Reglas de prelación establecidas en los Pagos del Fondo

I must admit that I do not have an easy answer to these questions, as few people do. Despite my stated goal to interrogate the implications of the word of “dark” in “dark web”, I still must admit that this is no less frustrating, as the dark web proves to be an expertly slippery foe in the battle of interpretation. This of course is a matter of method as much as goals, as an engagement with such a phenomenon means approaching its material dimension as well as its symbolic. Partitioning the two for sake of ease proves just as impossible and self-defeating as jamming them together. Despite this difficulty, I see the struggles with which the Tor Project, Bartlett, Ormsby, and I approach this topic to be productive, as it at minimum resists facile crystallizations of the dark web into horror-movie fodder or

threatening masks worn by moderately contentious intellectuals. In light of this, I wish to conclude this chapter with a very short, curated sample of Hidden Services that I located while using Tor on my own. This requires several methodological clarifications up front. Firstly, I make no claim that this is a random sample. Indeed, this is a selected sample of Hidden Services that I saw as resisting the cultural conception of the dark web, the kind that is often mentioned as a theoretical counterpoint but rarely examined closely. Secondly, I will not be using screen captures or explicitly identifying information here (except for larger,

more “public” services), so much of this will be an act of faith on the part of the reader, only guided by my assurances. Hence, this exercise makes its appearance in a coda of sorts, rather than within the bulk of the chapter proper.

There are several reasons for this choice: 1. The nature of Hidden Service life cycles basically means that one has only a fleeting chance to study sites, as it is in no way

guaranteed that they will be there the next day for further examination. 2. Holding to the spirit of anonymity and secrecy, I feel a certain ethical duty to obscure some of these sites, as I believe that exposure would harm the continued existence of some of them, sites whose aims I support. 3. I also care about my personal safety, and am not as well connected or savvy of a scholar as Bartlett or Ormsby. While these sites remain largely hidden, I, as a public academic, am not, and for the sake of perhaps overzealous caution, I would like to avoid unwarranted risk. Finally, I cannot overstate the miniscule nature of this sample, and would highlight here the explicit impact the nature of the dark web places on any content- based study thereof. Knowing this difficulty from the start, I decided to do an experimental and opposite approach: in the span of only a few days, could I find a series of Hidden Services with ease that lend themselves to a counter-reading of the current cultural and metaphorical position of the dark web? With the aid of Michel Serres, I believe this to be so.

Serres concept of the “parasite” is well-trodden territory by this point, having emerged from its earlier obscurity to become a vanguard theory for political and

communication studies. Steeped in allegorical imagery, The Parasite comes as close to a solid definition of its central concept in the introduction, in which Serres describes the

parasite as “noise”.185 _{Noise is both distorting and productive within this schema, an}

insurgent force that interrupts relations and injects its own influence into situational

dynamics. The larger system onto which this noise attaches is comparable to a host, while the noise itself is a parasite, feeding off of the host’s situational power and growing in turn. Drawing equally from communication theory as much as poststructural philosophy, Serres claims “There is no system without parasites. This constant is a law.”186 _{Further, this}

parasitic relationship creates new power relations and in turn opens itself up for further parasitism, thus position noise as an essentially generative aspect of communicative and organizational relationships. Serres writes, “The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information.”187 _{Where Serres goes great lengths to illustrate his}

concept via a variety of examples both practical and literary, the easiest illustration of his concept is that of a grassroots revolution. Revolutionary actions and groups emerge from within a larger governmental structure (i.e. the host) and draw from its resources and infrastructure as a way to organize and gain force. Using this “energy” to grow in size, the revolutionary group gains prominence, and if not eradicated, is able to forcefully establish a relationship with its host that positions it as an alternative structure. This draws focus and centrality to the revolutionary body, which if left unchecked, can overturn the host and assume dominance. Now itself a larger focus, what once was simple “noise” has entered into a more dominant position, and thus is susceptible to being “parasited” by a new element of noise.

185 _{Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 3.} 186 _{Ibid. 12.}

Serres does not limit himself to macro-scale power relations such as this, instead claiming that all systems and relationships have elements of parasitism at their organizational core. Noise engenders change, and it is the most critical cog in the machinery of progress. Even a computer virus or a DDoS attack, malignant in goal but productive for innovation, serve in the same manner. To this end, darknets can be seen as parasitic in similar fashion, an approach taken by Robert Gehl and Fenwick McKelvey in their article on the subject.188 _To

summarize, Gehl and Fenwick establish a difference between “infrastructure” and “platform”, claiming that infrastructures hold affinity with public interactions while platforms are privatized spheres.189 _{Darknets, such as Tor, act as parasites on the general}

public internet infrastructure to create alternative, privatized platforms for anonymous browsing and communication.190 _{This relationship is further reversed and doubled, as the}

writers claim that darknets also parasite private platforms such as personal computers as a means to establish their own functionality, i.e. through using chains of personal computers as relay stations in the case of Tor.191 _{Acting as conceptual relays in this sense, darknets serve}

as noise that distorts the common binaries between public and private, infrastructure and platform and in turn produce hybrid media spheres that open new productive potentials.

