Fog, Friction, and the Dark Forest

When I read Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest (the sequel to Three Body Problem) some years ago, I found myself "depressed." Not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of feeling smaller, scared, dampened.

The Dark Forest states that we humans exist in a dark, enormous environment called space with high informational entropy, asymmetry, and massive lag (on account of distance and physics). In that environment, predators lurk. A species realizing its state as surviving not by prowess or power, but by lieu of simply not being noticed, must by necessity go very, very quiet. In the Three Body Problem, we don't realize this and send out a brief beacon instead. That beacon is picked up and fate comes for us (some flattening is involved).

Recently, a book inspired by Yancey Strickler's Dark Forest Theory of the Internet had its second printing, and I eagerly hopped on. I encourage you to as well. Broadly, it takes the idea of the Dark Forest and applies it to our interactions online today. We glom onto social platforms that cast us as resources, and become encircled by predators in the form of bots, influencers, and ad-tech. The various authors present solutions, ideas, and trend speculation (cozyweb is everyone's favourite, myself included as I have a few instantiations of that in my life, this newsletter arguably included): but reading the collection of essays, I found myself wondering what getting ahead of these platforms might look like?

Fog and the Forest

I've often written about Boyd, but in my academic writing, I found myself writing a LOT about Clausewitz. Very short version: Clausewitz was a Prussian general who saw the insanity of Napoleon's conquest of Europe, and it gave him some ideas. Those ideas were developed through the redevelopment of the Prussian officer corp, and synthesized and captured in his book On War, which was posthumously published (and likely completed) by his wife. Clausewitz' theories of war, uncertainty, and decision-making serve as the foundation of modern military strategy, and uncertainty is at its core.

The Fog of War was introduced by Clausewitz (the idea anyway) to describe the uncertainty a commander experiences when in the field with the imperative to make decisions. Planning is great, but even with perfect knowledge of an enemy's capabilities and position, things change quickly on the battlefield.

The idea of the Dark Forest isn't quite the "fog of war." Clausewitz' idea is situated in ones capacity of plan from the outset — something is known of the enemy, something is known of the territory. Whereas the Dark Forest is intrinsically unknown. Using space and the likelihood of other intelligences (or some alternatives), we might be entirely alone in the cosmos, or we might not. Our eyes are slowly adjusting to the dark, and where we have awareness of the landscape but not awareness of the evolving state of that landscape — that's where the fog comes into place.

There's a story in qtmn's excellent book, Valuable Humans in Transit that discusses a "grey goo" scenario. You should read it, but basically: humanity has space travel and a team discovers as "dead" planet. They investigate the planet, but doesn't realize the planet is investigating them in turn — learning from their capabilities. As the situation becomes clear to the captain (too late), they flee back to earth to try and warn the humanity before it's too late. In this story, the unknowable unknowns of the Dark Forest give way to the known unknowns of the fog of war — creating a context around which actions and decisions can be taken.

Unfortunately while the fog of war is an intrinsic characteristic of any situation where adversaries meet in time and space, its effects are not symmetrically applied.

Asymmetric Forest Bathing

The problem with inhabiting the dark forest is that we basically can't know what is out there. Liu Cixin argues in the Dark Forest:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

In both the universe of the Three Body Problem and in qtmn's story, the moment of realization that another hunter has been spotted or has spotted us can become "the end" immediately. In the Three Body Problem, the San Ti are massively our technological superiors, and yet they themselves live in fear of even greater powers. The delicate infant and tottering old man metaphorically represent different stages of technological advancement, so our species that may have embraced pacifism or struggle to escape our galaxy might be an infant compared to the species with capabilities entirely outside our ken.

The landscape of the internet isn't far from this metaphor. Centralization of wealth within the tech giants, the business incentive to establish and protect moats, undermine regulators, and leverage network effects all drive these actors towards ever-increasing advancement. The result is that individually we are ridiculously, absurdly, helplessly under equipped as individuals to protect ourselves in the current internet landscape.

Maybe our only hope is to become as hard as possible to spot.

Wading Boots

Clausewitz has another critical concept in On War, which is Friction. Broadly, friction in Clausewitzian theory is a state of taking action under negative circumstances. A simple example might be planning a straight line course and encountering a muddy field and a mountain you need to climb. A more complex example might be starting at a new company with a "clear" hierarchy, and then running head first into the Dark Matter of the organization.

Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.

In the Clauswitzian model, Friction is an equal opportunity irritant. It can't be eliminated, it is variable with context, and it just happens to you. Hence the idea that only an experienced swimmer can effectively theorize about swimming. To operate in that environment means engaging with that modality of friction.

But according to Clausewitz, YOU aren't a source of Friction. Friction is purely PvE, and not something that any individual actor imposes on others. Except I don't think this entirely applies in the Dark Forest-y internet context. We've seen the internet's friction systematically "managed" by and to the benefit of the apex predators of the internet (the FAANGs), either by lieu of evolution or simply because they are "born" to the network and we aren't. In exchange, we are forced to give up bits of ourselves to continue within this environment.

Take Email. One, you needed a computer that was always on, configured as a server, with that server kept online, mostly at a static address with a domain, that had some sense of authentication and privacy, that could receive emails via a broadly published and open protocol like POP3 or IMAP. You nrequired some way of storing what you received, and if you wanted to get very fancy, you needed some way of writing emails, formatting them correctly, and then broadcasting them to another server that you knew the address of via a protocol like SMTP.

Or you would use Google's Gmail. And you would be associated with Gmail. And your messages on gmail (sent and received) could be used to sell you things because your preferences became more transparent to Google, who runs the largest advertising platform on earth.

