A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest. Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must 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.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
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Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#12On 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.
If you believe content is worth paying for at all, the price of a cup of coffee every month seems perfectly reasonable. The NYT has a different business model, and is still partly supported by advertising in the print edition. The digital content pricing race-to-the-bottom is really unfortunate. It's why we have shitty free-to-play mobile games, for example: people won't pay more than a few dollars for a phone game a…
or if not advertising inside products, then it rewards walled gardens to grow - the games, blogs, et al end up inside a subsidiary that collects payment for access to all of it together. and the walls grow.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#13A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest . Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must 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 o…
People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#14A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest . Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must 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 o…
I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCTmgavkrQ made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#15On 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.
we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased. imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as…
The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can.
I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how I value their content, I think Medium is the worst kind of walled garden.
The Medium model is hot garbage, and I hope it dies.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#16As 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. 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 s…
I cut some of this out before hitting publish, but I had originally included more about the emotional and status anxiety of posting publicly, reputation management, and the risks to self posed by the way these platforms work. I ultimately cut those things because I thought they distracted from the overall idea and it's something we already hear so much of. I definitely wouldn't say this analogy is 1:1 with Liu Cixin's original, but I do think there is a real fear to poking your head out online that isn't that far from the original dark forest concept.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#17"Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent."
Forests aren't deathly quiet at night. Insects, reptiles and many birds and canines are very loud at night; the forest at night in summer is positively raucous with noise. No one that can hear ever suspects the forest is devoid of life at night.
This is the sort of ignorance that can only manifest in a strictly urbanite writer. The rest of the story exhibits more of the same group-thinky urbanite mentality.
The traditional gathering places of the Internet are fracturing. Moral panic has gripped the self righteous at the top of mighty Internet platforms and, like all such outraged grandees of the past, they've resorted to the ban hammer. So new platforms emerge to capture the deplatformed.
Thankfully the emergence of such alternatives is still possible in some nations.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#18Is this a meme? '''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
You can criticize a system and still participate in it. The author also stated that they only posted on Medium after vetting their ideas with a more private group.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#19Is 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.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#20Wouldn'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.