Robert W. Gehl

I am heading home from a great visit to the Institute of Humanities at the University of Calgary, where I gave a keynote, titled, “A Deep Dive into the Marianas Web: Surveillance, Information, and Mythologies of the Dark Web.”

This talk is based on a paper I’m working on about the Marianas Web meme, a meme that began in 2011 or 2012 and has circulated the Internet in various forms.

Along the way, the talk draws on a common event I saw happening on Dark Web social media (alternative social media that exists on Tor, I2P, or Freenet), where new users ask, “Ok, I’ve made it to Tor. How do I go deeper? How do I go to the Dark Web?”

While the meme has been debunked (most eloquently by Violet Blue), in my talk I took it seriously, uncovering the anxieties that the meme reflects. I argue that the meme associates spatial metaphors of the Internet, digital immateriality, and post-truth politics into a potent mix.

The talk was part of a larger conversation happening at Calgary about social media. The Institute of the Humanities put together an essay contest for undergraduate students on “Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The winning entries (by Lorianne Reuser, Daniel Huss, Bryn Waidson, and Max Kurapov) as well as the work of my co-keynoter Safaneh Neyshabouri, prompted excellent discussions of the problems of (corporate) social media: its consumerism, its addictiveness, its valorization of the sensational over the sober. To be fair, the discussion also touched on everyday resistance and deep discussions that can happen on corporate social media.

But one thing that bothered me about the conversation was: it was all corporate social media. It was mostly Instagram, a bit of Facebook, and a lot of Twitter. There’s so much more!

So, once again, I banged my favorite drum: if we have issues with social media’s centralization, distortion of sociality, and surveillance, then c’mon, people now: switch to a non-corporate, ad-free, decentralized alternative! These days, I’m liking Mastodon.

So I was glad that some of the anxieties I argued were reflected in the fake Marianas meme were also explored by the students, and I was happy to plug the alternatives once again.