Unmasking the Trolls
Approximately twenty minutes after the first photograph was posted, one user requested that Sarah take a naked photograph of herself with her first name written somewhere on her body. Soon afterwards, another user asked for a naked photograph of her posing with any medication she was taking. She duly performed both tasks. This was a mistake.
Anonymous said: shit, I hope no one doxxes her. She actually delivered. She seems like a kind girl.
Anonymous replied: dude get a grip she gave her first name, her physician's full name, and even the dormitory area she lives in she wants to be found
Anonymous replied: She is new. Any girl who makes signs or writes names on her body is clearly new to camwhoring, so they really don't know what they're getting themselves into.
Sarah had inadvertently provided enough personal information to allow users to "dox" her—to trace her identity
In 2001, John Suler's famous Online Disinhibition Effect put forward a reason why. It listed six factors that, Suler claimed, allowed users of the internet to ignore the social rules and norms at play offline. He argues that because we don't know or see the people we are speaking to (and they don't know or see us), because communication is instant, seemingly without rules or accountability, and because it all takes place in what feels like an alternative reality, we do things we wouldn't in real life. Suler calls this "toxic disinhibition." According to other academic studies, between 65 and 93 perfect 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 that cues, making communication abstract and anchorless
The easiest way to deal with the trolls is to remove their anonymity, to force websites or platforms to insist that everyone log in under their real names. That wouldn't stop online nastiness entirely of course, but it would at least make trolls a little more accountable for their actions, and perhaps encourage them to hesitate before abusing others. But removing anonymity online has its drawbacks. Anonymity is not a modern invention designed to protect trolls. It also allows people to be honest and open and invisible when there are good reasons to. We dispense with that at our peril.
Get rid of trolling and we might lose something else, too. The line between criminality, threats, offensiveness, and satire is another very fine one. Trolls like Old Holborn do occasionally cast a satirical eye on society's self-importance, exposing the absurdity of modern life, moral panics, or our histrionic twenty-four-hour news culture
the serious trolls seem to broadly follow a libertarian ideology, and believe that 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. Trolls have existed just as long as networked computing, which surely says something about the need many of us have to explore the darker sides of our nature. Every troll I've spoken to says what they do is natural, a human need to push a boundary simply because it's there
The Lone Wolf
Paul genuinely believes he is standing up for the country and its culture, facing down an existential threat from radical Islam. Antifa believe that fascists are on the march across the country, that everyone in the EDL is a closet racist and violent thug, and that they are facing down a possible resurgence of fascism in the country. The reality is far more nuanced, but in their own closed universes, they are both right. In their personal echo chambers they've made demons and enemies of each other. Neither is as bad as the other thinks
There are a lot of people screaming hate online. Although only a tiny proportion will ever commit a violent act, it's almost impossible to tell who that might be. Yet whenever we met in person, I was a little assuaged. Paul's diatribes were usually prefixed with an apology. For him, the online and offline worlds worlds were clearly very different realms.
Two months later, I received an email from an unknown address. Paul hadn't gone anywhere—he just needed a break. "I was becoming too hate-filled, too paranoid, it was seeping into my blood, my bones," he tells me. He felt under too much pressure from all the trolling and abuse, and worried about the effects the attacks were having on him. He decided to hill off the digital Paul he'd created. "It was hard, because I ache to have a voice"
Into Galt's Gulch
Modern computing made encryption far more powerful, but the underlying principle was the same: if you wanted to communicate secretly with someone, you still had to get the code to them—which presented the same problem you started with. Two MIT mathematicians called Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman solved this in 1976 with a system they called "public key encryption." Each user is given his own personal cypher system comprised of two "keys," which are different but mathematically related to each other through their relationship to a shared prime number. The mathematics behind it is complicated, but the idea is simple. It means you can share your "public" key with everyone, and they can use it to encrypt a message into a meaningless jumble that can be decrypted only with your secret "private" key". Public key encryption transformed the potential uses of encryption, because suddenly people were able to send encrypted messages to each other without having to also exchange a code, and indeed without even having to ever meet at all. Up until the early nineties, powerful encryption was the sole preservation of governments. The United States had even classed powerful encryption as a "munition" in 1976 and made its export illegal without a license
As a computer programmer, Amir is exceptionally precise and exacting. But when I try to press him on the specifics of politics, it feels to me like he struggles to turn his frustration into a clear and coherent set of ideas. Whenever he speaks about Bitcoin and its potential, the conversation often quickly switched to angry polemic
"Bitcoin is a currency based on mathematics," he says. "The purest kind. It creates the purest market, peer to peer with no corrupt or controlling third parties." In that sense, he sees the Dark Wallet as one more strike against the inefficient and overly powerful governments in the world. "A bunch of gangsters running a sham democracy," Bitcoin cuts out the friction, the inefficiencies, that get in the way. (And as he will later explain, its potential exists in far more than money.) On this broad point, there are many within the Bitcoin community who agree with him.
