The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  There’s another danger too, explains Joe. Online, you can never be quite sure what advice you’ll receive. Other users may be supportive, sympathetic, but there’s no way of knowing who they really are. In 2008 a nineteen-year-old Canadian girl named Nadia joined a.s.h., and posted that she was feeling suicidal. A user named Cami replied. Cami explained that she also suffered from severe depression. She too had decided to end her life soon. Being a nurse, Cami could also offer some professional know-how.

  Cami: I started looking for methods to let go since ive seen every method used possible at work as a emergency ward nurse i know what does and don’t work so that is why i chose hanging to use ive tried it in practice to see if it hurt and how fast it worked and it was not a bad experience

  Nadia: So when are you going to catch the bus?

  Cami: I would like to soon you?

  Nadia: I am planning to attempt this Sunday

  Cami: wow ok you want to use hanging too? Or can u?

  Nadia: I’m going to jump

  Cami: well that is ok but most people puss out before doing that plus they don’t wanna leave a terribly messy mess for others to clean up

  Nadia: I want it to look like an accident. There’s a bridge over the river where there’s a break in the ice

  Cami: ok otherwise I was gonna suggest hanging

  Nadia: I considered train jumping like, at the subway, but I though this would be better

  Cami: umm yeah if you wanted to do hanging, we could have done it together on line so it would not have been so scary for you

  Nadia: Well if I puss out, I think we should do that

  Cami: ok that sounds good im off work monday too I can die then easily or any time for that matter I w[an]t to bad

  Cami: do you have a web cam?

  Nadia: yes

  Cami: ok well IF it comes down to hanging I can help you with it with the cam p[r]oper positioning of the rope is very important as Ive found out but we’ll cross that path when/if it comes to that hun

  Cami: I hope im being a help to you in some way

  Nadia: yes it’s a big relief to be able to talk to someone about it

  Cami: I wish [w]e [b]oth could die now while we are quietly in our homes tonite :)

  Nadia: since i decided that i will go this weekend, i have felt much better.

  Cami: great im at peace too and if i cant die with you i will shortly after that.

  Nadia: we are together in this

  Cami: yes I promise

  [More dialogue]

  Nadia: I must say, I’m feeling a lot better now that I can talk to you

  Cami: it makes me feel better too knowing I won’t die alone

  Nadia: you won’t

  Cami: Monday will be my day wish it were tonite im really at peace with it

  Nadia: i wonder how it will feel to actually die

  Cami: nice

  In the early hours of Monday morning, Nadia told her flatmate she was going ice skating. She didn’t return. Her body was discovered six weeks later. But Cami didn’t go through with the pact she’d made with Nadia. In fact, Cami didn’t even exist. Cami was a middle-aged man named William Melchert-Dinkel, a nurse, husband and father. Police now believe he spent several years trawling the internet for suicidal individuals, and may have contacted more than 100 people around the world in efforts to persuade them to kill themselves. Melchert-Dinkel himself believes at least five people actually did, including Nadia.

  On my brief foray into the world of self-harm sites I did not discover a deviant and malicious group of people intent on causing harm to others. Although there are people like Melchert-Dinkel out there, these sub-cultures tend to be tight-knit, supportive and caring. They are always there for you. They listen, advise and encourage you. If you are feeling low, they are a natural and easy place to go to relieve your loneliness and suffering. That is precisely why they can be so destructive. By wrapping up negative behaviour in an ordinary, positive and romantic way – by surrounding each user with peer support – it insidiously makes an illness feel like a culture, a lifestyle choice, something to be embraced.

  Eventually, Amelia was spending hours a day on pro-ana sites, posting messages about her condition, interacting with others in her community, and barely eating. She had even bought a pro-ana bracelet to wear. When her mother suggested she needed help, she refused to listen, and was terrified about losing her online social life, losing contact with the only people she thought understood her. When her parents took her to hospital, Amelia was immediately transferred to a specialist eating disorder unit. It was six months before she was discharged and finally allowed to return home.

  Amelia is now fully recovered, and, for the most part, offline. I ask her what advice she might give to people who are tempted by or trapped inside pro-ana groups, as she was. ‘You need to get help. I know you won’t want to listen. And I didn’t want to listen either. But if you’re actively going on these sites, you’re probably already in an unhealthy state of mind. You might not think you need help, but just talk to someone anyway. There are people outside the online community who know what you’re going through.’ She pauses. ‘Your pro-ana friends might understand you, but they won’t help you.’

  * * *

  fn1 To protect the identity of the people I mention in this chapter, I have created the composite character of Amelia. All information is derived from interviews I conducted with members of pro-ana websites, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I have also cloaked quotes where necessary.

