The Dark Net

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My internet habits are pretty boring. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and a few other sites, but apparently I am missing out on a whole world of drug deals, illegal pornography and nationalistic groups out there in the darker corners of the internet, which do not show up in google searches yet are still only a few clicks away, if you know where to look.

Welcome to the Dark Net.

Jamie Bartlett lays out a brilliant examination of this world, starting with the phenomenon of trolling and destroying people’s lives simply by ascertaining just a few key details--and moving on to seedier topics, such as the Silk Road online drug market; porn made with web cams; the benefits of using Bitcoins to circumvent Wall Street and the national banking system; even forums about suicide that don’t offer the type of advice one might hope. It is a scary world out there, and The Dark Net gets into it in an extremely entertaining way.

Bartlett implants himself with the online Nationalists, perverts, and regular working folks just trying to make a few bucks off a web cam. He brings up a lot of questions about freedom from government, privacy, and the ethics of the online world. It is no doubt that the internet has opened up the world in a way that it had never been opened before, and often times the biggest innovators are the ones who use it for less than noble goals.

The answers that Bartlett seeks to the questions he asks do not come easily. He finds benefits to things that might otherwise be considered harmful (such as how the ability to buy drugs online can be beneficial and safer than buying them on the street) , and in many instances, he learns things about his subjects that contradict his initial image of them. For example, he finds a perfectly likable man who just happens to be a neo-Nazi; he has a perfectly civil and productive interview with a convicted child pornography...enthusiast. As he states in his conclusion, “the dark net is not black and white: it is confusing shades of gray.” (page 240).

At 240 pages of text (with extensive endnotes), The Dark Net is a breeze to read that will take you to a darker corner of the online world.




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