---
title: "Darkness / Superdarkness"
description: "Poliks, Trillo, Dunn, Scott-Douglas and Springett's epistemic condition in which descriptive information about a system stops being useful: \"the decorrelation of information from utility\" for prediction, audit or steering."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/darkness-superdarkness"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/darkness-superdarkness"
last_updated: "2026-09-09"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Darkness / Superdarkness

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/darkness-superdarkness), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Poliks, Trillo, Dunn, Scott-Douglas and Springett's epistemic condition in which descriptive information about a system stops being useful: "the decorrelation of information from utility" for prediction, audit or steering. It is neither secrecy nor illegibility nor encryption — every log, schematic and line of code may be public and readable and still support no action, partly because the system rebuilds itself faster than it can be described, but mainly because its ground shifts (their image is an opponent who quietly renegotiates what counts as winning between moves). Darkness intensifies with factory class: a 3D printer is asymptotically resolvable, an agentic coding harness is dark because its plan is selected along a live branching trajectory, and superdarkness is the Class 3 limit, where the missing key is the factory's world and so cannot be handed over at all. It is the article's radicalization of the Black Box: not a box hard to enter but one whose interior would tell you nothing.

## Appears in

- [The Superdark Factory](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/superdark) (2026-09-08)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-09._