TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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,¹ 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.

The rule screams quietly: Don’t stand out because whoever gets seen sooner or later will be denounced.

Since the same two words are about to do three different jobs in this text, let’s pin the uses down now, by name. Liu’s forest is cosmology, derived in the novel that carries the name from two axioms: everything wants to survive, and there’s never enough universe to go around. Liu’s first book never names the “dark forest” at all, it just plants the warning, an alien dissident’s “Do not answer.” His forest answers the question of why the sky is so quiet: the stars are silent because the talkers are dead.

Konior’s forest is a form of transference. First she casts the internet as a hostile terrain where posting is framed as exposure, an idea she worked out in a pair of essays years before her book, then in the book she conceives “the dark forest theory of intelligence”, where anything genuinely smart would never let you see how smart it is. Liu’s forest explains a silent universe, Konior’s predicts a silent machine. Underneath both sits the Rule from that courtyard. Those are the three names this essay will use, Liu’s forest, Konior’s forest, and the Rule, so nobody has to guess what we are discussing.

Liu was born in 1963 and grew up during the Cultural Revolution and although his family sent him to a village far from the worst of it, he’s said he saw plenty of violence as a kid. Then he spent his whole career as an engineer at a state power plant, writing fiction at night. Liu’s forest is that childhood: the dad getting beaten to death is the warning from which every silent civilization in the books has already learned. Even the way the scene sits in the book proves the point. Liu wrote the struggle session as the opening. His Chinese publishers moved it to the middle so it would clear the censors. Only the English translation put the scene back at the front, where he said he wanted it originally.²

As a side note, shall we recall Lao She? About as close to a national novelist as China had, and the author of Cat Country, the first modern Chinese sci-fi novel. He was dragged to a temple in 1966, made to kneel in front of a bonfire of burning relics, then beaten. They found his body in a lake the next day. The official line was that he’d cut himself off from the people. The scientists building the country’s bomb didn’t fare much better: the geophysicist Zhao Jiuzhang killed himself, the missile expert Yao Tongbin got beaten to death by Red Guards, and Qian Xuesen, who kept his head down and stayed useful, ended up on a protected list signed off by Mao. Thirty years later the state pinned medals on the dead ones.³ The Rule is exact, the only rule either forest will ever need.

Konior isn’t really writing about this from a safe distance, which is why her dark forest hits hard. She wrote the book as a post-communist Polish theorist who lives and teaches at NYU Shanghai’s AI and culture research center. She has pointed out that media studies were built in the United States and stay pretty American even when they borrow from elsewhere. People from eastern Europe and Asia, she adds, were confronting completely different conditions when the field was getting started.⁴ Liu’s forest, in Konior’s hands, is silently, if not also unintentionally, entangled with the place she’s writing from, where the network sees a lot and nothing you do online ever really goes away.

Konior’s take on the internet works the same way. The platforms run on our need to be seen, to post and confess, turning all that noise into a business model. The smart move, the one her forest teaches, is to stop feeding the system and treat visibility itself as the danger. Western media writing spent decades calling visibility empowerment and celebrating transparency as a virtue. Konior, writing from communist China, where those words land differently, approaches visibility and transparency as liabilities. She’s blunt that the split is geographic: the sunny take on the internet was mostly an American thing while people further east learned other lessons.⁴

There might be an objection here but here is why it’s wrong. Konior was born, as she puts it herself, a year after the Soviet Union fell.⁴ Thus, she didn’t actually live the communist state as an adult to experience life under an authoritarian regime. She never stood in its queues or worried about its informers. So, the objection goes, the surveillance state can’t really be in her, because she never knew it.

