POWER/FREEDOM ON THE DARK WEB: A DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE DARK WEB SOCIAL NETWORK

Abstract

This essay is an early ethnographic exploration of the Dark Web Social Network (DWSN), a social networking site only accessible
to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. The central claim of this essay is that the DWSN is 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 and freedom from state oppression.