It feels to me a little utopian: too much faith in the certainty of math and physics to resolve society's problems, with insufficient thought about precisely how to get there. Amir sees it differently. "I spend a lot of time in communities, observing the problems they have now. I look at the tools available to me, and see how to create solutions. there's not utopianism in this process, as it is an iterative one [...]
Amir suddenly stops. "Do you want to play a computer game?" he asks. He loads up something called Mirror's Edge. The story is set in a near-future society in which a dictatorial state keeps the peace through a toxic mixture of surveillance and sterile hyperconsumerism. The docile population prefer peace to freedom, except for a handful of rebels who rely on "runners" to deliver messages to the underground resistance. As a runner, your job is to scamper across the tops of building, scurry down back alleys, and disappear into the shadows, evading the state police. "I love games," Amir says. "They're how children learn about politics. He plays with his face impossibly close to the screen, head slightly cocked, half jumping out of his chair every time his online persona does. Training," he says chuckling. As he ducks and weaves he continues the thread we'd left off before he started the game: "It's true—people are going to suffer. Yes, that's said. But that's just the way it is"
Three Clicks
Founded in the United States in 1978, their goal is to "end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships," although in truth it's hard to see how that really amounts to anything except the right of the members to fulfil their wish of having sex with children. NAMBLA members consider themselves to be misunderstood and persecuted in the same way homosexuals once were, and in the 1980s and '90s they held public demonstrations in support of their cause. Most remarkably NAMBLA considers itself part of "a homosexual struggle" and claims to support "the empowerment [my italics] of youth in all areas" against what they call "rampant ageism"
Although no data is available, Tink believes that suicide rates are higher among those arrested for offences online than those perpetuated in the real world. The online offenders continue to retain Suler's dissociative fantasy. "It was only when the police arrived," says Michael, "that I realized the severity of what I'd been doing"
On the Road
According to Professor Wortley, the potential to become sexually attracted to children is not as rare a phenomenon as we'd like to imagine. The human sexual impulse is extraordinarily flexible, and at least partly shaped by social norms. Without some degree of demand for these images, they wouldn't be produced and shared in such staggering volumes. That is why the net has led to such an explosion in both content and the number of people accessing it: by making it easier to find, the latent demand can be more readily realized and, in some cases, created.
This does not excuse what Michael did. Just because something is three licks away does not make it any less of a crime. Michael repeated to me several times that he never actively searched for the material. He clearly thinks that mitigates in his favor. But the distinction between searching and accidentally-finding-and-keeping is pretty meaningless on the internet. Michael clicked three times: and then he kept clicking. It's not the computer's fault. It's Michael's fault. But if it had been a little harder for him to find, if jailbait pornography wasn't so easily accessible, perhaps Michael's casual or vaguely formed attraction to children would never have been explored. Without the internet, I don't think Michael would be a convicted sex offender
According to Nathalie Nahai, the author of Webs of Influence, a study on online persuasion, we make subconscious judgments about websites based on "trust cues." Typically, explains Nahai, we have confidence in a site if it is well designed—with high-definition logos and page symmetry—simply constructed and easy to use. It is an indication of the amount of effort the people behind the site have put in, and, Nahai argues, a reliable measure of how deserving they are of our trust and custom. Major e-commerce companies spend millions developing and designing websites
A study by the United Nations suggests that the costs associated with drug-related crime (fraud, burglary, robbery, and shoplifting) in England and Wales were equivalent to 1.6 percent of GDP, or 90 percent of all the economic and social costs related to drug abuse. This is also likely to reduce, as buyers cut out the street dealer. History suggests that those who want drugs will always find a way to get them. On Silk Road, they can get a better product and with fewer negative risks associated with buying drugs on the street
Lights, Web-Camera, Action
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
"I post for the attention, I suppose," he tells me. "I'm fed up with people always mentioning how thing I am. It's refreshing to hear that somebody appreciates my body. Whether they're male or female isn't a concern. I'm only listening to the compliments: it's a confidence boost." Joe has saved every positive comment he has received—there are hundreds—in a folder on his desktop
