What people don’t seem to realise is that the geeks are winning. Actually, scratch that. They’ve all but won. The world just hasn’t realised yet. So, when the likes of David Cameron talk of, say, blocking regular porn, or eradicating child porn, people take him seriously, as though this might actually be a thing in his power to do. Rather than what it truly is, which is something between a cynical gimmick and a last, desperate, deluded grasp at a dissolving straw.
I mean, look, it might work a bit. Aspiring nonces, I suppose, will be set back by a week or two. People who just stumble upon kiddie porn while searching for somebody else — a kipper pan, say — will, indeed, be warned off going any further. Meanwhile, children who are less capable of using computers than their parents (those under nine, in my experience) will indeed be less exposed to adult porn. And all of this is probably good. But the technology exists already to enable anybody who still wants their porn, be it nice or nasty, to get it. Today, it’s as easy as installing a printer. Pretty soon, it will be as easy as pushing a button. And then what?
The ability of people to dodge governments online is not a bad thing. People — journalists, really — talk about the ‘dark web’ as if it were some sort of shadowy internet hinterland, a nasty Narnia, or a secret cellar under the regular internet full of rats, heroin, and men in zippered masks like the gimp from Pulp Fiction. In fact, it’s just a way of connecting to the web with anonymity; be that the regular web, or bits of the web that require anonymity before they’ll let you in.
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