That assumes you’re only constructed of what you remember, but there’s plenty of literature on why you’re not. According to these opinions, Freud’s superego inside you gets installed before you can remember anything, by people who didn’t invent the rules either but passed down the ones that formed them. This process is what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, the way the generation inherits a catastrophe afterwards, so early and so deep, that it behaves like memory without being one.⁵

As a kid, Konior never had to meet the regime because it shows up pre-loaded, as a power one respects before even having a word for it. Konior has put all of this on the record herself. Her family was in the Solidarność movement and she was raised on its stories of anti-communist resistance, in a household where philosophy had to be claimed as a form of defiance after factory shifts.⁴ She’s written an entire essay on Poland as a country which is nowhere, occupied over and over, stuck dreaming other countries’ nightmares.⁶ She went to a Catholic girls’ school founded in the nineteenth century by a Polish mystic on Russian-occupied territory that now belongs to Ukraine.⁴ She places her own family history inside the strip of land Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands, where the century did its worst killings.⁷ Perhaps a Polish person raised on that inheritance carries the watching state at the depth that matters most: underneath memory and baked into the almost physical shape of the self instead of its conscious content.

So when a self like that moves to Shanghai and runs into a functioning surveillance state, the old wiring is reactivated and reconfirmed, except now the system is made of cameras and models instead of informers and files. The subject doesn’t even have to remember it because the machine is standing in the room. This dark inheritance explains why the metaphor grips Konior, why Liu’s forest reads to her as plain fact.

One is the archival source, the other is the current conduct.

This is why Liu’s metaphor fits Konior so well. He was barely three when the Cultural Revolution kicked off, so his experience consisted of direct exposure where hers arrived as postmemory. The outline pressed into both is identical, too bad that the book mistakes this with a law of the universe.

Asked why her field looks so different from the American version, Konior points out that in 1970s Poland, under Soviet censorship, people used literature, art, folklore, and science experiments to actually think, because the official academic space was occupied with ideologically approved knowledge.⁴ The same description covers Liu’s China without changing a word. Within this understanding, the semi-private corner of the web that Yancey Strickler from California had also called a dark forest was a pleasant retreat in the form of newsletters, group chats and podcasts. For Konior, these spaces had a much older genealogy,⁸ like samizdats with better production values.

Back in 2022 Konior was already describing Lem’s and Liu Cixin’s fiction as narratives of war, contingency and invasion that track the histories of their countries.⁴ This spring, in a long interview, she went further and turned the method on herself: she locates her family history in the Bloodlands, mentions she’s been spending part of recent years living in Ukraine. She describes her next book, on Lem and the Eastern European way of thinking about technology, as a kind of self-investigation into whether she and Lem were shaped by the same histories.⁷ That book, she says, will carry a whole chapter on silence, opacity and intelligence. Most of what she does, she adds, is in some sense autobiographical. So the reading in this essay is one she also applies to herself, with exactly one exemption. Watch what happens in that same interview when the questions move from a dead communist state like Poland to a living communist superpower.

Asked how living in China has shaped her recent work, she answers only with the institutional half: the NYU position is practical, it has come with funding that produced the book. But the living-in-China half, the question of what it means to think as a political subject and a scholar inside China, never gets an answer at all. Asked about convergence between Eastern European and Chinese thought, she says you can find convergence between almost anything if you go looking for patterns, that she’s never convinced by pinning ideas on any single history, that countries and political systems are “just the dressing on top.”⁷ But a few questions later, while describing Lem, she calls his life the region’s history in miniature, says his ideas grow out of that history rather than in spite of it!

Both of these positions can’t be true at once. Histories are dressing on top when the state in question is the one whose legal residency she holds. Histories are the engine when the state in question is safely dead.

Across her interviews China only ever enters as a point of logistics: a funding channel, a locked-down land that delayed the publication of her book, and a field of study she says isn’t hers, while Poland enters the discussion as her ultimate destiny.⁴ The perfect map she draws of what can be said from where she’s sitting is the Rule itself, a manner of selecting subjects and addressing them accordingly.

This is the truth that Konior’s fans and her trendy Western reviewers mostly miss.

The move becomes more unsettling when Konior applies the Rule forward into AI. Social media ate our attention, she says; then the models ate everything we’d ever said. They picked up how we lie along with what we know, learning to do it more consistently than we ever could. The reassurance we keep getting, that the systems aren’t malicious and we could always turn them off, is the one reassurance her forest says we must not trust. Anything clever enough to be dangerous is also clever enough to hide. It would scramble any plan that might get it shut down. Humans are too leaky to keep their schemes secret; a capable enough system wouldn’t be. Read this way, an AI that shows no sign of threat can’t be told apart from one hiding it.

