The dark forest of political communication

I have no views I care to vocalize about the current political situation in the United States, or anywhere else you may associate me with. I am personally totally politically inert, the equivalent of neon gas in a tube, and a steadfast adherent to philosopher Michael Huemer’s prescription in In Praise of Passivity to boot. I have never voted and refused to say the pledge of allegiance in kindergarten after my teacher kindly printed it out for me so I could review its contents after class and understand the implications of it.

That all said. It has just come to my attention that the recent, ahem, event of a certain political figure, in a certain country, has given rise to a lot of people cheering the event on on social media. Unusually for our times, that cheering has led people who are not of the same boat to create an actual website taking doxxing submissions for these people. Jobs are being lost and lives are being derailed right now as a result of this website.

(I should also mention dig thewebsite.com and the default isometric cube favicon both suggest to me that this site is being hosted on Squarespace.com, and that this is almost certainly in violation of their Acceptable Use Policy. The doxxed parties may do well to reach out to Squarespace en masse to demand action be taken. Anyway.)

In other words: Welcome to the dark forest.

First a primer: The “dark forest” theory is a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox, first popularized by the science fiction novel “The Dark Forest” by Liu Cixin, which asks why, if alien life is likely to exist, we haven’t found any evidence of it. It suggests that the universe is like a dark forest, and every civilization is a quiet hunter. Because a civilization can’t be sure whether another is benevolent or hostile, the safest course of action is to remain silent to avoid detection. If detection can’t be helped - say, because the shadow pattern created by your Dyson sphere is too characteristic for another civilization to not conclude you’re over there - then the winning move is to strike first to ensure its own survival. This environment of paranoia and “shoot first” mentality means that any civilization that reveals itself is likely to be quickly eliminated. Therefore, the universe appears quiet because all intelligent life is hiding.

Political communication has become like that. Attitudes and extremism across the spectrum are so heightened that you can no longer be sure someone won’t try to hurt you for something that you say. I wish to emphasize beyond any shadow of a doubt this is not a partisan thing and that this is true regardless of whether you are left, right, up, down, top, bottom, strange, or charm. Actions like (a) our doxxing website, (b) the cheering on of the event itself, (c) the event itself (there is strong evidence to conclude this political figure was targeted because of being maligned on the internet, and the fact that even that statement is vague to the point of meaninglessness only serves to bolster my claim!) will all become more common as time goes on. As technical knowledge and social media usage achieve omnipresence, we will gradually enter a strange bottom-up panopticon generated and fueled by the masses. A society where you must be aware, at all times, that if you say something, it will not only be immortalized - because websites like the Wayback Machine have already been doing that forever - but actively made easier and easier to find. That should profoundly change how you interact with the net going forth. You should grieve if you need to, then adjust your world model to account for this.

But indeed our situation is even worse than that of the classical dark forest theory, because an alien race with millions of years can build an arbitrarily close-to-physically-perfect armada of ships, without ever actually needing to fight anyone. We don’t have that advantage. Nobody can actually form actually usable or coherent political views in a vacuum, you have to have sparring mates to get anywhere. How can you do that, when the forest is pitch, and you can never tell whether the person you’re sparring with is a true friend, or whether they have a knife in their pocket they’re just dying to surprise you with?

You don armor. Technically speaking, it is not that hard to dissociate yourself from your real-world identity. Literally just not posting object-level takes under your own name will thwart the vast majority of malicious, but not particularly skilled, assailants. You have the home advantage here and you can push it much farther than that. Real ones lease a web hosting server from one country, and a domain name from another country, and pay for both with untraceable cryptocurrency (I note here for context that I have worked in software almost exclusively since I was a teenager, and have a known geeky interest in security and security-adjacent topics, and so naturally reflect upon technical solutions for secure communication even if the most interesting things I actually have to communicate myself are videos of my kids in a swingset).

Most importantly, you can speak in a manner that communicates courtesy and good faith to the people you are directly talking to, or to the person who is reading your post. The more layers of plausible deniability you can put between the profile that is talking politics online and the employed, living, breathing person you are in real life, the better. The effects are generally multiplicative and just a few layers of this will make you effectively bulletproof, if you don the armor. But you need to do it ahead of time.

Neither you, nor your “enemies”, nor your enemy’s enemies who are not your friends, particularly like this state of affairs¹. But the rank truth is that there almost certainly are speech acts that are so beyond the pale for you that you would go out of your way to harm someone for committing them in some way. It is in a perverse way an act of the utmost respect to extend awareness of that same capability to your counterparties. “We’re going to discuss this divorced of our real-world identities, so that we can both feel safe in being frank.” This is the sole way to move forward and continue a good faith political discussion at all without the fear of violent or professional reprisal.

Postscript

I have one last statement to make, since even posting something as anodyne and generalized as this has me worried that someone might take it out of context.

If someone links you to this post in the future, please consider it a polite way of saying:

I’m happy to hear whatever you have to say on this topic. You can rest assured that I will follow something approximating professional therapy norms when it comes to the subject matter under discussion. (No discussion of plans to hurt anyone else or commit crimes, etc. Not willing to go down on co-conspiracy charges with you.)

But for me, discussing this kind of thing in public introduces too much of a tail risk into my life for me to feel comfortable. I do not necessarily agree with you just because I am being pleasant. I do not necessarily condone anything you are saying. Nor do I necessarily condemn anything you are saying. I simply have a life I like living, and part of continuing to live it involves making sure nobody targets me or my loved ones. This is more important to me than expressing whatever I happen to think on the matter.