Artists who tire of the commercialised web are thriving in a space free from legislation, surveillance and monopolisation
You could view the internet a little like the Earths surface. The bits of the web everyone knows about and uses are the land masses, but surrounding them are the vast expanses of ocean that represent the much publicised deep web the uncharted depths that are the areas not indexed by standard commercial search engines, because theyre meaningless to the average internet user. However, within this abyss of uncharted waters, there is a place that undertakes groundbreaking technological advancements just to keep itself both separate and efficient. This relatively small area has been labelled the darknet, and it can only be browsed using services like Tor (The Onion Router) or Freenet, which are based on multilayered concepts of anonymity designed to make both the visitors and the web pages (styled as .onion) incredibly difficult to trace.
The darknet has been around since the 70s, but the rise and fall of the Silk Road darknet marketplace empire (now Silk Road 2.0) in 2013, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, notably Bitcoin, saw it truly break into the mainstream press. Ever since it has enjoyed sporadic news mentions, usually relating to drug and gun markets, political activism, child pornography, fraud, fetishism, murder, terrorism and Tesco clubcard vouchers. To many, unsurprisingly, the darknet is an incomprehensible sin city.
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by Joe Zadeh via Electronic music | The Guardian
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