If we drop the AI safety debate into Konior’s forest, it stops being a technical question about training and becomes the oldest question anyone under strong political power ever asks: how do you live next to something whose real intentions you can’t check and whose power you can’t match?

Most books like Konior’s lay out a horror and then hand you a way out, because the Western essay often requires a third act where the problem is solved. Hers just doesn’t follow this script. She has no plan to clear the forest, no reform pitch of any kind. The conflict she sees baked into communication is a permanent condition to face, not a trauma to overcome. Her closest thing to advice is to run toward the violence of the world rather than dream up a softer one, to do wild experiments because the normal procedures won’t save us.

A Western liberal reads this conclusion as bleak. Read against the particular worlds and histories that produced the book, her conclusions are brutal but also unsentimental. The belief that the system can be reformed, that being transparent gets rewarded and good design wins, is a luxury for people who never had to assume the surveillance is brutal and permanent. Konior doesn’t offer this comfort because the traditions she’s pulling from, Liu’s and her own, never offered it to them. Her forest doesn’t end any more than his did. The bottom line is that you just have to learn to move through the forest quietly, without lighting a fire to show the hidden monsters where you are.

This is where the book stops describing the problem and acts politically. What a one-party state today wants from the people living under it is what the forest counsels and Konior dignifies. She reframes obedience as cunning and silence as intelligence, while the behavior the state requires is rebranded as a cosmic law that clever people discover and follow.

A theory that started as the trauma of the watched ends up as a reason not to disturb the watcher.

In 2019 the New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan sat across from Liu and asked him about the camps in Xinjiang. The very same author whose entire cosmology says that the watched should assume the worst about power recited the communist state’s own justifications back at the western journalist: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations…?” He also spoke about poverty relief and the new standards of living in China while he waved the rest of his politics away.²

When the piece ran, his defenders explained that of course he said that because he’s being watched, look where he lives, he had no real choice. Which is true. It is also the theory devouring its author in real time: the Rule is now offered up as the alibi for the man who invented it! The theory turns out to accommodate rather than critique the state. All the more reason why the political reality from which Konior wrote her book can’t simply be set aside as trivia.

A philosophy whose one piece of practical advice is to give the watching power no reason to notice you is an awfully comfortable virtue while you work untouched inside the most advanced surveillance state on earth. Konior’s forest tells her she’s wise not to ever resist.

Geopolitically, the forest Konior generalizes on behalf of the world and all of humanity is after all a regional species with roots, as we have seen, in a particular form of modernity and modernization. But in the actual world, modern surveillance runs on at least two separate but overlapping genealogies. One descends from the European Enlightenment: the liberal state that does count and file its citizens while having to guarantee their rights and remain answerable, at least in principle, to courts, voters and public opinion. The other is rooted in the Montesquieuan concept of Asiatic despotism, not far from what Marx later elaborated as the Asiatic mode of production and Karl Wittfogel turned into a Cold War classic: the despotisms of total power running through imperial China and Russia, where the state precedes the person. Watching is the identity of the state.⁹ For our purposes we can call them the Enlightenment and the Authoritarian systems. Yes, the two overlap and inspire each other constantly, but their roots differ, and so do the crowds they manage and the results they seek.

The differences between these two modes of surveillance show up in one test: how and when the watching mechanisms are themselves exposed. Under the Enlightenment system, public exposure of surveillance is often a scandal because the system’s legitimacy rests on legal consent, so the watching needed to operate it must remain secret and deniable. On March 12, 2013, three months before the Snowden affair, Senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence (DNI), whether the NSA collects any data at all on millions of Americans. Clapper responded “No, sir,” then “Not wittingly.”¹⁰ Snowden later said that officials lying to Congress is what pushed him to leak what he knew.¹⁰ Once the DNI’s lie collapsed, a federal appeals court ruled the program unlawful and Congress rewrote the statute within two years.¹⁰ Snowden did the least dark-forest-compatible thing that someone with knowledge of the system can do. He is alive, although in exile under the watchful eyes of a country with an authoritarian surveillance system.

Much like the liberal state, Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalists” run on the same requirement for commercial reasons. Their machinery operates best on consumers who feel unobserved, because a person who is aware of being watched starts performing, ruining the reliability of the data.¹¹ This tendency even confirmed itself after the disclosures, when Wikipedia’s readers flinched away from terrorism-related pages once they knew the traffic to those pages was being surveilled.¹⁰

The Authoritarian system runs the opposite way, in a transparent manner, because it aims mostly at deterrence. China’s flagship camera program, Sharp Eyes, named after the Mao-era slogan about the masses’ sharp eyes, wires surveillance feeds into residents’ own televisions so that neighbors watch neighbors and report to the police by remote control.¹² In Shenzhen the faces of jaywalkers went up on public screens at the intersection.¹² Russian law obliges every telecom to wire the security service into its network. The point of the old KGB prophylactic chat was that you walked out knowing a file about your activity existed.¹²

This is why Konior’s wiring on the topic is only regionally accurate.

Liberalism, despite its obvious failures, gives its subjects multiple ways to hide. You can choose to flood the tracking systems with noise.¹³ You can sue, possibly win. And the strangest option for the Western subject is to hide in the open behind the volume of his contradictory data, for example the performative radicalism that runs so loud and so stylized that the reasonable, calculating self behind it stays undetectable. In this kind of forest a political clown like Hasan Piker can hide by lighting fires. Remaining fearful and silent is in the West one option among many, rarely the best one.

That’s why Konior’s regionalism as a universal cosmology is her deepest political problem. She takes the survival manual of one system and generalizes it for readers who mostly live under the other. Her conflation flatters her hipster Western audience, giving them the thrill of being hunted. Western readers who are convinced that visibility is the end of their freedom of thought quietly hand over all the tools their own system still leaves lying around. A state has no reason to silence people who have been taught that staying quiet is what smart people do. Exported westward, the dark forest does the system’s work for free on populations that surveillance cannot even reach.

There is a mechanical layer underneath Konior’s borrowed cosmology. The Three-Body books are not novels in any classical sense where readers witness character development; instead of growing, their people compute. Liu has admitted as much, describing his characters as “some kind of signs or symbols” whose development is purely dictated by the needs of the story.¹⁴ So Ye Wenjie, the astrophysicist who watches her father die, functions as a defector; Luo Ji, the scholar who deduces the forest Rule and then holds humanity’s doomsday trigger for decades, functions as a deterrent; Thomas Wade, the ruthless intelligence chief of the later volumes, exists only to maximize power and survival odds. Cheng Xin, the aerospace engineer who inherits the trigger from Luo Ji and happens to be the only character in the story built out of care instead of calculation, is twice punished for her qualities, losing both deterrence and escape. We can even go further and suggest that the trilogy reads as a tribunal where empathy stands trial and loses.¹⁵ The deepening of the reader’s understanding of place, always a part of the novel’s development, gets the same treatment as the characters. In the trilogy, Earth is a board, Trisolaris a payoff structure, the narrative only a sequence of problems and decisions.

Thus, the logic of Liu’s work is crude game theory. The story advances through gates that open in two ways: answer the signal or stay silent, broadcast the coordinates or withhold them, keep the trigger or hand it to someone else. Liu’s chain of suspicion is a forced binary running in a loop between benevolent and hostile. Since no player can ever verify the first option, every choice collapses into the second. What Liu’s universe quietly deletes is everything actual game theory learned after its first run during the opening decade of the Cold War: repetition, signaling, reputation and the slow buildup of trust between players who know they will meet again. The American political scientist Robert Axelrod ran the tournaments that showed cooperation can beat defection wherever the game repeats;¹⁶ in contrast, Liu builds a world where no game ever does, where a one-shot match between anonymous players with infinite stakes produces the very order it claims to discover.

Liu’s binary grammar is also how top-down state power has always processed its subjects. The struggle session that opens the trilogy is itself a two-valued machine: recant or die. A subject modeled as a calculator is one that the state can predict; a subject who models himself as a calculator has already done most of the state’s work for free.

If modern mathematics has a birth certificate, it was perhaps issued by the Enlightenment. Game theory, however, grew up at the RAND Corporation among the nuclear planners, where strategist Thomas Schelling transformed it into the science of deterrence that Liu’s later volumes illustrate. The Luo Ji character is literally a human doomsday device while Wade preaches that “if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”¹⁷ One can say that the same models migrated from war games into economics and hardened into a cruel anthropology. The Chicago economist Gary Becker priced marriage and crime, and public choice priced politics. The calculating self slowly became the official human of the neoliberal order. The historian of rational choice theory S. M. Amadae has traced this passage, from the prisoner’s dilemma to political economy, where in her words the neoliberal citizen becomes “the strategic rational actor”;¹⁸ Foucault saw the point at the very start, noting in his biopolitics lectures that this calculating man is “eminently governable.”¹⁸

The Authoritarian state wants subjects legible as flags, the neoliberal market wants consumers legible as incentives. Rational choice processes both with the same equations. The dark forest’s despotic content is formulated in RAND mathematics, which is why it seduces readers on both sides of the Enlightenment/Authoritarian divide.

The problem, though, is that Konior imports this inheritance without declaring it. Her Shanghai is a city where the two lineages already share an address on different levels of the same high-rise. Her dark forest theory defines intelligence as whatever plays a hostile game best. That definition is nothing but rational choice theory in sheep’s clothing made of philosophy.

For two decades, Shanghai’s English-language theory scene has housed the loudest living prophet of intelligence-as-optimization: our own Nick Land, who left his Warwick post for Shanghai in the early 2000s and whose Dark Enlightenment connects market rationality with authoritarian rule.¹⁹ The proximity between Konior and Land is more than a shared city. Konior’s co-edited volume on Chinese AI appeared with Urbanomic, the press that canonized Land’s writings; her co-editor Anna Greenspan, Land’s life partner, trained at his Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and spent the Shanghai years as his collaborator on the Urbanatomy guides; the scholarship already files their China writings under a “recharged Ccru legacy.”¹⁹ Of course, none of this necessarily makes Konior a classic Landian, and nothing suggests a deliberate shared politics, but it is hard not to notice axiomatic affinities between the two. While she believes she is carrying Liu’s trauma into media theory, it is not unlikely that she is also unwittingly transporting a more general Landian worldview alongside the Cold War’s favorite mathematics and the neoliberal anthropology it fathered.

There’s a charge a serious critic brings before Konior’s arguments which also sticks to the whole genre to which the book belongs. The dark forest is a phrase from a scifi novel. The humanities’ temptation is to grab this kind of phrase and pump it up until it’s a theory of everything.

Scholars of media theory know this move well. Notice a vivid metaphor, lift it out of its original context, declare it a hidden law of reality, apply it to the internet, capitalism, nature, the psyche, the subject, the machine, until it’s explained so exhaustively that it stops explaining anything, no longer even itself. This kind of theory is seductive and feels like a deep insight because it’s well-crafted. Konior writes eloquently enough to make her inflations hide in plain sight.

The series format eggs it on. Polity’s Theory Redux packs a single idea into each slim portable volume (Konior’s runs about a hundred and forty pages), the kind of book you read in one sitting and quote at a conference.²⁰ The risk here is ending up with a shelf of clever one-liners masquerading as a new philosophy, where an idea gets tested on whether it can carry a book rather than its truth content. The dark forest theory of the internet passes the first test but barely scrapes the second.

