Yancey Strickler does well to not spoil Liu Cixin’s sci-fi series in his analogy, but there’s a beauty to taking this deeper — and in doing so I’ll spoil some concepts revealed in the final book of this series, Death’s End. If you haven’t read them, scroll on!

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We learn later in the series that there’s a means to safeguard an area in the dark forest by broadcasting a message that your existence does not pose a threat. It becomes commonly understood that this is achieved by lowering the speed of light in an area, to create a dark tomb, where anything that enters can never leave. If we take this analogy to the author’s writing, the internet as a whole is the dark forest (there’s no plural), where he refers to dark forests, we can actually interpret these as dark tombs. Perhaps in future cultural cycles of the internet, we’ll face an opportunity that someone (or a group, family, society..) can irrevocably disconnect from the internet. For now it’s a discipline that we can experiment with. The implications become a magnitude more interesting when we apply the rest of this analogy.