Technology is often described as ‘neutral’. But it could be more accurately described as power and freedom. For the transhumanists, technology provid… - Jamie Bartlett

The dark net fosters breathtaking creativity. The majority of the sites I visited were astonishingly adaptive and innovative. Outsiders, radicals and pariahs are often the first to find and use technology in shrewd ways, and the rest of us have much to learn from them.

The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis.

The dark net is all of these things, to some extent – but for me, it is an idea more than a particular place: an underworld set apart yet connected to the internet we inhabit, a world of complete freedom and anonymity, and where users say and do what they like, uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society’s norms. It is a world that is as shocking and disturbing as it is innovative and creative, a world that is also much closer than you think.