A forthcoming volume in Polity’s Theory Redux series, Assistant Professor Bogna Konior reimagines the internet and artificial intelligence through the metaphor of Liu Cixin’s “dark forest” – a universe where visibility invites danger and survival depends on strategic silence. Professor Konior portrays the online world as a zone of cosmic conflict, shaped by existential tension, emergent AI cults, deceptive super-intelligences, and users who behave like camouflaged life-forms. The book argues that intelligence – human and artificial – is mutating under pressure, learning to conceal, misdirect, and manipulate as transparency becomes a liability. In this dark forest, survival belongs not to the loudest voice, but to the most effectively hidden.
The book is now published across Europe, and will be in the United States in February 2026, with translations underway in Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and German.
About the author
Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid.