The dark net
"An Independent and New Statesman Book of the Year Beyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit--a world of Google, Facebook, and Twitter--lies a vast and often hidden network of sites, communities, and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits, and where people can be anyone, or do anything, they want. This is the world of Bitcoin and Silk Road, of radicalism and pornography. This is the Dark Net. In this important and revealing book, Jamie Bartlett takes us deep into the digital underworld and presents an extraordinary look at the internet we don't know. Beginning with the rise of the internet and the conflicts and battles that defined its early years, Bartlett reports on trolls, pornographers, drug dealers, hackers, political extremists, Bitcoin programmers, and vigilantes--and puts a human face on those who have many reasons to stay anonymous. Rich with historical research and revelatory reporting, The Dark Net is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at a world that doesn't want to be known"
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2014–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That’s not a new problem with selling info on dark web marketplaces. if you're interested in learning more, here are a couple of books you might enjoy:
"The Dark Net” – Jamie Bartlett “We Are Anonymous” – Parmy Olson “Future Crimes” – Marc Goodman “Kingpin” – Kevin Poulsen
- "The Dark Net" by Jamie Bartlett was a book with a perhaps overly dramatic and actually a bit misleading title/graphics, that nonetheless does a very, very good job of explaining the so-what of crypto-anarchism. Also, as it was published in 2014, so it was a bit prophetic.
To crib a Goodreads review of it, it's actually about:
> Bartlett spends the bulk of the book analyzing the impact and development of the internet on human life:
To get to the point, what is really interesting about the crypto-anarchist movement is a concept Bartlett does a good job explaining. The cipherpunks, for all their libertarian wackadoodle beliefs, believed that if you could enable 3 pillars of internet use, the impact of how the internet could be used would be radically improved. Or like, those 3 pillars would enable something really "meaningful" about internet use..
Those three pillars are natively digital... 1) private browsing 2) private communications 3) private spending
If you look at how the past 20-30 years turned out, 1 and 2 came into existence and proved to have immensely impact: Tor and PGP. Tor perhaps didn't shake things too much although has its niche, but consumer-accessible encryption today plays fundamental roles in internet infra basic functionality the same way that web servers and DNS does.
So, the cipherpunks sort of called it accurately on 1 and 2. Along comes 3 in Oct 21, '08 with bitcoin's white paper. At a minimum, that means btc merits attention in my mind, as it comes out of a community that has some other very prescient commentary on how the internet could, should, and would eventually work.
- I vaguely remember a chapter in the book The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett talking about some kind of techno-commune in Spain(?) where people just kind of worked on their personal projects. There was a lot of cryptocurrency related work iirc. Didn't sound as formal or nice as the art colonies described in the article.
- Perhaps the most interesting point is in the last paragraph:
> Moreover, the deep web’s denizens will continue to adapt. Jamie Bartlett, author of “The Dark Net”, predicts: “The future of these markets is not centralised sites like Silk Road 2.0, but sites where…listings, messaging, payment and feedback are all separated, controlled by no central party”—and thus impossible to close.
I know some work along these lines has been started with e.g. OpenBazaar, but it may be a while before they are seen in any large scale activities - maybe another five years still until they are at all commonplace, or even available to the general public.
