I haven't read The Dark Forest but I read a few blog posts about it. What really got me interested, however, was The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler in 2019:
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. – Yancey Strickler
I often think of where the world is headed, politically. I'm a doomer at heart.
As part of that, I think about the Internet in a few decades. In the worst case, the public Internet is gone. An alternative that is slightly less bad is that governments will have discovered that blocking at the level of the national Domain Name System (DNS) won't work because it's easy to circumvent using alternative name servers. And so, slowly at first but then ever faster, from the top down, people will think that perhaps the Great Firewall is cool: for the children, against porn, against spam, against vandalism, to fight tax evasion, to fight terrorism, you know the deal. And yes, even to fight fascism. So many people are telling me that we should ban Telegram, for example.
I'm honestly not sure what to recommend. Is the free press our problem? I don't think so. It's the incentives and the power imbalances that are a problem. Rich people pay other people to create companies, to buy companies, to sponsor some programs and to cancel others, and slowly the landscape changes. Big corporations buy small ones. Rich people buy failing ones. The prime example here in Switzerland is how the Weltwoche was bought by billionaires and handed to somebody who supports a flat tax, who supports the ban on minarets, who supports supports tax evasion abroad, who supports anti-refugee policies… all of it legal, of course, but these laws are nauseating. The same pattern can be seen in how the state tries to support media diversity and still the big publishers manage to profit the most. The same pattern can be seen in how the right wing parties fight against state radio and state TV.
So what I recommend is to not go dark. Have friends. Have social media. But be aware that our time might be short. We might have to build the infrastructure while we can. Those of us who can should build for the rest of us who have other things on their mind. We should build this to be as easy to use as possible. We should build this so that we can detach from the public Internet and it will still work.
The sneaker-net will be back. They will call it the dark net but to me, it will forever be friends meeting in a place, with mass storage in our backpacks (at the time) or in our pockets, exchanging stuff. And even if this future is not great at all, we need that alternative. How else will our future selves and our children organize? And even if it turns out to be unnecessary because we keep riding that wild horse of freedom, forever teetering at the brink of fascism, alternative needs to be there to keep the next level of services in line. I still believe that the availability and ubiquity of bit-torrent is what keeps the prices of streaming services down. It's the threat of piracy that keeps the official channels honest. Because we can always go back. The infrastructure is still around. The software is still around.
This is why I'm interested in @jgoerzen@floss.social's Recovering Our Lost Free Will Online: Tools and Techniques That Are Available Now. In my case, the thing I'm most interested in is NNCP.
Recovering Our Lost Free Will Online: Tools and Techniques That Are Available Now
NNCP allows us to connect all services that can be made to work with a store and forward architecture. The simplest and oldest protocols in this respect are mail and file copying, and services built on top of that, such as net news. These services grew big with UUCP, the precursor to NNCP. Store-and-forward precludes the kind of interactive applications many of us are used to. Instead, it's a bit like a library or a book store: you order a book and at some point you get the book. There is a delay. The postal system works the same way: write a letter and send it off, wait for some days, maybe get a reply back. Basically, anything that can be imagined as requesting something and getting back a reply after some time can be implemented using store-and-forward architecture.
If you think of the web as serving static documents, it can be made to work. Imagine reading Wikipedia via email: you send the URL via email to a service, and some time later you get back an email with the response. Soon we would be thinking of extensions to this. What if the response returned an archive of the page requested, all the images it includes, and the same for all the Wikipedia content pages it links to? Fewer visits to the library, so to say! It would be much harder to do the same thing using traditional social media because the web sites are more like web apps. There are a gazillion ways to view things: in a time line (or multiple time lines!), on a profile (so many profiles!), in threads, in search results, and so on. If every click on a button requires a trip that can take many days, it's doesn't work. Instead, such social media sites must be restructured to work a bit like net news: new posts satisfying some filters are sent in regular updates and your local client rearranges the, filters them, searches them.
All of this delay-tolerant networking is possible with Unix to Unix Copy (UUCP). What Node to Node Copy (NNCP) adds is end-to-end encryption (in a multi-hop setup the packets remain encrypted so the carrier cannot read them) and onion routing (in a multi-hop setup the carrier doesn't know where the packet is originally from or where the packet is going to end up). And with that, the sneaker-net is back. You can imagine a low-tech future where most of the last miles are burned, the copper stolen and repurposed, the optical fibre no longer functional, and a service springs up where the post or some other courier is used to send USB sticks and SD cards from community to community in order to exchange letters, reports, movies, pictures, music, and so on. Or if the government is monitoring the airwaves and declaring mesh networks illegal or taking over the mesh networks (like Cuba's Street Network, SNET), we'll have to rely on USB sticks and SD cards, too.
This is where we're getting back to the Dark Forest. I don't have an answer to that. It's a bit like members-only bit-torrent sites. Do you trust them? Do they trust you? How are you going to learn about the trustworthy ones?
In order to learn more, to be prepared, to think things through, I want to experiment with the technology. I want to see what can be done, run into the issues, pick the low hanging fruits. Play with the technology before we really need it.
I remember audio cassettes being sent back and forth as a kid when we were living in South-West Africa (back before they finally got their freedom and renamed the country to Namibia) and my grandparents were living in Austria. Phone calls were very expensive. So the family sat around a tape recorder, each of us speaking in turn, saying something, and weeks later, all of us gathering again, listening to the replies.
Using images like these virtual, delay-tolerant family gatherings worked long before I knew anything at all about computers.
#NNCP