The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld

by Jamie Bartlett

Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making.

posted online, it is almost impossible to control who sees it, and what they do with it.

Exit and voice on dark net markets are doing precisely what economics textbooks predict: creating a better deal for consumers.

That’s not to say young people don’t care about protecting their privacy online – surveys show they do – but rather that they regard their privacy in terms of retaining control over what they share publicly, rather than limiting what they share.

Does connectivity bring us together, or supplant real-world relationships? Does access to information makes us more open-minded or committed to our own dogmas? Is there something about the internet, or perhaps technology itself, that shapes and constrains our choices, prodding us to behave in certain ways? And what do their prophetic visions of our technological future – one bright, one bleak – say about the dark net and how we utilise the internet today?

But ultimately, my work is about ideas. You need to use every tool at your disposal to spread those ideas, even if you dislike them.’

The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis.