Imagine you are in a forest. Or better yet, think back to the last time you were actually in one. Your brain will likely generate an image of dirt, eye-level bark, and a green canopy. In this vision, it is unlikely your brain captured much else to memory - assuming that’s all you saw. But you know, in reality, there probably was the song of a bird, or the scurrying of animals passing by. Those moments are probably in some lower-tier memory because my mention of them likely caused you to imagine those sounds - assuming you are not one of those unfortunates who cannot imagine such things. If you’re very lucky, perhaps you recall the discovery of a pile of rocks, or a piece of garbage, left behind by past hikers. I am, of course, assuming you were on this hike or walk sometime in the enlivened seasons - odd to be there in the winter, isn’t it?
Why not?
Imagining sociology through an ecological lens is a growing trend these days. In my opinion it offers greater insights than the pseudo-Marxists running the institutions today with such criminally low replication rates and methodologies. In science fiction it has sometimes popped up as a guidebook to “Cosmic Sociology”, such as in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. I recently learned it was also used in the 1995 science fiction The Killing Star. In both texts, the concept of a “Dark Forest” is a governing principal of the universe. The Dark Forest Theory is a Lovecraftian solution to the Fermi Paradox, built upon only two axioms:
Survival is the goal of the civilized
Civilization grows but matter remains constant.
From this, one understands that there will inevitably be clashes between civilizations as they expand and meet at mutual points of interest. However, at the scale of the cosmos, this can be dreadfully deadly. The prolonged timescales for diplomacy to be conducted means a massive lag between events at home and events at the fringes. Recall that before electrical communication, battles sometimes occurred after a peace was agreed, as typified when Andrew Jackson won a victory in Louisiana where peace had already been declared for many weeks. The information had not arrived yet, so fighting continued. Now apply that to something like the Cuban Missile Crises. Could peace have been so quickly resolved if communication was limited to passenger pigeon and horsemen?
Slow communication carries inherent risks. If you cannot say sorry in a reasonable timeframe, you’re going to get shot eventually. This fact is what strongly encourages a Dark Forest answer to the universe. The only real way to avoid these situations is to avoid communication entirely. The solution is to hide! Quoting Gaurav Deshmukh:
The result of this conundrum is the Dark Forest Theory. According to the theory, the universe is a dark forest and every civilization is a silent armed hunter who is treading very carefully without making any noise. The hunter cannot make his position known and if he does encounter anyone — a predator, another hunter or even a harmless herbivore — the only option he has is to eliminate them.
Wherever there is a gap in communication, local authorities - generals, politicians, and the ordinary citizenry - are often scooted to the moment of decision in place of their authorities. Under such pressures, keeping all the armatures of an empire in lockstep becomes increasingly impossible the wider the gap grows. At the scale of the cosmos, where communication may take decades or even hundreds of years, there is no practical means to maintain centralized authority. The fringe will have to be trusted to remain in-step with the homeland. But even with trust, you cannot assume cultural development remains synced.
Let’s think about that even further. Suppose in the 19th century, by whatever means, humanity discovered how to travel at the speed of light. In fact, such a story somewhat exists in the little-known 1898 novella Edison’s Conquest, written as something of a sequel to 1897’s War of the Worlds. Do enjoy the 19th century art of space war as I go on:
Let’s imagine while they were colonizing Africa, the Europeans would also begin to colonize other stars as well. Let’s imagine a scenario where both the British and Germans have a colony on a habitable planet in the Luyten's Star system, 12 light years away. This would mean it takes 12 years to inform the Luytenite colonists of matters back on Earth.
In other words, by the time they arrived in 1910, Germany and England are gearing up for World War I, while the Luytenites - Both Anglo and German - have no idea. In fact, as far as they know, the German and Anglo relations are quite good.
Consequentially, news of World War I does not arrive to the Luytenites until 1926, by which time the war has already been over for 8 years. Do the Luytenites engage each other? It’s possible. But it’s also possible they would work out their own private neutrality. These things happened, in fact! In 1914, the Germany colonists of Cameroon, West Africa, attempted to sign a neutrality pact with the English and French colonists they bordered. It failed, of course, but an attempt was made! I would argue that without the cultural continuum of Europe and the fragile state of affairs of colonizing a new world, it’s more likely the Luytenite Anglo and German colonists agree to a term of neutrality. Four years later, in 1930, they would learn the Germans had surrendered thanks to an intervention of the Americans. They would likely all breathe a sigh of relief.
