The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's busines

The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state. There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly. Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.