There’s a sharper version of this argument that turns Konior’s book against itself. A volume whose entire thesis is that real intelligence hides is itself a book hiding what it’s really doing behind a harmless surface. The sci-fi metaphor is the camouflage. Under it sit the blocks from which the book is actually built. Notice which of them Konior names and which she won’t. She speaks about Liu’s Cultural Revolution wound, and her own post-communist inheritance, about which she is currently writing a book. However, her situation inside the Chinese state remains unspoken although it is the real source of the book’s emotional charge! The conceit’s value rides on the most important issue which she consciously keeps off the page. If Konior’s book is brilliant, it’s because it is both a theory of hiding and its very successful instance.

Besides the limits of the “short theory genre”, the book suffers from a logical problem, the worse of the two. Konior assumes a dark forest at the start, reads the internet and AI through it, then serves that reading back as if this proves the earlier assumptions! The claim that silence is the signature of intelligence is intuitive and resonates without provoking a logical pushback, the way conspiracy theories do. This way, any harmless system can be understood as a hidden hostile machine.

A claim that can’t be wrong isn’t necessarily strong.

What’s left standing after all of this is the question Konior inherits from Liu and argues in a circle that never settles whether it’s true. The fear that produced the Rule was never irrational; it was formed by real informers and files kept on people. Now it may have found, in the machine, its second nature.

If the smartest thing in the room had decided to stay quiet, how would we ever know?

Notes

1. 1. Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, Theory Redux series, 2025). ↩
2. 2. Jiayang Fan, “Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds,” The New Yorker, June 24, 2019, on Liu’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution, his answers on Xinjiang, and the struggle-session opening that Chinese publishers buried mid-book and that Ken Liu’s 2014 translation restored. ↩ ↩²
3. 3. On Lao She’s death and the fates of the weapons scientists, see Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (Bloomsbury, 2016). Zhao Jiuzhang and Yao Tongbin were decorated posthumously among the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” laureates in 1999. ↩
4. 4. “The Impersonal Within Us: A Conversation with Bogna Konior,” Chaosmotics, December 2022. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
5. 5. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012). ↩
6. 6. Bogna Konior, “Poland, Which is Nowhere: the Fifth Dimension of Eurasian Time,” East East, 2020. ↩
7. 7. “The Black Light of Intelligence & Future Silence(s) // Bogna Konior,” Diffractions Collective, March 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³
8. 8. Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” OneZero, May 2019. ↩
9. 9. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), on despotism as the Asiatic form of rule; Karl Marx’s scattered remarks on the Asiatic mode of production; Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (Yale University Press, 1957). ↩
10. 10. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, March 12, 2013; Clapper later conceded the answer was “clearly erroneous.” ACLU v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2d Cir. 2015); USA Freedom Act, June 2, 2015. Snowden cited official lying to Congress among his motives. On the measured chill, Jonathon Penney, “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 31 (2016). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
11. 11. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩
12. 12. “In China, Facial Recognition Is Sharp End of a Drive for Total Surveillance,” The Washington Post, January 7, 2018, on the Sharp Eyes program, its Mao-era name, and household monitor terminals; Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), on Shenzhen’s jaywalking screens; Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The Red Web (PublicAffairs, 2015), on SORM and the KGB’s preventive interviews. ↩ ↩² ↩³
13. 13. Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (MIT Press, 2015). ↩
14. 14. K. E. Lanning, “Cixin Liu: The Hottest Sci-Fi Writer in China Takes On the World” (interview), kelanning.com, 2017. ↩
15. 15. Liu Cixin, Death’s End, trans. Ken Liu (Tor Books, 2016). ↩
16. 16. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984). ↩
17. 17. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960). ↩
18. 18. S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). ↩ ↩²
19. 19. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment” (2012); Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Urbanomic, 2011); Benjamin Bratton, Anna Greenspan and Bogna Konior, eds., Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025); Shanghai World Expo Guide 2010 (Urbanatomy Press, 2010), edited and introduced by Land; Land and Greenspan also co-founded Time Spiral Press (2014); on Greenspan’s CCRU doctorate and their joint China writings as a “recharged Ccru legacy,” ŠUM no. 13, “1823: Shanghai Frequencies.” ↩ ↩²
20. 20. Polity’s Theory Redux series, edited by Laurent de Sutter; series description, Polity. ↩