Into the woods… from a web, darkly
The infectious appeal of rational paranoia in an increasingly simulacratic world
🎼 Human by Mistake by Landhouse
“When I was a child, …I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly…” – 1 Corinthians 13, Bible
When life becomes intelligent enough, it begins to broadcast its voice beyond its own planetary boundaries, into deep space, inspired by the evocative question: “Surely, we’re not the only intelligent life in the entire universe?”
But intelligence is relative. Before long, it begins to appreciate it may not be as smart as it previously thought. After all, if an alien civilisation out there were smart enough to hear and interpret such signals as life, they’d also already likely be smarter enough to consider such nascent, yet inferior, intelligence as ripe potential for planetary plunder. Not all neighbours are friendly or benign. Like the quiet forest at night, silence doesn’t always indicate the absence of life; truly intelligent life is just smart enough to know not to draw the unwanted attention of dangerous predators.
So goes the Dark Forest theory. One potential explanation behind why we’ve yet to make contact with extraterrestrial alien intelligence, despite the odds being reasonably high of their existence (also known as the Fermi Paradox). It’s so manifestly a paranoid theory, but also contradictorily, a rational one. One in which all interplanetary civilizations default to a state of mutual suspicion and fear of the other, frozen into stealth mode by a ‘dog-eat-dog’ mindset of survival.
This state of mutual suspicion and caution towards exposure is also one with echoes in our wider contemporary zeitgeist, in which rational paranoia is increasingly becoming the default mindset.
World Wide Woods: The internet as dark forest
In a prescient article from 2019, Yancey Strickler suggests that the Dark Forest theory may also apply to the modern web:
“In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviours, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”
“The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 (US) Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on).
This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.
The web 2.0 era has been replaced by a new “Web²” era. An age where we simultaneously live in many different internets… the dark forests are growing.”
Yancey Strickler
In this definition, the Dark Forest(s) of the Internet are characterised as invite-only groups and subculture communities, such as subscriber newsletters & patreoned podcasts. Slack, Discord & Telegram chat channels, Reddit rabbit (and rabid) holes, and so on. Highly controlled and curated walled gardens that trade–off privacy and anonymity for proprietorially–bounded ecosystems ‘safe’ from the dangers of the wider wilderness of the web; where bots, trolls, clickbaiters, voracious influencers, and big–data–feeding algos roam scot–free.
The article continues by warning of the dangers of entirely abandoning the mainstream web, thereby leaving it more vulnerable to the predation of bad actors. In a rationally paranoid US mind these presumably would be archetyped by the twin evils of Russia (state corruption) and Trump (corporate narcissism), as opposed to the toxic exclusivity and global predation of the broader Anglosphere as a whole.
Yet what Yancey’s thought provoking article leaves curiously unexplored is an anthropologist's insight on what kind of life might still live in the overpopulated villages, towns, cities, or scavenged brownfield wastelands, of the ‘mainstream web’.
Who inhabits the commons that the Entrellectualati like Strickler have abandoned for the safety of gated woodland communities?
Perhaps we should not even be asking who, but what.
Generative AI: Emergent artificial ambience
Maggie Appleton picked up a similar thread recently in a fascinating article that elaborates on the threat that generative AIs, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, pose to being able to coherently separate the signal of authentic online human interaction from the noise of algorithmic spam.
“[They’re] designed to pump out advertising copy, blog posts, emails, social media updates, and marketing pages… [and] they’re really good at it. These models became competent copywriters much faster than people expected — too fast for us to fully process the implications.
You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven’t seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun.
Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, ‘engaging’ tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.”
“We’re about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal. Goodbye to finding original human insights or authentic connections under that pile of cruft.”– Maggie Appleton
Heed this rationally paranoid warning then: Our cyberspaces will soon become even more opaque and blurry when it comes to trusting we’re experiencing authentic interactions with meatspace-inhabiting humans, rather than replicant AI bots.
In many ways, this is not news. Dead-internet theory has been a conspiratorial meme questioning the apparently inhuman and sterile desert of the modern web since a bigoted 4Chan incel egotist floated the idea on an obscure forum a few years ago.
Which leads us to a more visceral existential angst that doesn’t require geeking out on The Matrix or poring over Baudrillard with a joint: We’re so obviously already ‘living’ in a simulation of reality, and one that is also so clearly of our own creation and volition.
Kindred Dystopia: The desert of the real
Rewind to five years earlier and Henry Farrell, in his 2018 Boston Review essay, makes a very strong case that the classic dystopias popularised by Orwell or Huxley are poor caricatures of our times; totalitarian surveillance of absolute control does not reign supreme, nor is hierarchical hedonistic nihilism entirely ubiquitous. Our contemporary dystopia is much more messy, ambiguous and surreal.
Biohacked corporate tech gurus (e.g. Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel) masquerading as quasi-religious cult leaders ‘peacefully’ coexist alongside drug-tranquillized ‘dropout’ communes flourishing on the fringes of society (e.g. the Opioid epidemic, San Francisco homelessness crisis). Economically vital financial market traders and their trading floors/flaws are now almost exclusively ruled by robot automata (e.g. Automated Trading Systems), while Fembots lure infidelitous husbands to pay for extramarital sexual trysts (e.g. Ashley Madison). Upon stealthily deploying their surveillance machinery, big-data snake oil salesmen inadvertently make it impossible to “distinguish the behaviour which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations” (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
“The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways.”
“Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites.” — Henry Farrell
If this sounds a lot like the plot of a 1960s pulp Sci-Fi author, perhaps that’s no coincidence. Welcome to the rationally paranoid world of Philip K Dick, a man who was unhealthily obsessed with a holy trinity of human nature, the nature of reality, and the realness of humanity — a philosophical ouroboros of sorts. Dick is therefore surely the de facto source code architect behind the curtain of our contemporary dystopia, having believed 50 years ago that “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into [our] heads”.
This has unforeseen consequences, feeding a vicious cycle of unreality:
“The bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans … as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.”
Philip K. Dick
Separating the fake from the real is no simple task. In Dick’s many pluriverses, even state-of-the-art technologies that aim to reaffirm our humanity, like the Voight-Kampff empathy test, are unreliable, struggling to maintain parity with the more rapid evolution of advanced machine learning. Instead, humans seek solace and comfort in primordial wisdom and mysticism, waiting to be rediscovered, reinvented and remixed from ancient relics like the I Ching. Or resort to the unadulterated purity of investing in ‘true’ nature — via the virtue–signalled, status-symbolic social prestige that comes with paying to own and/or care for real (rather than genetically-created) animals.
In our era of rationally paranoid conspiracy memes, ‘fake news’, algorithmic manipulation, less-than-human apparitions and AI hallucinations, it's unnerving to recognise the mirrored doppelgängers of where we also escape to seek a similar more peaceful, ultimate truth.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Philip K. Dick
