Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.

To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.

Humans are amazingly adept at rationalization.

AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.

It’s an interesting contrast to actual dark forest theory—-AI doesn’t want to destroy us, so we don’t need to hide for existential sake. But imagine walking outside and as soon as you do, innumerable copies of you spring up, and each action and sound you make is replicated and amplified. Like a weird Phantom Tollbooth meets Alice in Wonderland on DMT

This article attempts to bite off a lot! I'm going to condense it down to one small part.

The Dark Forest experience that's causing "mass migrations" on the Internet is that, if you venture out into social media carelessly, you're entering an aggressive and frequently unpleasant space which is close to the opposite of "fun" for the average person. Here follows a laundry list here of things which you might expect to encounter in an unpleasant online space, most of which have a kind of tabloid quality: scams, nonstop sales pitches, porn, extreme violence, celebrity worship, ideological extremism, racism, sexism, etc. And more (that list is not exhaustive).

So people find that signing up for the average generic platform that welcomes everybody is a bad experience, and migrate to more niche ones. That's been the path I've followed too, all the way here.

Maybe I’m imagining it, but I feel like there’s a shift in gears somewhere between “we need to fix networks” and “the solution is decentralized networks”. Decentralized networks are unfixable and unmoderatable — that’s why people want them. People don’t want to be corralled or have their information consumption managed (not speaking to what’s good here). The author spends so much effort condemning Facebook for not managing the network in Myanmar enough, and then turns around and suggests — unmoderatable decentralized networks without authorities in a position to manage or moderate them?

I think I must be confused.

The dark forest hypothesis sort of existed before Liu Cixin.