This is a stirring application of Serres thought to the darknet phenomenon, and it is one within which I hold personal affinity. It does not, however, engage with the content of the dark web, likely on account of the difficulties I mentioned prior, coupled with a

difference in aims. I would like to consider the dark web through Serres lens on these

188 _{Gehl, Robert & Fenwick McKelvey. “Bugging out: darknets as parasites of large-scale media objects.”} Media, Culture & Society. Volume 41 (2): 17 – Mar 1, 2019

189 _{Ibid. 220.} 190 _{Ibid. 224.} 191 _{Ibid. 225.}

grounds, though, and think here of the space as a kind of parasitic nurturing ground, one that resists the exclusively noxious image the dark web has assumed. Aligning with the Tor Project, I see in tandem with criminality productive noise and alternative networks that allow for disruptive potential, the kind of which strikes against centralized power both minor and totalitarian. Ironically, a select few of my examples do fall under the purview of criminal activity, opening up an extended debate that I welcome rather than offer solid answers instead. What is here is a survey and reprise rather than a focused analysis, a coda in the truest sense.

After settling on a Hidden Wiki, I began to explore links, eschewing obviously criminal and pornographic ones in lieu of apparently benign or beguiling links. Many of these were in Russian, putting my linguistic skills to the test prior to direct engagement. I first found a book repository run by a Russian school teacher, one who claimed to love reading and books and who felt that literature should be a free gift to the world. They had posted all of the books that they could from their collection, scanned and available for download to peruse at will. Certainly this would fall under the view of copyright

infringement, criminal activity to be sure, but one that finds itself still debated in terms of the Enlightenment ideal of free information. I located an English language site that had on it the translated works of Marx and Engels in total, every word that they had ever published. The site host wrote that they felt these writings were of the highest importance, so much so that there must remain at least one bastion where they cannot be easily found, and thus removed, waiting to be read by future generations. I stumbled upon a Russian language forum that had in its main directory a criminal advice forum set directly below a tech advice forum, one of several technology and media-based forums that I discovered. The latter of which was not

coded language for hacking or seditious activity, but rather was filled with questions for the best graphics cards and processors. The former, while bedecked with questions regarding identity theft contained a single thread on how to get revenge on a bellicose neighbor. The first response involved defecating on his steps.

I once again make no claim or argument towards the objectivity of this select group: I admit absolute bias in terms of for what I was looking. But it is so seldom that one hears about such sites in popular depictions of the dark web, ones that seem to hold the aims of illumination over shrouded criminality. These sites cannot and will never eclipse the damage of the child pornographic trade, for instance, but they still stand out as hopeful beacons, from the renegade teacher trying to get people to read to the “last guardian of Marxism”. In attempts to generate education, these sites serve as quiet bits of noise, drawing into the shadows in an attempt for disruptive enlightenment. Consider The Torist, created in part by Robert Gehl himself along with an anonymous co-creator, a dark web only literary journal that was created “to throw a spanner in the works of various attempts to smear anonymity as being only desirable for evil people”, a direct quote from the anonymous founder.192 _{Itself a}

parasite, The Torist latches onto a representative system, that of such negative assumptions, and attempts to create a new paradigm through its disruptive faculties. This political

undertone is rendered explicit in certain cases, wherein entire nations experienced surges in dark web use following communication platform shut downs on the part of authoritarian governments. China’s reputation for internet control/censorship precedes it, and as such there is little surprise that both VPN and Tor use has been on the rise for Chinese national citizens. Despite holding a smaller presence on the dark web, trade and social forums exist

nonetheless, one such forum announcing itself as “a free Chinese internet world, [in which] you can speak whatever is on your mind.”193 _{Four years since its inception, the likelihood of}

this particular forum still standing is unlikely, but it nonetheless served as a herald for a new discursive universe, one that attempted to establish free dialogue under a system that

restricted it at the core. Similarly, the Russian government’s continued assault on the popular messaging platform Telegram has pushed many citizens to using VPN’s (themselves the subject of legal scrutiny) and dark web use as a means to uphold free communication.194 _The

dark web does host reprehensible content in part, but as Gehl and his associate argue, evil is by no means the sole possessor of evil. It has just as much to offer to those who seek even having such debates in the first place within the political ecology.

The point here is that for as slim as this sample may be, these sites and phenomena exist nonetheless, something the thick metaphor of darkness as applied to the dark web smothers with ease. While researching, I encountered several claims to the existence of forums for queer youth to talk with each other in countries that have seemed their existence punishable by imprisonment if not worse. I tried to find such forums to the best of my ability, and came up with nothing for my efforts. This led to a mix of feelings, on one hand

disappointment for my lack of results, but on the other a sense of hope that they just may be that well-hidden rather than nonexistent. I wonder what could have been had I found the ability to find such places protected in the reaches of the dark web, if even that kind of secured connection could have changed my relationship to the world and myself. I will never know this with certainty, but like Gehl and the Tor Project, that productive potential has left

193 _{Cox, Joseph. “What Firewall? China’s Fledgling Deep Web Community.” Vice. 25 Feb 2015.}

an unshakeable impression on me in terms of my relationship to such anonymity networks. I cannot tolerate the existence of the depravity such as what Ormsby discovered in the final instance of her book, but I nonetheless find myself wishing to “parasite” the dark metaphor in the way that The Torist does, amongst other similar sites. If absolute metaphor and its

development into conceptual complexes can be seen as a historical system, one that bridges a vast literary history of which my prior sample only scratches the surface, then it becomes the job of those small bits of noise to disrupt the chain and allow for a new space to rise.