A flashlight into the cellar of the lawless ‘dark net’

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the world wide web, and I wonder whether its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, would still have given it away had he known where it would be now. Had he foreseen Google and Facebook and Twitter, the conquest of web porn and the normalisation among teen-agers of misogyny and sodomy, the endless harvesting and mining of data, the surveillance, the cruelty and vulgarity and invasive crassness, the commercialisation of everything — would he still have said, ‘Have it for free, in the common good’?

That’s a question that only he can answer. But the great fascination of the web lies in the near-asymptotic rate at which it has grown, not only in scope but in its domination of our lives. It is like a speeded-up version of cultural and commercial evolution — and one which no one could have predicted. Even web billionaires have only got rich by guessing one tiny element of its potential, and making it come true.

Jamie Bartlett’s interesting approach is to look at the web from inside out. ‘The Dark Net’ of his title refers to the submerged, anonymous, unaccountable — and, being unknown, uncountable — users accessing the web via the TOR network. The acronym stands for ‘The Onion Router’, a way of navigating the internet by multiple layers of anonymously relayed data. And the significance of TOR, and the ‘hidden’ web it gives access to, is that it is still largely private. ‘Privacy’ in this case doesn’t mean ‘exclusive’ or ‘members only’. You don’t have to be put up for TOR. You can’t be blackballed. But nor can you be identified or traced.

Bartlett works for the think tank Demos, where he specialises in the political and cultural effects of social media — the stuff that governmental and commercial agencies are desperate to get hold of, and are pretty successful in doing so.