You could view the internet a little like the Earth’s 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 they’re 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.

With all that in mind, Aphex Twin’s decision to release details of Syro, his first album in 13 years, via an elusive .onion web page left a wider community of music lovers trying to decipher why electronic music’s prodigal son had chosen such a platform. Hackers immediately booted up their Tor browsers and pounced on the page to search for any hidden surprises, but reported back via Reddit that there was no hidden content and no secret messages. “If anything, the site is a little sloppy,” said one commenter.

As I tried to explore the thought processes of Aphex Twin’s Richard D James (a daunting task in itself), I became sidetracked by a much wider issue, which involves a growing scatter of artists who are exploring the outer limits of the internet for inspiration, adventure, anonymity and rebellion, in search of a truer and uncensored reflection of the society we live in.

It began with Lee Bannon, a Sacramento based experimental hip-hop producer. Bannon has spent the last year working on an album subtly inspired by the darknet. In contrast to his production work for rappers like Joey Bada$$ and Souls of Mischief, Bannon’s solo work is a distinct brand of atmospheric jungle which nods as much to digital culture as it does to the early years sounds of Goldie’s Metalheadz label. His first experience with the internet’s peripheries came when he started to find his music being discussed on different types of internet forum. “My original hip-hop fan base was somehow evolving into a more intellectual hacker crowd,” he says. “They lived a certain lifestyle, and I wanted to dive into that vibe.”

Musician Lee Bannon: ‘For me, the fascination is about social justice and this new frontier of possibilities.’ Photograph: Josh Wehle

A combination of watching the Anonymous network join in the Ferguson protests and witnessing a friend smoothly buy drugs off the darknet made Bannon obsessed with both the potential and the awe-inspiring absurdity of it all. “For me, the fascination is about social justice and this new frontier of possibilities. I think it’s like a sword. A good guy could pick it up to protect people, and a bad guy could pick it up to cut someone’s head off.”

It turns out Bannon wasn’t the only one in California’s state capital who had embraced internet subculture. Two years ago, the now defunct group Death Grips launched an ARG (alternate reality game) on the darknet to promote their albums The Money Store and No Love Deep Web, by seeding various clues on the bulletin board site 4Chan. “Silicon Valley is only an hour away, so a lot of that hacker culture winds up in Sacramento, because it’s cheaper to live there, and you can commute back and forth,” Bannon says of the attraction of the darknet for the city’s musicians.

Explorations into strange parts of the web aren’t restricted to Sacramento, naturally. “One of the few sublime experiences I have today,” explains the Canadian artist and essayist Jon Rafman, “is discovering a new community online that I didn’t even know existed. It reveals a whole world within a world. It’s like thinking you know what reality is and then discovering an entire universe within an atom.” Rafman’s warped video collage Mainsqueeze was collated entirely from footage found on the deep web, and this latest discovery has him even more fascinated. “Wizardchan,” he says, “is an online community of male virgins over the age of 30. It comes from a Japanese saying that if you reach the age of 30 and you are still a virgin, you become a wizard. It is a community of supportive self-deprecation and self-loathing with a very internet sense of humour. They are often trying to one up each other in levels of patheticness and a lot of the time discourage any attempts at becoming ‘normies’. I see this image of the basement-dwelling wizard who rejects societal conventions to such an extreme degree as one of the tragic heroes of our times.”

The above video features some footage that readers may find disturbing



Mainsqueeze, by Canadian artist Jon Rafman is a compilation of footage posted on the deep web

Part of what Rafman admits to loving about the darker corner of the internet is how it allows people to take on new roles and identities. Yet, one of the key features of the darknet – the anonymity – is largely highlighted as its most dangerous component, with the “what have you got to hide?” card being thrown into most debates about encryption systems such as Tor, despite the dangers posed by the absolute lack of anonymity forced on internet users by sites that harvest their data.

The fear of the sites which see their users as a resource from which to make money drives Alec Empire, the founder of Berlin-based digital hardcore band Atari Teenage Riot. “You fear that a corporation is taking your stuff and monetising it,” he says. “Facebook, Twitter, all these things that helped independent artists in the beginning are now working against them. Putting a Pringles ad next to them. Even putting a video up on YouTube screws up the whole experience of watching it. The viewer is bombarded with bullshit. Using the deep web is a way to do things differently. I feel a new enthusiasm, [like] I witnessed when the original internet became big in the 90s.”

This idea, that the darknet harks back to a “golden era” of the internet – before legislation, surveillance and monopolisation took control – is a recurring theme. “The early internet was this alternate, separate place that was meant to transcend all the problems and censorship of real world society,” says the journalist Jamie Bartlett, a specialist on internet culture and author of the book The Dark Net. “As a result, it would be dangerous, liberal, uncensored, and it would be a great place for freedom fighters, democratic dissidents and whistleblowers to go, as well as criminals, child pornographers and terrorists. And that’s exactly what the darknet is. It’s seen as somewhere new, free and open, for those increasingly worried by the idea that the internet is becoming colonised by commercial purposes.”

Of all the artistic interactions with the darknet, Aphex Twin’s link may actually have been the least sophisticated. But what he has done is place the notion of the darknet, and the Tor project, in a new perspective both to the mainstream press and to an enormous fanbase, given his status as one of the most influential artists in electronic music.

Perhaps, the darknet – which Bannon describes as being like “Paris in the 20s” and Empire as “discovering America again” – has the potential to be a bastion of free speech and creativity, where art can escape surveillance and commercialism, to blend with new technology and hard truths in a way that is no longer possible on the surface internet. As Jamie Bartlett concluded in his book: “Outsiders, radicals and pariahs are often the first to find and use technology in shrewd ways, and the rest of us have much to learn from them.”