The Luytenites wouldn’t learn about the advent of World War II until 1950, by which point they would have been on the planet for 40 years. This is sufficient time to have developed into two competing powers. It is unlikely they would agree to a peace treaty, meaning they would be in a state of war until 1957 - or occupation if one overcame the other. In truth, it wouldn’t matter who won, because the merging of their identities would be impossible to avoid. It is very likely that by 1960, the Luytenites would be a single colony with the cultural heritage of the 1930s. Some kind of strange mix of Fascist German and Imperial British - a cultural time-capsule lacking the “progress” from either the world war eras, or the post-war era.
They wouldn’t even hear about the Beatles until 1972, assuming it would even catch on in the hard life of a colonist in the first place. The Luytenites wouldn’t learn about decolonization until the mid 1970s, and furthermore, wouldn’t even know about civil rights and fiat currency until 1982. From the perspective of the Luytenites, they would be shocked at the rapidly increasing divergence of their preserved 19th century morality - a pattern witnessed in many isolated groups on Earth, such as with the Boers. It is very likely that at some point in the 1980s the Luytenites would declare - and assume - independence knowing full well Earth couldn’t possibly stop them. They would have none of the fear and loathing of environmentalism either, which means their industrial revolution would never slow down. They would continue at the industrial pace of the 1930s-1950s into the 1990s, without any economic stalls. The colony of a few thousand would reach over a million and exponentially grow from then onward. They would also begin organizing for their common defense.
If Earth wanted to reconquer this divergent world, it wouldn’t even be able to know about their independence until the mid 1990s, nor would they be able to get a force to re-take the world until the mid-2000s. By that point, the Luytenites would have had 24 years of technological and cultural divergence as an independent people. Who knows what kind of technology the Luytenites would develop in that time. How do you sanction someone whose trade ships take 24 years to go round-about? By the Time the Earth’s responding forces arrived to liberate this last bastion of imperialism and fascism, there would have only been three round-trip trade voyages. The Luytenites would have built up their own defenses and developed their own infrastructure. Earth’s 1995 invasion fleet would be greeted by ships that had been independently developed for decades and may have already learned and digested all of Earth’s weaknesses and strengths. It would be a bloodbath for the Earth. Worse, they wouldn’t even know about the defeat until 2020. All that, assuming they would have even risked going off to conquer the queer chimera of fascism and monarchy 12 light years away.
Now, consider this chessboard. What kind of future do either the Luytenites or the Earthlings have to look forward to? As long as one or the other continues, the companion must deal with several facts:
The worlds will continue to diverge from each other due to the gap in communications and digestion of information.
This gap will generate suspicion that diplomacy cannot solve due to the very gap causing it. Divergences justify their own defenses.
Eventually, one of these worlds will suspect the other is readying for an invasion.
The weapons of both worlds can end the other, so long one shoots first.
End result: On a long enough time-span, someone will shoot first.
This is known as the Chain of Suspicion in literature such as Remembrance of Earth’s Past, as well as The Final Encyclopedia by Gordon R. Dickson. The only cure for the CoS is communication - the one thing impossible at those vast distances. During the Cold War, CoS scenarios were common, but easily resolved over direct lines of communication between Moscow and Washington. The threat of mutually assured destruction, clearly transmitted between, was a viable solution to the CoS. But as the gap widens, the destructive inevitability of the CoS begins priming. You can’t threaten mutually assured destruction when the enemy has already launched by the time you can tell them you will launch. By the time anyone even notices, it’s likely one, or even both, are dead.
In the Dark Forest model of the universe, this is known as a Dark Forest strike. And the really scary thing about Dark Forest strikes is that they don’t even have to come from the two parties involved. Any third party that notices this celestial duel will be biased to shooting at both, so as to not deal with either in the future.
The really cruel thing is that due to those vast distances, it’s even possible both worlds fire at each other nearly at the same time, as the time to actually get a weapon to the other will also take many years. So not only is the chance of someone shooting first inevitable, but the chances also both shoot is rather high. In such a scenario, both worlds end. No one wins.
