Power/Freedom on the Dark Web: A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network
Free and open to the public
The Dark Web Social Network (DWSN) is a social networking site only accessible to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. This talk will explore the DWSN as an experiment in power/freedom, an attempt to simultaneously trace, deploy, and overcome the historical conditions in which it finds itself: the generic constraints and affordances of social networking as they have been developed over the past decade by Facebook and Twitter, and the ideological constraints and affordances of public perceptions of the dark web, which hold that the dark web is useful for both taboo activities as well as freedom from state oppression.