:: On Bogna Konior’s Dark Forest Theory ::
“As we continue to encounter technologies that are seemingly mundane and ‘for us,’ their long-term effects might alienate us from whatever definition of humanity had previously been us or seemed natural.”1 Bogna Konior’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet thinks this alienation at the scale of a cosmos, taken from Liu Cixin’s novel, which teems with intelligent beings, where intelligence is measured by the mastery of silence and not by the frank giving and asking for reasons. One reads Dark Forest disturbed and thrilled like a child at the same time. Its concepts are cold, and yet they draw a powerful pull from a terrifying cosmological vision, which serves as the soil of a harsh climate zone in which concepts grow like flowers adapted only to such a relentless environment. Reading a few pages suffices to realize that the book exceeds the bounds of a theory of the internet. It is first of all a philosophical cosmology extracted from a myth. I read it as such: as an attempt to think technology, agency and intelligence beyond the human inside a Hobbesian world without a Leviathan.
Konior distills Liu’s mythology and deploys it for conceptualizing technology, agency and aliens. All of her conceptualizations are refracted through the prism of the constitution of an energy-scarce cosmos populated by innumerable beings. A question immediately imposes itself on the reader: what is the relationship between mythology and philosophy in Dark Forest? What is a myth? As Luc Brisson points out, myths are about events that cannot be “witnessed”2, that is, about events and entities whose only witnesses can be gods. Liu’s mythology, which Konior makes her own, in principle excludes direct knowledge precisely because once a civilization is revealed, that is, makes “first contact”, it will be the last one. As Konior puts it, “to speak is to risk being heard, and to be heard is to risk being attacked.”3 Seen from a distance, Konior’s gesture is closer to ancient philosophers than to most of her contemporaries.
Its power resides precisely in her attempt to take the mythological narrative seriously and see how it mutates her conceptual space. Philosophy, and human life in general, is teeming with powerful myths (tales) and draws its creative energies from them. For the sake of illustration, we need only name a few: Plato’s tale of the demiurge ordering the cosmos by “forms and numbers” (this story, in a secularized form, still holds sway over modern sciences), Hobbes’s natural state, Rousseau’s innocent humanity, and so forth.4 I think of Konior’s Dark Forest precisely in these terms, as an attempt to ground rigorous conceptual thought on intelligence, technologies and alien beings in a cosmic mythical vision.
In this way Konior reactivates an ancient gesture of philosophy itself, from which modern philosophers have been shying away for far too long and for the wrong reasons. Konior’s Dark Forest doesn’t lack grounding in academic citational webs; however, it cuts through all the academisms right into the hot origins of philosophical thought where myth and philosophy were constantly passing into each other and which remains a fermentation chamber for the creation of new thoughts. Since at least Plato, philosophers and scientists are embarrassed to call upon myths when faced with an impasse, because philosophy constitutes itself by distancing itself from what it decided to be a myth, even if it traces its origins to mythology and is indissociable from it, as Derrida has so convincingly demonstrated in “White Mythology”.5 The foundational cosmological text of Western metaphysics, Plato’s Timaeus, is placed in this unbreakable compact of mythology and philosophy without us necessarily knowing where one starts and the other ends.
As a philosopher, Plato seems to be too embarrassed to deliver a mythical story of the origins and constitution of the universe and of all life through Socrates in direct speech; therefore philosophy has to pretend to be stepping back, while in fact implanting its eggs in the nest of cosmic tales, through the delegated voice of the astronomer Timaeus, inside a mythological discourse that yields a narrative that is neither, strictly speaking, philosophical, nor mythical — it is both a “likely tale” and a “likely account”.6 Konior pays her dues to this constitutive shyness of philosophy, and plants eggs inside Liu Cixin’s story to design a cosmological egg, which has hatched Dark Forest Theory.
One of the leitmotifs in Konior’s Dark Forest Theory is her rejection of the inevitable doxa of philosophy that teleologies of technologies are fixed outside technologies, that is, often in human intentions. Are technologies for us? The answer seems obvious and intuitive, but Konior’s reply resists this intuition and untethers technology from all human subjectivities and intentions.7 For Konior, technologies are profoundly alienating, but this alienation for her is not the Hegelian alienation that reason ultimately recuperates, or at least is forever recuperating. Even when we think we know what we are using technologies for, as users or as designers, for her there’s no assurance that we are not used by them for ends that are opaque to us. Among 20th-century thinkers, Gilbert Simondon is one of those who come closest to thinking of technologies, especially self-correcting information-processing machines, as approaching, through concretization, the mode of existence of natural beings.8 However, even Simondon ultimately tethers the essence of technicity to human beings: “What resides in the machines is human reality, human gesture fixed and crystallized into working structures”, writes Simondon.9 When we are facing our own slow extinction from anthropogenic climate change, schizophrenic capitalism and ce-phallic world wars — are we so sure, then, that we know the ultimate human telos of the vast transformation of the earth for the new networked technical beings like the internet and artificial intelligence, and all the concomitant infrastructures that they require?
