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Every theory of the internet is almost a theory about online attention and, above all, surveillance and visibility.
Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet says something about the subject that most Western media writing won’t admit, that the lights online were never for seeing but for being seen. The book interprets the internet, and then AI, through Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, a universe where civilizations hide because getting noticed gets you killed.
In this text, I ask, from where does this picture emerge and where is Konior positioned when she writes about it? The short answer is that the dark forest she borrows from Liu grew straight out of communist one-party states, and that her book makes the most sense once it is read that way.
Liu’s trilogy begins in 1967, at the height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Beijing during a “Struggle Session,” where a young astrophysicist watches Red Guards beat her father to death for refusing to take back his scientific claims, killing her faith in humanity. What grows in its place is the certainty that humans can’t be trusted with themselves. That certainty is what makes her respond to the alien signal and invite a hostile civilization to come and wipe Earth out.
This is why Liu’s dark forest rule that shows up in his second volume about staying silent because anything that spots you will assume the worst and shoot first, is just the struggle session blown up to the size of the galaxy.