Dark Web and the Human Condition
Amid recent global turmoil, especially due to the threat of a trade war (initiated by the trade dispute between the US and China) that will surely change the world order in many dimensions, global citizens face a common enemy.
Amid recent global turmoil, especially due to the threat of a trade war (initiated by the trade dispute between the US and China) that will surely change the world order in many dimensions, global citizens face a common enemy. This is the worst of all enemies the world has ever seen, and the strongest enemy ever to exist; it is almost untouchable, and has no precedent in history.
What’s more frightening is that this enemy is intangible, immaterial and tremendously fierce: its audiovisual presence feels terribly nice and pleasant, and the whole world approves of its extraordinary functions and benefits. This is the ang-e(vi)l, a post-postmodern devil-and-angel that is the most popular in world history: the Internet.
I am terribly sorry if you think I’m exaggerating things. However, nothing will make me revoke my proposition above. It is not only because we have recently become aware of how hoaxes and fake news spread through social media can induce not only mass riots but also social division that threaten the existence of states.
In the recent uproar in Europe and the US over Cambridge Analytica, the data-processing company could have (and has) compiled the psychological profiles of not just 50 million people as the media reported, but 250 million people in the US alone. Through abusing the “Like” feature on Facebook, these profiles can tell us (and certain interested parties) users’ personal and even sensitive information, including sexual orientation, intelligence level, their parental relationships, life traumas and certainly, political preferences.
It is also not because some governments and peoples in certain advanced countries have become aware of how the algorithms engineered and owned by – say – Facebook had influenced the latest US presidential election or the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum. Or that Google, also through the big data it has acquired using its algorithms, can determine not only the music and film genres that we like, but also our preferences in design and clothing brands, food, furniture, electronics and universities, even the preferred color of our underwear. The consequence of all of this is that we are targeted and exploited by corporate businesses and their commercial marketing, and our social identity and personal existence has begun to dissolve.
Moreover, in a graphical comparison I found on Pinterest, Google has everything (founding, working environment and mechanism and end goals) that parallel, if they are not identical to, the goals of Skynet, the fictional and sophisticated online, artificial intelligence (AI) weapons system of the Terminator series. The point is that Skynet plotted – and carried out – the mass eradication of its perceived enemies. Such a super-advanced virtual weapons system that controls all the world’s military arsenals may merely be a work of science fiction based on in-depth research into real possibilities. However, Elon Musk – tech titan, AI genius and founder of SpaceX, Tesla, Inc. and PayPal with a net worth of no less than Rp 200 trillion (US$14.6 billion) – has pointed to Skynet as a strong possible cause of potential dystopia.
However, do not be mistaken: Combine Google with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the 980 million websites in existence and you will only scratch the surface of what we call the virtual world. The Internet still has another, more sinister realm: The deep web, together with the “Dark Side” or the “Dark Web” as the darkest part of its realm, serves as the major below-the-surface part of the Internet iceberg.
Its capacity? Content-wise, some say that the deep web is 50,000 percent bigger than the “surface Internet”, accessible through Google and other search engines. Statistically, if all content on the surface web can make our brains and minds (our internal hardware and software) explode with its 19 TB (1 terabyte equals 1 trillion bytes) of data, the deep web is estimated to have 7,500 TB of data with an infinite number of pages. It is not indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo and the like.
What can we find in this bottomless well? What can it do to us and the world? What can possibly happen to us as individuals, to nations and even to global civilization?
Dark web’s clutches
No comprehensive answer is available to these questions. Many experts and agencies have tried to count it in part and create a sensible picture of it. Anatomically, the contents of the deep web, especially the dark web, is everything considered “dark” or criminal, particularly harmful and destructive, but on the other hand, it is apparently highly profitable. It is in this dark and seedy place that the online black market thrives – especially for drugs, botnets (that corrupt websites), fraudulent crimes of scamming, phishing, bitcoin, hitman and various leaks, terrorists (with no less than 50,000 terror groups), and even human trafficking and pornography involving all social classes and ages.
Financially, the notorious Silk Road – an online black market specializing in illegal drugs – makes US$1.2 million a year in transactions. This does not include the rampant dark trade in human beings or human clones (for certain reasons). If you wish to use certain services from this seedy world, everything can be had for cheap. Hitmen for personal targets will only cost you US$20,000 each, while important targets will cost $100,000 each. If you need someone’s medical records, a dollar is enough. Creating a fake Facebook account with 15 friends? Also a dollar. Creating spam to target 5,000 email addresses is only $50. Falsified credit card records depend on the value, with services ranging from $0.25 to $60.
If Google can make us all feel naked with our private data accessible by at least 1.9 billion people worldwide, the dark web exposes our innards. It knows not only our body temperature, but also whether our private medical records show that we have kidney failure or are suffering from diabetes. If Google states in its rarely read terms and conditions that it has the right to spread users’ personal data (Article 2.1) and even revoke our accounts if we falsify our data (Article 4.4), the dark web can provide anyone – corporations, intelligence agencies and states – the personal data of a country’s entire citizenry for certain purposes.
If Google can provide a free service, so to speak, through its Maps application for thieves and kidnappers to follow our movements every second of every day (it has installed 30 million cameras in the US alone), we can only imagine what kind of information is available on the dark web to be sold to radical groups and terrorists. We can only imagine what this dark realm can do and has done to us, not only in our present and future but also in our past, that it may revise for certain purposes. Mankind’s time and space is in its hands.
Threat of a “new god”
Through my brief exposition above, I wish to provide a clear illustration to mankind that they no longer possess sovereignty over their own selves, even now. They can even question their own humanity. It is not enough for us to accuse capitalism, democracy, totalitarianism and all other political regimes, the economy, science and technology and even religion, as the cause of this increasingly acute dehumanization.
The late Stephen Hawking’s philosophical statement that “philosophy is dead” no longer holds meaning if the answer is that science, especially astrophysics, is the road to real truth. Everything has been carried out sophisticatedly and exactly through the computational algorithms of this intangible world I explained above.
What exists on the surface in the material world, and even great advancements in the fields of neuron and silicon engineering (the two greatest foundations of the current age), such as in biogenetics or biotechnology that give birth to artificial intelligence, will be meaningless if their management resides in invisible and unknown entities. Data and its processing system has turned into a “new god”, replacing capital, gold, money and political power that will soon be relegated to primitivism in the present age.
This “new god” can only be touched or owned by a handful of men: those capable of operating TOR (The Onion Router), a software that makes its users anonymous and “legal” for entering the deep web. Perhaps only one or two countries, such as Russia or the US with its National Security Agency, can surf the dark net and make use of it. However, even they may be able to only scratch the surface.
The rest remains shrouded in darkness. However, the fact is that it constitutively determines life today. Not towards positive goals and glory as espoused by science, religion and culture, but toward their opposite: the mass destruction of civilization.
Should this threat not concern us more than, for example, the threats of natural disasters, meteor showers, slavery-inducing economy and even nuclear war? Once again, this threat is unseen. Even if it is seen, it appears as a beautiful and passionate angel. We are amazed and intoxicated by it. Should we let this happen and forget our humanity? Should we forget that we have powers that can seem unimaginable, even to us?
Should we remain ignorant of external powers that are more decisive and constitutive? Should we not be aware that it is our destiny to realize and believe in such powers? On the other hand, we are still busy with television shows that destroy logic, fake news, intimidations by cheap politicians, simple-minded political ambitions and our fixations on Internet fame from uploading vlogs and becoming Instagram celebrities. What is our future, then?
Radhar Panca Dahana, Humanist