  Conclusion

  Zoltan vs Zerzan

  TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES HAVE always been accompanied by optimistic and pessimistic visions of how they will change humanity and society. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the recent invention of writing would have a deleterious effect on the memories of young Greeks who, he predicted, would become ‘the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing’. When books began to roll off Johannes Gutenberg’s press, many suspected they would be ‘confusing and harmful’, overwhelming young people with information. Although Marconi believed his radio was helping humanity win ‘the struggle with space and time’, as his invention became popular, others feared that children’s impressionable minds would be polluted by dangerous ideas and families rendered obsolete as they sat around listening to entertainment programmes. We don’t know if early Homo sapiens argued whether fire burns or warms, but you can hazard a guess that they did.

  From its inception, the internet has acted as a canvas on to which we have painted positive and negative pictures of our future. Several of the Arpanet pioneers were looking beyond data sets and communication networks to a future in which their new technology would radically transform human society for the better. Joseph Licklider, the first director of the team responsible for developing networked computing, and often referred to as the ‘grandfather’ of the internet, predicted as much in 1961, eight years before the first network connection was made between two Arpanet nodes. ‘Computing,’ he proclaimed, ‘will be part of the formulation of problems . . . it will mediate and facilitate communication among human beings.’ It would, he believed, help us to ‘make better collective decisions’.

  Computing in the 1960s and early 1970s was often endowed with a magical, mysterious power. Anarchists dreamt of a world in which humanity would be liberated from the drudge of labour, ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’, while counter-cultural writers like Marshall McLuhan were predicting a ‘global village’ of connectedness as a result of modern media, and even a ‘psychic communal integration’ of all humankind.

  As the internet became a mainstream form of communication for millions of people there was a surge of techno-optimism. The early nineties were ablaze with utopian ideas about humanity’s imminent leap forward, spurred by connectivity and access to information. Harley Hahn, an influential technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birth-right’. Meanwhile
the technology magazine Mondo 2000 promised to give readers ‘the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen . . . The old information élites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls. This magazine is about what to do until the millennium comes. We’re talking about Total Possibilities.’

  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. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’.

  But it was not only the optimists commenting on the possibilities presented by this strange new world. For every starry-eyed vision of future utopias there was an equally vivid dystopian nightmare. As Licklider dreamt of a harmonious world of human–computing interaction, the literary critic and philosopher Lewis Mumford worried that computers would make man ‘a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal’. In 1967, one professor warned presciently in the Atlantic magazine that network computing would create an ‘individualised computer-based federal record-keeping’. As the optimism about the possibilities of the internet reached its zenith in the 1990s, so a growing number worried about the effect it was having on human behaviour. In 1992, Neil Postman wrote in The Surrender of Culture to Technology that ‘we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo . . . They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.’ Others were concerned that we would become ‘socially immature’, ‘mentally poor’ and ‘isolated from the outside world’. Worried by the proliferation of pornography – including child pornography – and the growing amount of criminal activity taking place online, governments around the world began to pass legislation designed to monitor, control and censor cyberspace.

  This divide, between the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists, is one that stretches back to the birth of the internet, and one that is widening as technology becomes omnipresent, faster and more powerful. There are, today, two movements that are extreme versions of these opposing views about technology. The transhumanists embrace technology; the anarcho-primitivists reject it. Both groups have existed in some form since the early days of the internet, and both have been steadily growing in popularity in recent years, and as technology comes to play a more central role in our lives. Both exist across the dark net – from forums on the deep web to highly polished websites on the surface web, with a host of portals, blogs and social media groups in between. But which side is right? Does connectivity bring us together, or supplant real-world relationships? Does access to information makes us more open-minded or committed to our own dogmas? Is there something about the internet, or perhaps technology itself, that shapes and constrains our choices, prodding us to behave in certain ways? And what do their prophetic visions of our technological future – one bright, one bleak – say about the dark net and how we utilise the internet today?

  Zoltan

  Zoltan Istvan wants to live for ever. Not in the metaphorical sense – in the memory of his children, or in the words of his books – but in a very real, practical sense. And he believes that technology will soon make it possible. Zoltan is planning to upload his brain, and all its billions of unique synaptic pathways, to a computer server. ‘Based on current trends, I hope to upload my mind at some point around the middle of this century,’ he confidently informs me. Zoltan – that really is his name – is a transhumanist. He’s part of a growing community of people who believe that technology can make us physically, intellectually, even morally, better. Like all transhumanists, Zoltan believes that death is a biological quirk of nature, something we do not need to accept as inevitable. Transhumanists seek the continued evolution of human life beyond its current form. They believe that we should use technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage – especially mortality and physical and mental limits – thereby exceeding the constraints of the human condition, which they regard as changeable. ‘By thoughtfully, carefully and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves,’ writes Max More, a leading transhumanist philosopher, ‘we can become something no longer accurately described as human . . . [who would] no longer suffer from disease, ageing and inevitable death.’

