One liner

The internet is a dark forest, where visibility creates risk, and connection inevitably produces conflict.

Description

This short essay proposes the “dark forest” as a model for understanding the internet, drawing on Liu Cixin’s science fiction theory in which communication between civilizations is inherently dangerous, as it exposes one’s existence to potential threat.

Extending this framework to digital culture, the essay argues that online communication operates under similar conditions. Sociality is both necessary and hazardous: users are compelled to communicate, yet every act of expression reveals information that can be used against them. Visibility becomes a form of vulnerability, and connection produces not mutual understanding but escalating complexity and conflict.

The internet as a system that amplifies interiority while simultaneously dissolving agency. Users experience the world as intensely personal, yet operate within automated, large-scale dynamics that exceed individual control. Communication, rather than clarifying intentions, intensifies suspicion, producing a “chain of suspicion” across digital networks.

The internet is an entropic system: the more communication increases, the more disorder and conflict emerge.

The essay later became a small part of the book, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).

Materials

2020-Konior-FS-Dark-Forest.pdf

Reference

Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Flugschriften, 2020.