Simulcast on YouTube, Facebook & Twitter | Thursday, April 30, 2026 @ 8:00 PM EDT (-5GMT)
What if the internet isn’t just a tool—but a hostile environment? In this fascinating conversation, I speak with Bogna Konior about her new book The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, published February 3rd. Drawing from Liu Cixin’s famous “Dark Forest Theory,” Konior reframes the internet as a kind of digital cosmos—one filled not just with people, but with unseen algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine systems quietly shaping how we think and communicate. Is going online a form of “first contact”? Are we broadcasting too much in a space we don’t fully understand? And if the internet is being constantly monitored and interpreted by non-human intelligence, should we rethink how—and why—we communicate at all? This conversation explores the unsettling idea that deception may be safer than honesty online, and that silence might be the smartest strategy in an environment where we are never truly alone.
BOOK https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/1509569251
BIO: Bogna Konior is a scholar and a writer. She is currently Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she works at the Artificial Intelligence & Culture Research Center, and the Interactive Media Arts department. She is the author of Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025). With Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan, she is the editor of Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025).