One of the nice things about my line of work is that sometimes I get paid to read interesting things, and sometimes even to talk to the interesting people who write them. Pretty much exactly year ago, I got to interview Bogna “Dark Forest” Konior, a brilliant young theorist with whose main line of thought I find really quite repellent¹, for reasons I discussed over at Worldbuilding Agency at the time.

I couldn’t share more than that at the time, because [client confidentiality], and still can’t now—but if you wanted a sort of overview of her ideas, this interview piece at The Philosophical Salon might save you wading through various books and hard-to-find long-form essays.

It also contains an aside with which I agree entirely, although it’s a conclusion I’ve apparently reached by a very different route. Konior and the interviewer are discussing her approach to media criticism, which quite explicitly disavows the now-standard yoking together of “the internet” with the economic circumstances of its construction and sustainment:

A great deal of what is now called media theory, she said with a smile, is a Guardian op-ed with philosophy footnotes; a respectable genre, she added, but one that should not exhaust what can be thought about technology. She considers herself an anomaly in the field because she did not enter it out of hatred. She came from film and art, which she studied out of love, and brought the same curiosity to machines; the economic critique operates on one dimension and the philosophical questions on another, and the unpleasantness of an experience subtracts nothing from its interest, since most philosophically rich experiences are unpleasant in some way. When people ask her why the book says nothing about Mark Zuckerberg, she answers that some fifty-seven books published this year already do; at a certain point reactive critique becomes a form of unfreedom, in which one’s enemies dictate the rhythm of one’s thinking.

That last line is really quite something. Konior has been working out in China for some time, and tends to soft-pedal the influence of religion on attitudes to technology in that country. But that’s a line that could come straight out of Sun Tzu, or the Tao Te Ching…

1. For the avoidance of any doubt: I find her theory repellent, not her person. To the contrary, she was a delight to interview. ↩︎