“Fika” is a Swedish tradition where you take time out of your day to socialize with friends, family, or colleagues over a cup of coffee or tea. It's a time to relax and enjoy the company of others.
But why "fika" for this product? Well, coining new names is important. It sheds light on the invisible and lays the building blocks to create narratives upon. Let's talk how I got there.
The dark forest
One of these neologisms is "Dark Forest", which was popularized in 2008 by Liu Cixin when he published a book of the same name.
The "Dark Forest" is a hypothesis that tries to explain why we haven't found alien life despite how likely it should be (the Fermi Paradox). It uses a metaphor: in a dark forest, full of hostile predators, one wouldn't make themselves known to others, as it would mean certain death.
In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, wrote an essay that brought this term to the tech world. He argued that the internet is slowly becoming a dark forest, where people are afraid to share their thoughts and ideas, as they might be attacked by trolls or other predatory actors.
