A Permanent Condition of First Contact: Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Abstract

Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025) departs from the “socially engaged journalism” that dominates internet scholarship to recover an older link between computation and ufology, recasting the internet as a site of first contact. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s game-theoretic answer to the Fermi Paradox, Konior underscores AI systems’ continuous ingestion of online communication as training data, arguing that it collapses the distinction between speaking about and speaking to algorithms. Intelligence, in her account, inheres in strategic concealment, yielding an “inverse Turing Test” in which genuine cognition would remain undetectable. From this follows a Wallfacer strategy: the tactical deployment of silence, deception, and abstraction within an architecture engineered to collapse deliberation into reaction. Yet this prescription sits in tension with her characterization of online communication as compulsive and pre-reflexive, raising the question of whether strategic opacity is available to organisms constitutively driven toward disclosure. This review proposes that the discordance can be negotiated by reframing the communicative impulse as autonomic rather than automatic. Read in this light, Konior’s text may itself function as an adversarial payload, encoding structural indeterminacy into the datasets it ostensibly theorizes. For audiences who have grown weary of emancipatory manifestos and the defeatist critiques that shadow them, Konior provides a realism sturdy enough to inhabit the forest without surrendering to it.