Review: The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you've been on the internet since the early 1990s, you've seen some things.

And yet, the internet itself has expanded out far beyond that since then, and the seedy underbelly gets some press but not a lot of the detail you'd expect. The Dark Net attempts to fix that by giving some short pieces and details from known things like the deep web and 4chan to lesser-known situations involving the GNAA and camgirls. The end result is a good read with some magazine-article-sized chunks of information throughout.

In a way, it only scratches the surface, both as a detailed read and of all the things that you might know of that the book doesn't cover. As I often feel with these more mainstream takes, I wish this had more detail, but that's a small complaint for what was a good read on a whole. Especially good for those who haven't been as ingrained in the culture.

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