  Transhumanism’s roots are found in the ideas of science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and the futurist biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term ‘transhuman’ in 1957. (Nick Bostrom, a well-known transhumanist, says the desire to transcend human limitations is as old as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.) Transhumanism first became prominent in California in the early nineties, the watermark period of techno-optimism. In 1993, Vernor Vinge popularised the idea of the ‘Singularity’, the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to produce new and ever more advanced versions of itself, quickly leaving us mortals behind. Vinge hoped that transhumanists would ‘exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool . . . progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else.’

  By 1998, the burgeoning group came together as the World Transhumanist Association. Soon after, a number of influential transhumanists published a declaration of intent: ‘We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of ageing, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology and our confinement to planet earth.’ In 2008 the World Transhumanist Association was renamed Humanity+, and remains the largest formal organisation of transhumanists, publishing a glossy, quarterly magazine and organising a number of conferences and academic events. Today there are around 6,000 members from more than 100 countries – an eclectic mix of self-confessed technology geeks, scientists, libertarians, academics and activists like Zoltan (who describes himself as a writer, activist and campaigner all-in-one). Together they work on a dazzling array of cutting-edge technology. Everything from life extension, anti-ageing, robotics, artificial intelligence (Marvin Minsky, considered one of the inventors of artificial intelligence, is a prominent transhumanist), cybernetics, space colonisation, virtual reality and cryonics. But most transhumanist technology focuses on life extension, and technological upgrades to the brain and body.

  It’s the possibility of a tech-powered ‘great leap forward’ that excites transhumanists like Zoltan, who believes the possible benefits of near- and medium-term technology are too important to ignore. In addition to the personal goal of immortality, he believes synthetic biology could solve food shortages, genetic medicine may help cure diseases, bionic limbs already do transform the lives of disabled people. (Zoltan explains that, as a computer file, his carbon footprint would be greatly reduced.) They believe that connecting our brains to computer servers would dramatically increase human cognition and intelligence, which would help us solve the sort of problems we humans are likely to face in the future. For transhumanists, not to pursue every avenue to improve human capability is irrational, even a derogation of a duty to relieve suffering and improve well-being.

  Dr Anders Sandberg, a softly spoken computational neuroscientist and transhumanist, is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘mind uploading’. He is one of the few people working on how Zoltan might realise his ambition of turning his brain into a computer file. In the nineties, Anders ran the Transhumanist Society in his native Sweden, and is now a research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he grapples with the problems of rapid human evolution.

  As I meet Anders – a tall, smartly dressed man in his early forties – for lunch on Oxfor
d’s bustling high street one Saturday afternoon, I notice he is wearing a large silver medallion round his neck. It reads:

  Call now for instructions. Push 50,000 U heparin by I.V. and do CPU while cooling with ice to 10C. Keep PH 7.5 No embalming. No autopsy.

  ‘It’s for whoever finds me first,’ Anders says. ‘I rarely take it off when I’m out in public.’

  I am none the wiser.

  ‘The critical period in cryonic freezing,’ he explains, ‘is during the first two hours or so. As soon as I’m in the nitrogen tank and my body is cooled down to 77 Kelvin, I’ll be fine. The heparin is in order to help thin the blood so it doesn’t clot, and so it can freeze faster.’

  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.fn1 It’s surprisingly little to pay for a shot at immortality. ‘On current trends, I estimate a 20 per cent probability that I’ll be woken when the science catches up,’ says Anders.

  My first impression of Anders is of a genius but slightly madcap nineteenth-century scientist (an impression that is helped by his soft Swedish accent and precise, clipped sentences). He recently experimented with the cognitive enhancing drug modafinil, an experience that he claims was positive, and tells me he also plans to have magnets surgically inserted into his fingers so he can feel electromagnetic waves. But his main area of interest is mind uploading (what he calls ‘whole brain emulation’). In 2008, Anders published a 130-page instruction manual setting out exactly how the brain’s content, its precise structure, pathways and electric signals, could be transferred on to a computer chip. If it was perfectly copied, it would, thinks Anders, be indistinguishable from the real thing.