The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld

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

“Part of living in a free society is accepting that no idea is beyond being challenged or ridiculed, and that nothing is more stifling to free expression than being afraid to upset or offend.”

“I’ve found that just being able to talk about life with others who understand and aren’t judgmental has made it much easier to not jump on the suicide train every time things go south.”

“The problem with a boundary-pushing philosophy is that it can be used to justify bullying and threatening people with no regard for the consequences.”

“But if everyone starts using Bitcoin, government’s ability to tax and spend will diminish: healthcare, education, and social security will suffer. The things that hold democracies together, and provide support for the most in need. Societies cannot be broken and fixed like computer code, nor do they follow predictable mathematical rules.”

“Anders is one of 2,000 or so people around the world currently paying between £25 and £35 per month to ensure his body is preserved when he dies.* It’s surprisingly little to pay for a shot at immortality. “On current trends, I estimate a 20 percent probability that I’ll be woken when the science catches up,” says Anders.”

“Once you’ve got a file, you needn’t fear death—you can always be re-uploaded into a synthetic human body, or, he says, “some kind of robot.” It doesn’t matter what the vessel is, according to Anders, because it would experience consciousness in exactly the same way as we do.”

“We don’t know if early Homo sapiens argued whether fire burns or warms, but you can hazard a guess that they did.”

“Ultimately, the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified, and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online—but still recognizably us.”

“An increasing desire for digital affirmation is leading more of us to share our most intimate and personal lives online, often with complete strangers. What we like, what we think, where we’re going. The more we invest of ourselves online and the more ready we are to be offended, the more there is for trolls to feed on. And despite the increasing policing of social media sites, trolling is not going anywhere.”

“Bitcoin is nothing more than a unique string of numbers. It has no independent value, and is not tied to any real-world currency. Its strength and value come from”

“Like many techno-pessimists, Zerzan thinks technology tends to work most effectively for those who already have power, because it maintains and strengthens their grip on society’s levers: more ways to watch us, control us, make us replaceable automatons just like in a nineteenth-century British factory. “The idea that technology is neutral, just a tool, is plain wrong,” insists Zerzan.”

“Smári has scrutinized current National Security Agency (NSA) programs revealed by Edward Snowden and the overall security budget of the U.S. government, and calculated it currently costs 13 cents a day to spy on every internet user in the world. He hopes that default encryption services like his will push that closer to $10,000. It’s not to stop people being spied on—he agrees that’s sometimes necessary—but rather to drastically limit it. At this inflated cost he estimates the U.S. government would only be able to afford to keep tabs on around 30,000 people. “If we can’t trust the government to do only those things that are necessary and proportionate—and we can’t—then economics can force them to.”

“Worse still, thinks Zerzan, we have become too dependent on technology for our everyday needs—communication, banking, shopping, etc.—and our sense of autonomy, self-reliance, and, ultimately, our freedom has been eroded as a result: “If you rely on a machine for everything, you slowly stop being a free person in any meaningful sense.”

“Ultimately Old Holborn agrees with /b/: “Would you go post photos of yourself and put them on the internet? So why did she do it? It’s not about teaching her a lesson, but she has to be responsible.”

“By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature? And if so, how?”

“Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw.”

“According to other academic studies, between 65 and 93 percent of human communication is nonverbal: facial expression, tone, body movement. Put very simply, our brain has evolved over millions of years to subconsciously spot these cues so we can better read and empathize with each other. Communicating via computers removes these cues, making communication abstract and anchorless. Or, as the web comic Penny Arcade has it: “The Greater Internet Fuck-wad Theory”: “normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad.”

“The reason Bitcoin is so beloved by libertarians is because it takes control of the money supply away from the state. Satoshi distrusted the global banking system, and saw his crypto-currency as a way to undermine it. He hated that bankers and governments held the key to the money supply and could manipulate it to their own ends.”

“It sometimes feels that anyone, especially women, who puts their head above the internet parapet is targeted.”