Of course, there is an out. A pricey out, but an out none-the-less: You kill yourself. After all, if one shoots you, and you shoot yourself, it’s guaranteed one will make it out of that standoff alive. Suicide becomes the only sure-fire way of preventing extinction, second only to gambling neither shoots - which it would take an awfully long time for you to wait on confirmation you won the game of cosmic roulette. There’s the chance you both kill yourselves, of course, but less so than you both shoot each other. No, killing yourself is the only way to win the gamble. If only there was a way to survive doing it…
Second to actually killing yourself, you could fake it. If you could fool the other world into looking like you are dead, then no one would worry about you - a dead man can’t prime the CoS pistol. So, if the Luytenites could set off some kind of large explosion or solar flare to look like they had died, and then cut all communications, they would appear dead to the Earth - eventually the Earth would go on its own business (For an added bonus, make sure things look too dangerous to go and check). The next step is if the Luytenites decide to one day actually take vengeance, or part ways like gentlemen - it’s a lot of resources to commit to that gotcha move, after all. Far cheaper to just go your own way.
There is a very real parallel to this scenario which experiences the same communication gaps as that between worlds: The Internet. In fact, the Chain of Suspicion itself is a kind of internet. To quote Cixin Liu’s characters in his own trilogy:
“The chain of suspicion is unrelated to the civilization’s own morality and social structure. It’s enough to think of every civilization as the points at the end of a chain. Regardless of whether civilizations are internally benevolent or malicious, when they enter the web formed by chains of suspicion, they’re all identical … To sum up: one, letting you know I exist, and two, letting you continue to exist, are both dangerous to me.”
With the internet, instead of communication traveling too slow between worlds, it travels too slow between cultures. By the time an authority understands a meme or a joke, the community that developed it has already produced several more, or done a deed that the meme was organizing for. There really isn’t a method to keep up. Furthermore, due to the nature of bureaucracy, even if they infiltrate, they still can’t internally disseminate the information fast enough.
Those well versed in dissident lingo will be familiar with the “Nice try, Fed” in-joke. Whenever someone you don’t know too well asks about your real-life activities or interests, this is the most common reply. The Game of Fed can be found on innumerable Discords and Telegrams whenever a new guest arrives. There is instant suspicion that they are a federal agent looking to incriminate the group. A Chain of Suspicion begins, and the count-down to an inevitable mass-ban or server shut-down initiates. In essence, once the Game of Fed starts - I mean really starts, and not just an in-joke - the server is already dead. It’s been marked. Soon, spambots start showing up, suspicious screenshots leak out, etc etc. No doubt you’ve seen staggering attempts to mimic the owners of various servers, thanking you for support and then trying to scam or dox you. At such a point, it’s best to leave and find a new home rather than wait around till the end - although, a few lucky servers will re-achieve their Dark Forest concealment by doing as I originally suggested: Pretending to kill yourself. A group of inner loyalists will restart the server in secret, with higher scrutiny and peer-pressure to prevent such Dark Forest strikes. At which point, Dark Forest secrecy is re-achieved, and the community can continue with the only enduring move it can do (which may not even be winning in the long term) - that being to keep a low profile, use coded language, and indeed, assume you are in a Dark Forest state, being hunted by feds out to incriminate you for wrong-think. This trend towards - and comparison to - a Dark Forest Internet has been noted for some time now. Back in 2019, before the Pandemic Era, Yancey Strickler wrote:
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. (source)
Yancey makes a further comparison:
I’m reminded of what happened in the 1970s when the hippies — bruised and bloodied from the culture wars of the ‘60s — retreated into self-help, wellness, and personal development, as Adam Curtis documents in his series The Century of Self. While they turned inward, the winners of the ‘60s culture wars took society’s reins. A focus on personal wellness created an unintended side effect: a retreat from the public arena, and a shift in the distribution of power ever since.
Yancey’s predictions have come true, albeit far sooner than anticipated. This was likely what was going to happen over the next decade, but the Pandemic Era accelerated us all towards the Dark Forest state.
One of the games I like playing to test if the internet has developed a Dark Forest nature is to take a popular meme and do a reverse-google image search using the code inurl:twitter or other sites. I will then check if the poster shares any mutuals with myself. Quite often I have stumbled into niche little communities of a few hundred dissidents which exist in complete isolation. They have their own coded language for spicy content, their own memes which occasionally boil into mainstream ones, and their own little hierarchy dramas. Once, I even stumbled into a discord community of dissidents within the Canadian government, led by the ex-husband of one of Trudeau’s cabinet staffers. They existed in complete isolation, although they shared many of the typical dissident views and jokes found anywhere.
Those of my readers who know of my escapades in testing Dark Forest theory can testify to the curious paths the flow of information goes in the forest. I produced the original LGBTQ-Ukraine flag back in March and distributed it to a number of points of entry. The usual such as 4chan, thedonald, and reddit, along with DMs to specific users. By late May, members of the US House were posting my flag…
I can tell it’s my flag specifically, because I left in the compression artifacts, which you can see as a slight blur on some of the edges. This is the same artifact in my original that I distributed:
This is not the first time I have caused a Snopes article to be written, but I do hope it’s not the last.
This test of Dark Forest theory allowed me to observe the percolations of information from the fringe anon imageboards to actual political assets in the United States, and make some observations using real data: If you are part of the dissident right or left, think about this. Even if we assume from unreliable election data that something between 20%-30% of the Anglo-American population is within the dissident right, that’s upwards of some 140 million dissidents scattered across the English Speaking peoples. Folks we might call “right leaning” who are past the center-right. Of those, some 70 million are between the ages of 16 to 35 - aka the kind of people who ought to be using the internet in a significant way. Yet, you do not know 70 million people. You do not even know 100,000 people. At most, you will know - on speaking terms - a few dozen dissidents. If you are addicted to social media, you might follow or be followed by upwards of a few hundred, to even a few thousand of them. If we assume an average of 200-400 followers you keep in contact with, the math works out that each one of these little niche internet communities constitutes .0005% of the dissident right on the internet. Under a Dark Forest state, that would indicate there are some 200,000 dissident networks in operation at any given point, each containing a few smaller linked cells of a few hundred members who know and speak to each other on a regular basis. These nodes will have points of contact where anonymity feels higher and siphon the flow of information into within these cells in a matter of weeks. Any predators in the Dark Forest will take a fortnightly cycle of internal meetings to even index the information, let alone start tracking it. By then, the cells will have already enjoyed the information, made variations, digested the information, and moved on - impossible for the predators to track down without accidentally hitting friends of the regime who are critiquing and spreading the new information to themselves as well.
The conundrum under a Dark Forest internet is how to do anything at all? It’s not easy to solve - assuming it even can be solved. Direct communication will be noticed by all observers and is a sure way to draw down a Dark Forest strike. Communicating indirectly through friendly nodes has shown effectiveness - after all, the entire January 6th fiasco was organized by these secondary channels, but it appears federal instigation and gaslighting was present such that January 6th ought to be viewed as a kind of Dark Forest strike as well. Memes can provide something of a curious way of transmitting information as they usually have no detectable origin, especially if they start leaking in from anonymous posting boards. They can quickly proliferate throughout communities, however. Which means in their “fresh” state, they are useful for identifying friend-enemy distinction. Though, as memes become “stale” and friends of the regime share them around to criticize, the capacity to use them in friend-enemy distinction dilutes significantly. These are therefore a reliable area of confusion and uncertainty, which explains the difficulty in using them for Dark Forest strike coordination. Of course, real-life meet ups work great too, so long as you are not infiltrated. So, in truth, there is no sure-fire way to maintain Dark Forest secrecy. Perhaps minimum contact with coded language is not the correct tree to bark up? Or not the only tree?
There is another way, in fact: information overload. If those 200,000 nodes go into over-active status with coded language, memes, red herrings, and distractions, the Dark Forest becomes too bright for its hunters to strike. There’s just too many of them. They may attempt a few, but ultimately it is too much. This is probably what happened in 2016, when the internet right went into overdrive and mass-produced memes, conspiracies, and exaggerations to a degree not-yet replicated since. It was the first time the Dark Forest truly glowed, and likewise the reason such an incredible forest-wide strike occurred soon after. Nonetheless, I maintain that overload is an effective means at blinding the Dark Forest predators and, if timed right, can change elections and politics.