The Werther Effect
When I first visited these sites, I was shocked by the emaciated bodies, the blase discussions about lethal cocktails or people searching for suicide pacts, the graphic photos of mutilation. This wears off very quickly. Emaciated bodies began to appear unsurprising, and ordinary. And because thinspo, tricks and tips, suicide methods and diets are put forward by a seemingly caring community of people, it is easy to forget just how deadly the advice can be. It could be said that almost any action, no matter how misguided, can quickly become acceptable—even admirable—if you believe that others are doing it too
In 1774, the German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which his thoughtful young protagonist takes his life after failing in his endeavors to be with the woman he loved. The book sparked a spate of copycat suicides across Europe by young men who had found themselves in a similar predicament. This strange phenomenon became known as the "Werther Effect"
The Werther Effect has been found to take particular hold following cases where the victim is portrayed as romantic and heroic in some way—like Werther himself—and if they receive a lot of attention or sympathy. This is why outbreaks of the Werther Effect nearly always follow large-scale media coverage. As a result, many countries have strict guidelines about how to report suicides. During the time of the south Wales suicides, for instance, the police asked the national media to stop reporting the stories in a bid to limit the number of copycat cases
David Conibear was a successful computer software engineer in his late twenties, and a frequent and popular user in a.s.h. In late 1992, he posted a new comment on the site:
Hey, fellow ASHers! ... After a lot of research and a lot more thought, I've gone with the KCN dissolved in cold water ... The computer is programmed to wait 36 hours and then phone 911, to prevent any of my friends discovering the body. This news is also on a delay timer, just in case there are any closet interventionists lurking. If this DOESN'T work, I'll try to get someone to post that tidbit to a.s.h. so none of you ends up making the same mistake. Oh, a final note ... in case the group gets any flak about this, let it be known that a.s.h. was not a promoting cause in my suicide. Had it not been for this group, my best plan to date was to get pissed drunk and dive off the roof of my apartment building (yes, I have a key). I think this is a cleaner all 'round. Have a nice life!
It was the first documented online suicide note. David's body was found the next day
Conclusion: Zoltan vs Zerzan
Many of the net's early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte—former director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab—declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism
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
The dark net fosters breathtaking creativity. The majority of the sites I visited were astonishingly adaptive and innovative
Their focus might be wrong or misguided, but people in the dark net use the internet in extraordinary ways. Rather than spend our energy on trying to censor, regulate, and close these sites, we would do better to learn from them, and work out how we might use the technology they have ruthlessly exploited for good
Did it give succor to my darker side? Not really. It didn't make me want to self-harm, watch illegal pornography, or bully someone anonymously. I like to think that I am a well-balanced, sensible person who embarked on this experiment with my eyes open. But I did become accustomed and habituated to horrible and troubling things. It was surprising how quickly I stopped being shocked by anything. Simply put: I got used to everything. That, I realized, can be a problem. It's important to be shocked occasionally. It forces us to examine our moral view. That's why people can easily get sucked into very dark and destructive places. If I had a propensity towards any of these behaviors, perhaps it would have encouraged me. For some people—for the young, the vulnerable, or the inexperienced—freedom in the dark net comes at a price. People have to be prepared for what they might encounter there
Most of the chief protagonists in this book I met online first, and offline second. I always liked them more in the real world. By removing the face-to-face aspect of human interaction, the internet dehumanizes people, and our imagination often turns them into inflated monsters, more terrifying because they are in the shadows. Meeting them in person rehumanizes them again. Whether it was anarchist Bitcoin programmers, trolls, extremists, pornographers, or enthusiastic self-harmers, all were more welcoming and pleasant, more interesting and multifaceted, than I'd imagined. 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
THE DARK NET: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/19186421-the-dark-net