Now, there are benefits. Setting up your own server and figuring all that out is a pain, and Google's encapsulating that friction into a clean and easy service for someone who has never heard of SMTP is useful. But by opting into those systems, you light up as a beacon with a known coordinate, value, and behavioural pattern to any others who might be swimming about.

Unfortunately for us, this use of reduced friction at the expense of being observed extends pretty far down. Obvious ones like signing in to an account, using chrome as a browser, and similar cause us to broadcast in the forest, but even things like using your modem's default and incredibly reliable DNS server (Google's 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4) undermine that imperative as a denizen of the dark forest: to not be seen because you don't know what is witnessing you. But with actors whose entire survival is predicated on finding, identifying, observing, and extracting targets on the internet for ad revenues, it's gotten to the point where the whole forest seems haunted.

Burrows

So let's figure some way around it. I've shared this drawing by Maggie Appleton before which visualizes the relationship between the Dark Forest and Venkat's description of the Cozy Web. She significantly puts an interface layer in-between the Dark Forest and the Cozy Web: namely the digital garden, communication, and anonymous stream following interface layer.

I think the rendering of Cozy Web as a network of warrens and burrows is an apt one: it isn't that the cozyweb isn't interconnected, but rather that its connections are controlled, finite, and only really observable from within.

Thinking in terms of the Clausewitzian ideas of Fog of War and Friction though, these burrows do four significant things:

1. They reduce the surface area for initial visibility, i.e. its less likely for the predators to see you in the first place (eg. Specific domains, closed content, word-of-mouth sharing of access)
2. They increase control over the terms of that visibility, i.e. the fog of war acts in your favour to manoeuvre around them (eg. access to logs, authentication, non-public content)
3. They eliminate the "low friction lure" that the apex predators leverage when searching for prey (eg. self hosting solutions, reliance on a technical person as guide vs. platforms to navigate infrastructure)
4. They present an opportunity to change the script on the "familiar friction" to which our World Wide Web predators are native. i.e. make it hard for these predators to move, breath, and hunt. (eg. leverage new protocols as in web3 world, self-host key tools like storage and communication, anonymize or use burner accounts)

By selecting the terrain we operate within (the burrows), we suddenly have some choice over how we engage with these predators. Obviously we might still need to zip out from time to time. In Denmark, Facebook utterly dominates for community organization, so if I want to know when events are held or leverage marketplace, I've no choice but to use facebook.

But for friends and family, I've actually started using Letterloop. I run a newsletter for myself, brothers, and cousins, and we've been using it to keep up with each other while living in different countries and parts of Canada. My wife does the same with her family back in British Columbia. It's still a hosted platform on firebase with google analytics with a social sign-on... but it's still pretty good.

There are other situations where we can't uncouple our burrows from the forest. Twenty years ago, Malcom Mccullough spoke at length about the role of the network, sensing, and data and we live that now. Entering an apartment complex via rfid key fob gives the building owner a fantastic understanding of the comings and going within their developments, and the same can be said for cars, public transit, etc. These are aren't really things we can do much about. But allowing a google home or an Alexa device into the house within any degree of control is a decision one should make very carefully.

For my part, I self host the open source Home Assistant platform and self-host a DNS server that gives me agency over what gets in and what gets out. This completely blocks ads from appearing on my home network, and also gives me a heads up on certain devices behaving badly. Admittedly this also makes me the house technician, and when I'm negligent in upkeep... well, a glitching smart home is basically a haunted house. But at least my family and I are haunted by ghosts of our own making.

Fog, Friction, and Favour

Returning to the original question, what would it mean to get ahead of these platforms? I think an answer lies in triangulating across a few observations:

1. The Internet is a Dark Forest and the apex predators within it are native to it. In other words, the Dark Forest is what the Dark Forest is.
2. The internet dark forest isn't instantly fatal like Cixin's Dark Forest. Instead, it is parasitic and once tracked, escape is incredibly difficult.
3. Predation on the internet relies on reduced friction to incentivize discovery of prey. The internet is filled with Anglerfish, dangling an attractive lure.
4. We are not the predators.

Ultimately, I've come to believe that the internet that's emerged today was inevitable given the parameters that were established. Platforms emerged naturally because platforms enabled consolidation of resources, moat building, and monopolization over user information and attention. It's not a mistake that advertising revenues are the fuel that drives these predatory platforms. It's also not a mistake that user experience design has becoming such a competitive focus for these platforms: we've been the light they've dangled in-front of the unwary.

Believing this then, getting ahead becomes a function of building the burrows we want under the current forest for the lives we live today, and then investing in seeding the forest we want to live in tomorrow.

The first means finding privacy and community in smaller places, and engaging in activities that might look a bit like digital homesteading.

The second means taking things like Web3 and other protocol innovations seriously. The internet we got doesn't need to be the internet that we are stuck with. Evolutions and replacements do occur, and maybe the forest of the future doesn't need to leave us feeling quite so drained.

Of course, predicting what kind of apex predators might emerge in any new forest that springs up might be impossible. But perhaps then we can lean on Clausewitz a bit to help navigate those unknowns.

Notes

If you're interested to learn more about Clausewitz, I'd suggest giving this a listen. https://librivox.org/on-war-by-carl-von-clausewitz/ Low stakes, podcast based reading of the book. The Art of Action is a good look at his theories from a business lens (along with his contemporary, Jomini), and if you're up for a really interesting look at its application in modern militaries, give this paper a look: https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Watts-Friction3.pdf