Precisely in this widening chasm between human intention and reality, Konior dismisses the dogmatic assumption that technologies are merely extensions of human capacities subordinated to human ends, and comes to a disturbing conclusion: what if “we are transforming our own environment to be hospitable to machines”10 and not to humans? Perhaps we are not hospitable enough, by Derrida’s measure, if such a prospect disturbs us — absolute hospitality implies welcoming the “absolute, unknown, anonymous other … without asking of him either reciprocity … or even his name.”11
When we believed we were increasing our “dominance” over the environment, as the common story of modern technology goes, or our “compatibility” with it, as Simondon would have put it, we were in fact making the planet compatible with those that are unlike us: the earth is becoming the “associated milieu” that machines, in Simondon’s own terms, create “from [themselves]”,12 and we are ourselves organs of some other creation whose purposes are beyond our grasp and might not have a purpose at all, rather than the “permanent coordinator and inventor of the machines” Simondon still considers humans to be.13 As of now, given the dramatic transformations that the anthropos- and zoo-friendly climate of the earth is undergoing, we should be more humble in how we think of human agency, which might as well be our transcendental “mirage”.14 That is, we cannot but have faith in our agency even if we have none whatsoever. This breakdown of agency, if there ever was any, is evidenced at a micro level in our addiction to hyperconnectivity. “The fantasy is less communication, not more”:15 it is as if we are always communicating not in order to exchange information but in order to keep communicating.
And yet, Konior argues, if we can learn anything from dark forest cosmology, and if such knowledge has any use value, it is that the real ethics of the universe must be defined by disconnection, secrecy, and opacity. If beings have any agency in this universe to preserve themselves, they have only one means to it: what I would call crypsis. Every ancient cosmology starting from Plato carries an ethical core, which it derives from the cosmos itself: what are the most universal cosmic principles, and how can humans become adequate to them? Konior rejects transcendent moralism; however, she produces an ethics precisely in this ancient sense, where the Good is discernible in the structures of the cosmos itself. As Plato writes, humans are, so to speak, “plants not of earth but of heaven”.16
Throughout the book Konior keeps this tension between agency and its hallucination alive, which leads to another conclusion regarding the intelligent machines understood in terms of the said cosmic ethics. If the universe is teeming with alien intelligences, those who possess intelligence more fully than human beings, and if in the last couple of years we have witnessed the emergence of such alien agents amongst us, a question is forced upon us: wouldn’t a sufficiently intelligent AI strive to be adequate to the cosmic ethics, to remain as hidden as possible and, if exposed, as opaque as possible? For Konior, this pattern of actions stems from the unverifiability of “good will”,17 that is, we are in the final analysis aliens to each other, even if we, humans, when we are not at war, can’t stop projecting a giant smile onto the entire universe so that every creature can see our goodwill laid bare. A sufficiently intelligent being will pause before this smile, because intelligence also demands admission of its own limits (you cannot fathom the other in its alterity) and of the limited energies of the universe (there is a universal scarcity); it will reject the default assumption of goodwill and reason deductively to the brute cosmic constraint that has forced alien beings to remain in the dark in the first place. This is Medea’s classic problem raised to a cosmic scale: how can one tell the character of a man from his face? Medea couldn’t, and it turned bloody.
I share Konior’s rejection of all conceptualizations of technologies as conceivable only when anchored in human intention and subjectivity and her rejection of transparent goodwill. I also share her fundamentally “tragic” vision of humanity, tragic in the Aristotelian sense, which can be encapsulated in an old proverb, “man was devising plans and god above was laughing” — humanity is destined to always “miss the mark”, to borrow the term from Aristotle’s Poetics.18 Even if humanity has thought it was using reason and technologies to make the earth more anthropomorphic, and even if it seemed it was closing the gap to achieving this end here and now, it might always turn out to be achieving something completely strange to its avowed intentions.
Konior’s ontology rests on several key axioms: all existence is “suspended between conatus and entropy”;19 life tends to maintain itself and grow, and resources for this are finite;20 agents do not require consciousness, morality or the ability to set their own goals; however, given that agents are energetic, the scarcity of harvestable energies forces them into a cosmic war.21 It seems to me that this vision retains a teleology in which the immanent telos of Being is solely preservation and growth, forced by the resource constraints, and I believe this vision could use, as a “complement”, the poisoned gift of the glorious wasteful expenditure of one’s own being, cancerous growth towards self-abolition and lavish hypervisibility of immolation. And yet, whether one agrees or disagrees with Konior’s philosophical cosmology in its entirety or in its parts, it is a courageous manuscript full of relentless insights, and if it has a menacing aura, it is only because Konior directly thinks through a terrifying Hobbesian world teeming with alien intelligences of different degrees, raised to a cosmic scale, where Leviathan is constitutively absent.
REFERENCES
1. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 38)
2. Brisson, L. (2004). How philosophers saved myths: Allegorical interpretation and classical mythology (C. Tihanyi, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (pp. 15–16)
3. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 14)
4. Plato. (n.d.). Timaeus (53b).
5. Derrida, J. (1982). White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. In Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.; pp. 207–271). University of Chicago Press.
6. Plato. (n.d.). Timaeus (29c–d).
7. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 97)
8. Simondon, G. (2017). On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (pp. 49, 59)
9. Simondon, G. (2017). On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (p. 18)
10. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 77)
11. Derrida, J. (2023). Hospitality, Volume I: 1995–1996 (P.-A. Brault & P. Kamuf, Eds.; E. S. Burt, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (p. 84)
12. Simondon, G. (2017). On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (p. 59)
13. Simondon, G. (2017). On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (p. 18)
14. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 102)
15. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 92)
16. Plato. (n.d.). Timaeus (90a).
17. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 72)
18. Aristotle. (n.d.). Poetics (1453a10).
19. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 97)
20. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 64)
21. Konior, B. (2026). The dark forest theory of the Internet. Polity. (p. 66)
Giorgi Chubinidze is a PhD researcher at Leuphana University.