew others wanted it too.
The asymmetry between the two cases is also worth noting. Beebe Station is a corporate project. The selection of pre-adapted workers is instrumental — what the corporation needs is cheap labor in a hostile environment, and the pre-adapted provide it. Whatever good the deep sea does for people the surface failed, that’s incidental to the business case. TownSquare is the opposite: it’s a personal project, built because its developer experienced the exclusion firsthand. The counter-environment is the point, not a byproduct.
But in both cases, the counter-environment’s design is legible only against the dominant environment’s architecture. You can’t understand who the rifters are without understanding what the surface does to certain people. You can’t understand what TownSquare is for without understanding what the attention economy has done to web presence. The dominant environment writes the counter-environment’s specifications by writing the people it doesn’t want.
Twenty-seven years separate these two documents. In 1999, Watts invented a social mechanism — the institutional recognition and instrumental use of people a dominant environment had already expelled — as the premise for a science fiction novel about deep-sea ecology and corporate horror. In 2026, a developer built TownSquare without any reference to Watts, ecological theory, or the logic of excluded populations. The mechanism appeared again anyway, in a different form, in a different domain, because the mechanism is structural, not authorial.
What the gap between 1999 and 2026 reveals is that dominant environments are always in the process of defining their own counter-environments by the act of excluding. The surface created the rifters. The attention economy created TownSquare’s users. The counter-environment’s character is a function of what the dominant environment finds uninhabitable.
This is what “pre-adapted” actually meant. Not that the rifters were built for the deep. It’s that the deep was the only place where what the surface had done to them became useful rather than disqualifying.