Yancey Strickler: Dark Forest Theory of the Internet | Doomscroll

We've thought of states in the west. We've thought of states for the last several hundred years as being democratic. >> Thought of past tense. >> Yes.

And now capitalism and totalitarianism are not in conflict. They can work quite well together. >> I also think of this topic of social pressure as being something that is often in the way of the truth. >> There is an uncontrolled burn >> tearing down existing institutions.

Right now, some new society and civilization on the other side of this. What remains to be seen is what it is. government as priest, government as police, government as sensor, and then I think the dark forest era is something different. Welcome to Doomscroll.

I'm your host Joshua Citerella. My guest is Yansy Strickler, an author and entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Kickstarter, the director and co-founder of Metal Label, and the author of the dark forest theory of the internet. What is the dark forest theory of the internet?

Well, I think I have to go back to what I was feeling at that moment. 2019 is Trump won era. >> Yep. >> And >> pre- pandemic.

>> Yeah. And it was within the post 2016 hangover where I think a lot of internet people, internet native people had seen the future. The future belongs to us. the future will follow these extremely classic liberal values and you know the future stretches out before us uninterrupted and I participated in those games.

I I always had a mixed feelings about him but I pursued that and then I I gradually retreated and I really stopped trying to stand out in those spaces and instead I was trying to actually not stand out. I was more doing the opposite. And uh at the time I had a tiny letter which was like a precursor to Substack had about 300 people on it. And so I wrote an essay where I tied some of the ideas from uh the threebody problem by Shishanlu the science fiction hard sci-fi book and in particular the way he writes about Ferm's paradox was which is this notion of whether there's other life in the universe.

And the idea goes that we look into space, we look into the cosmos, we send signals out into the cosmos saying, "Hey, we're here." And no one writes back to us ...