“Deep Web” — Alice’s Rabbit

“Deep Web” — Alice’s Rabbit

I picked up Deep Web and flipped through it, and it turned out to be pretty much what I had expected: 1. it could not possibly be a technical guide telling you how to infiltrate the deep web; 2. it could not possibly be an encyclopedia telling you everything that exists beneath the deep web; 3. it cannot even really give you a full overview of the deep web; 4. even so, a great deal still had to be cut for it to reach a form that could be legally published.

And yet, the fact that this book was published at all is itself a kind of success. It is like the rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: not the focus of the entire marvelous world, but unless you find it, you have no chance of entering that strange landscape at all. The book often uses Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor, and I think it is an especially fitting one for the deep web.

Because the facts themselves cannot really be explored in depth—and from another angle, if one’s purpose is simply to write, it is obviously impossible to gain any truly deep understanding or firsthand experience of the deep web—the discussion of viewpoints built on those facts ends up feeling somewhat thin. I do not think this is because the author lacks depth of understanding. Between the lines, it is clear that the author is not nearly as ignorant as the first-person persona in the book appears to be, even at that time. And once one enters Alice’s wonderland, one’s understanding of the world becomes completely different.

The discussion of anonymity unfolds from two angles that seem contradictory but are in fact unified. On the one hand, in the widely publicized narrative, the deep web is a breeding ground for crime, and anonymity protects many criminal acts and transactions that could not take place in real-world settings, some of them truly heinous. On the other hand, anonymity also protects a person’s rightful privacy, safeguards the security of potential victims, and at the most basic level can shield people from unchecked online violence. These two aspects are not fundamentally contradictory.

Through the people he interviews, the author goes on to propose a third perspective. Because of the deep web’s anonymity and technical barriers to entry, the share of crime that occurs there, compared with crime in the real world or on the public internet, is only a drop in the ocean. If the deep web is several orders of magnitude larger than the public internet, that is not because it contains proportionally more criminal activity. The largest part of the deep web consists of the university libraries, data centers, and other resources that we cannot access directly—those that are private, unpublished, or behind paywalls. I think the author is implicitly signaling his own position here.

In any case, even if this book does not truly introduce any facts about the deep web that are unknown to the general public, it at least provides some basic concepts and structure. Like the rabbit leading Alice into wonderland, its function is to guide the reader along a winding path toward something deeper and more secluded.

That is also why I gave this book five stars.