But there is also a technique to consider in Dark Forest theory which I do not believe has been done at a large scale yet. When dealing with regimes such as what currently rules the west, there needs be always some continent scapegoat to blame problems on. This regime currently blames the “far right”, but this can change for any given regime. If the regime has to constantly attack wrong-think to justify itself, becoming invisible is an effective means to constrict the regime’s scapegoat options. It has to attack closer and closer to the center whenever something at the extremities disappears. The state can only attack that which is visible and well-known for its usefulness to propaganda. After all, you don’t see any radical Jacobites being blamed for shootings and mass violence. They can’t, because hardly any American knows what a Jacobite even is. This cloaking technique can help too, as well - adopting some little known or poorly defined extinct identity that the regime would have a challenge demonizing for its propaganda. Thus, in addition to going wholly invisible, making the fringes a confusing patchwork of esoterica can be a powerful force to push the regime into sacrificing the center as well.
When the regime does attack, it also spends political capital that it could have spent elsewhere. A two-week news cycle talking about Pepe the Frog is a two-week news cycle not talking about immigration or inflation. This is a form of Spiritual Fidgeting which the regime has been prone to in the post-covid Era. The news topics are changing on a nearly daily basis to keep the viewer from looking around all the problems in their lives. If the dissidents could hijack this to get the regime to discuss something ridiculous, it would be very useful in pushing people in the center towards the fringes. 4chan’s infamous gaslighting that the OK sign was a white supremacist symbol is the best and most well-known example of this. But these are very primitive attempts to get the regime to conduct a Dark Forest strike on itself. This has only been done very vaguely and if it could be weaponized, it could be a very effective tool.
In one of the many EU development funds I’ve sat through in the past year, I witnessed a woman discuss how infrastructure development was sexist because women don’t feel as safe as men on public transit. She argued more funding for educating men than developing infrastructure. I wish this woman could realize how gaslit she had been to come to such an insane conclusion, but this is a valuable example of the kind of junk speculative nonsense that dissidents both right and left could feed the regime to get it to attack itself. Do this enough times - embrace the dark forest - and eventually the regime has to eat its own.
Obscura Silva Americae. The American Dark Forest should be embraced, and in many ways it already is. The use of coded language, the constant refreshing of new memes and information, the spreading of the ridiculous to gaslight the regime - even the fabrication of outright farcical groups - are all valuable tools for the dissident to take advantage of Dark Forest strikes. All of these could go further as well. I can Imagine the dissidents developing an app that encrypts their posts so that only members of a group can translate it. That’s the kind of ridiculous wasting of resources that would hurt the regime - if it had to decrypt 200,000 unique encryptions on a regular basis. Compare that to recent effort to make a “hate meme” index in the EU - only to find all the memes are outdated 2016 examples. The regime takes bait like this to justify their own existence, but the people at the edges of the center slowly bleed away from it whenever it does these exercises in madness. This should be accelerated - by both right and left wing dissidents as far as I’m concerned. Second to hiding yourself, inventing a mock-enemy for your enemy to attack is an excellent way to test their strength and reveal their incompetence to potential friends.
Creating these communication gaps on purpose and leading the regime to spend political capital attacking it are the kind of Dark Forest strategies that can make big impacts. But, perhaps most tragic, they will cause the regime to begin priming the Chain of Suspicion for an eventual Dark Forest strike at a scale we’ve not yet seen. If you are someone who believes the regime are foxes, not lions, and the sooner this can be exposed the better - well, this is a strategy to consider: purposefully growing the gap and the consequential chain of suspicion to drive the regime into a paranoia.
It’s a rather simple plan: If you can’t win, make your enemy waste money until you can.
In the American Dark Forest, it seems the complete incompetence of the regime is growing, but it can still manage powerful Dark Forest strikes. Be careful if you want to play this game as a dissident. For myself, I’m just here to write about it. I don’t really care who wins. I’m fairly certain we’re at the end of an Empire either way. Second to riding the tiger, this is at least making the bumpy ride a bit fun.
Here’s hoping you survive the next Dark Forest strike, friend.