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. I think it could be developed further, though.<p>What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire solar systems - or worse (the weapons in Cixin's dark forest make the Death Star look like a drawing of a BB gun). 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.<p>I think other analogies might be in order for the very real phenomenon of retreating from the corporate internet.
A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing <i>The Dark Forest</i>. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations <i>must</i> act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates of technological advancement and so long as crossing the gaps in space between civilizations takes sufficiently long due to the laws of physics, it seems hard to deny that there might be strong reasons for civilizations to fear each other.
Wouldn't the "Black Domain" concept introduced in Death's End be a better metaphor here? Communities are choosing to seal themselves off from the greater Internet, even if that means they cannot collaborate/engage with as many other people.
Is this a meme?<p>'''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.
I'm not a fan of this metaphor but I definitely feel the phenomenon it's alluding to in my life. I've increasingly enjoyed a relatively obscure social media existence on a small, focused Mastodon community as opposed to the general warfare of Twitter.<p>Similarly I post here out of obligations I have to folks, not because I like it or feel comfortable, welcome, or part of the community. I have smaller, private venues where I feel like I can be myself. And I'm aware sometimes I am a contributor to that attitude of "we are here to pick fights", but there isn't much I can do about it, that's what a lot of tech forums aspire to be.
I feel like there are some really nice ideas in here, but I felt like the metaphor of the dark forest really took a turn when the author started using it to describe the communication channels they felt like were still safe.<p>I'd personally term those burrows or something. Something that is hidden from external observers walking through the dark forest.
Is more a mass of jungle with some old boggy wastelands and an escalating series of slash and burn plantation forestry monocultures all intertwined with unruly canopy vines and invasive fungi.
I'd say the Internet is more like Dante's "dark wood" in that it leads to Hell, but without a Virgil and no road to Paradise (or even Purgatory) waiting at the end.
There are plenty of exclusive communities on the internet because it's just as useful of a tool for any illegal activity as it is for corporations trying to drive more profits.