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December 1, 2005
Embrace the Darknet.
Lucas Gonze has a good meme going, defining the explicit and implicit content on the web as examples of lightnet and darknet respectively. Lightnet is content that propagates openly and without much friction. Darknet content is traded clandestinely, implying a sense of mistrust. As developers and technologists, I think we should do all that we can to promote the Lightnet. But as an activist and organizer, I need to remind myself that the vast majority of the planet still needs both a lightnet and a darknet.
As I said before, I'm all for the Lightnet. When Lucas stood up at the OMDS to share his personal manifesto against underground economies, I was the first mouth open to support his idea. For a room full of developers whose job it is to make the world machine readable, obscurity should be the enemy. Just think of the many useful and interesting things that can be built once our media, information, objects, and the relationships between it all are made explicit. But this explicitness can also be used against people, and for that reason I will still advocate for the use of darknets for certain non-bourgeois contexts.
A few years ago, I met a couple of media educators down in Cape Town, South Africa. During Apartheid, they were gun runners for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. The ANC went through a massive stockpiling of weapons during the 1980s. They set up a tourist operation based out of London where white sympathizers would take rich, unknowing Afrikaners and white Europeans into neighboring Namibia for week-long safaris. While the tourists slept at night, the guide would go off and buy guns to be smuggled back into South Africa under the floorboards of the tour bus. (No one would ever search or question a bus full of rich white folks.) Upon their arrival in Cape Town, the guns were transferred to a van and left in a parking lot for an MK member to drive off and hide in the black Townships. If ever the time came for civil war, the ANC would be ready. Some say that when the white National Party eventually made its way to the negotiating table, it was this massive militarization that helped force their hand.
I tell this story because I can't help but wonder what could (not) have happened to them in a 99% above ground, explicit economy. Although they were fighting for a more Lightnet world, they needed Darknet work to support it. I think about the work of Witness.org, a group that uses video to document human rights abuses around the world. It's total Lightnet content, but it requires a Darknet in order to protect its participants. Sometimes an idea that seems bourgeois in our context can be liberating when mapped to another.
I don't think we can ever end discrimination but I do believe that we can make it harder to practice. As long as oppressive totalitarian regimes exist, institutional discrimination and ethnic oppression will be a fact of life. In these contexts, underground economies and the obfuscating darknets that form around them will continue to be an important organizing tool for the disenfranchised.
Posted by yatta at December 1, 2005 8:23 PM
Comments
This makes me think of samizdat, the clandestine literature that circulated in communist central and eastern Europe under communism because such literature could not be published openly (or would be banned). In that sense, it was darknet and had to be.
There's always going to be some body above ground that decides what figures as lightnet, even if that's a massive law of average. So where you're talking about open content models, I can't help but think about politics.
Very interesting, in any case, to have encountered your site. (Mine, FYI, is usually up, but just underwent a server move and is down at the moment.)
Posted by: molly at December 18, 2005 11:29 AM