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As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy.

• asplake 7y ago
  Actually that’s a good point. One thing I won’t tolerate in a community I host is its use to conspire against others (or even to attack them behind their backs). I would guess that happens quite a bit even in communities not set up for that purpose.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• persuemeliketh 7y ago
  >do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them populist non-techie people concerend with transhumanism have a niche, its called the "conspiracy theory" community and yes it is actively getting banned or shadowbanned at all significant gradations of intensity by facegoog
• ystrickler 7y ago
  I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.
  • soulofmischief 7y ago
    I was interested in reading your article, but Medium has it behind a paywall.
    • ystrickler 7y ago
      My newsletter archive is here: https://tinyletter.com/ystrickler/letters/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet https://tinyletter.com/ystrickler/letters/the-dark-forest-th...
    • keyle 7y ago
      I too get annoyed with that. Outline.com is your friend.
      • VvR-Ox 7y ago
        Thx for the hint that looks really interesting!
    • aabbcc1241 7y ago
      Interestingly, the pay wall does not block web archive or proxies. You can access the article via https://web.archive.org https://web.archive.org or https://minweb.surge.sh https://minweb.surge.sh
  • panarky 7y ago
    I identified with this post immediately -- both because of the Cixin Liu reference and my own behavior recently. Before: good opsec, ad blockers, minimal social media under my own name, anonymous and pseudonymous accounts, etc. Now: Between 5 and 10 spam, scam or phishing voice calls every day to mobile phone, home phone and office phone. So now I never answer any phone unless I'm expecting your call and all ringers are always off. Political operatives of every persuasion are knocking on my door at home several times a week, and there's not even an election on right now. They all have mobile apps, logging every interaction in a central database. So now I don't answer my own door at home. Used to enjoy discussing current events, economics, geopolitics, tech policy with family and work friends. We usually disagreed, but it was fun to talk and often I learned a new perspective. But now these discussions are amped up to 11, emotionally charged in every direction, so these conversations only happen with intimate friends now. I'm either living in a dark forest or I'm a turtle withdrawing into its shell. Meanwhile, others in my neighborhood are emerging from their shells, flying confederate flags and more obscure but hateful symbols, and advocating neighborhood militias on Nextdoor.
• jerf 7y ago
  If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill. Don't ask about why the oven seems so dirty.
  • KirinDave 7y ago
    Spoken like someone who has never pissed off fascists and found death threats in their PO box. Or lost their job because of a tweet about men being sexisg. Or (to flip the political spectrum), been carefully outed from your hidden fascist leanings by undercover agents and machine learning, instantly losing your job and being evicted from your home. Violence exists on the internet.
    • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
      Tweets and internet posts are not violence.
      • Kye 7y ago
        Violence is an expansive concept beyond the usual usage. Tweets and posts can lead to all kinds. Recent example: at least one politician being milkshaked after the first incident. And even though I find fascist views abhorrent, I can see the fear they feel about the possibility of being clocked post-Spencer as a sort of violence. Oddly, these same people would reject the notion of violence as something beyond immediate and physical... And then LGBTQ+ people experience economic violence all the time. There are no protections in most places, and plenty of people are happy to fire them/kick them out of apartments based entirely on stereotypes.
        • derp_dee_derp 7y ago
          There is no such thing as economic violence either. The word you are looking for is discrimination.
          • 7y ago
• ethbro 7y ago
  grinds teeth A vein almost explodes in my forehead everytime someone points to Cixin Liu as the originator of DFT. The idea's been around since the early to mid-80s, and people could at least do diligence to properly cite. It's almost as insulting as if I said "When George Lucas started science fiction films with Star Wars..."
  • mac01021 7y ago
    So who are the originators?
  • F_r_k 7y ago
    Could you cite some books that covered DFT ? I'm eager to read them
    • Symmetry 7y ago
      The Killing Star (1995) would be the main one that comes to mind for me. Even uses a dark forest as a metaphor though in this case it's a city park full of gangsters.
    • livueta 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure David Brin touches on it somewhere, but not to the extent of being the basis of an entire novel. Can't recall exactly where, sadly. At minimum, Revelation Space features it as a major plot-point and was published in 2000, significantly predating Dark Forest.
      • WorldMaker 7y ago
        It's related to the premise of David Brin's Uplift series, so in one way it's the basis of multiple trilogies of books. It's been one possible answer for as long as sci-fi has debated the Drake equation and Fermi paradox. Arguably, it is a critical part of the thesis of War of the Worlds as far back as the late 19th Century.
        • TeMPOraL 7y ago
• KirinDave 7y ago
  > Is that really what we have here, on the internet? When we find our autonomous zones (to steal an anarchist phrase), do Google and Facebook actively exterminate them? No. Not yet, anyway Worse: they co-opt and integrate them. We're already seeing that start to happen with Mastodon as well, the gravity is real. There are a lot of instances that flat out refuse to pair with corporate or government funded servers as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook started launching a scuttlebutt system and tried to monetize it. It is, as they say, 2019.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• morley 7y ago
  There are some forms of internet "weapons" that I think reach the same scale as the ones in Cixin's series: - Social media harassment - Review bombs - Doxxing - Swatting Luckily, the internet is not at a point where any individual who reveals their contact information is subject to these problems.
  • beat 7y ago
    That's a good point. I think it's subject to some of the same flaws as the original article, but you're right - the Dark Forest of the internet already has ways of driving people off.
• jasaloo 7y ago
  yes- I hate to nitpick with these sort of things since I really enjoyed the essay, but as a lover of Liu's series I took issue with the dark forest analogy. I think the author was rather describing Liu's concept of a "black domain," namely "a region of spacetime in which the speed of light is lowered artificially to completely seal it off (and protect it) from the rest of the Universe." (Wikipedia) Apart from that, really appreciated the author's ideas and using the phrase "...depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments." Spot on.
• xosys 7y ago
  What about the lives that were ruined in the past and even today because of keeping the antiquated belief alive? Nobody supporting the church/belief seems to do anything for those misfortunate people. It would be nice if people just accepted relativity/determinism and gathered around discussing how their life is special; what they expect in the future with their goals & how they're getting there. Except a giant nope because people are narcissists that don't care about the abused.
• cotelletta 7y ago
  In a world where some people have a reach millions or even hundreds of millions larger than others, the analogy may be much more apt than you give it credit for. What I find so myopic is the insistence that the 2016 election was somehow a milestone in this. The precedent was already there, and the playbook already written. But it was mainly used by the dominant left wing cultural elite to enforce their favored view, so it was seen as justified. It was only when the counter culture on the right started making use of it that the moral panic took off. Before Milo there was Shanley, combining reasonable sounding intersectional medium pieces with an ascerbic Twitter persona to create a one-woman motte and bailey. Who directed witch hunts to industry figures and got rewarded with paying subscribers for it. Before Trump there was DongleGate and ElevatorGate, showing the power of a narcissist who rewrites history to be the underdog, and whose audience doesn't listen to opposing views and experiences. Before Cambridge Analytica, there was the Obama campaign, hoovering up all the same data, except with Facebook's full knowledge and approval, and the progressive media's admiration and blessing for leaving those Stone age Republicans in the dust. In many ways, the big tech companies are just the scapegoat. Nobody was forced to move into Facebook, they did so voluntarily. Nobody was forced to push out buzzfeed level content, they just stared themselves blind on pageviews while losing their core audience. Nobody was forced to abandon critical thinking, they just succumbed to wishful thinking and tribalism.