I have reached the age when I am passing back into innocence. My children increasingly need to explain the meaning of the words they use, and are better able to do stuff with computers than I am (not, admittedly, very hard).

It was in this spirit of innocence that I recently learnt about the Darknet. This is a private, heavily encrypted internet, in which IP addresses are hidden and people share files in the freedom of untraceable anonymity.

It can be very useful. Journalists and activists working in oppressive regimes find it invaluable and it was much used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Yet it can also be nauseating. According to a report on this morning’s Today programme, it is heavily used by paedophiles to exchange and use child pornography images, which are accessed in breathtaking numbers. And then there is the drugs, and guns, and...

I have quoted before this prediction on the future of technology from the New Scientist in 1964. The contributors were thinking of a twenty-year horizon so, give or take a decade, their prophecy of the Internet is impressive:

An immediate situation will develop with private ownership of computers of limited capabilities which also serve as remote terminals to communicate with centrally located computers. The entire content of the large central files will be readily retrievable at a moment’s notice.

Their prediction of the impact this would have was less so.

The consequences will be truly profound in many diverse fields, such for example as agronomy, jurisprudence and medicine.

The net is just, twenty years on, beginning to make a difference to medicine, but… agronomy? jurisprudence? The idealism is palpable. As one subsequent government report laconically remarked:

Had the contributors taken account of the fact that what most people are really interested in… is social communication, market interactions (buying and selling) and sex, then they would not have been surprised to learn that the main uses of the Internet would be e-mail, e-commerce and pornography.

As with the internet, so it turns out to be with the Darknet: useful for evading dictators… and for enabling child abuse, selling drugs, running guns...

It was ever thus. I like the idea of the committee of cavemen who debated fire. One group, your progressive cavemen, had powerful evidence that this was the greatest invention since the handaxe, that it would revolutionise cave-society, minimise the number of mammoths they’d need to kill, thereby protecting the environment and enabling cave families to work a three-day week.

The others, your more conservative cavemen, only saw the problems. Who would control fire? Where would it be stored? Who was to say that cavemen would use it properly? Mightn’t they burn things they oughtn’t burn, like other cavemen?

Ridiculous, the progressives retorted. How can you have such a low view of caveman nature as to imagine some would be so wicked as to burn other cave-dwellers? How grimly cynical.

As Larry Siedentop commented in his event with Theos last week, progress is always ambiguous, always uncertain, always problematic.

Things could get better, but there is a stubborn shadow on the human heart. The next time someone sings to you enthusiastically about ‘progress’, send them to the Darknet.

Nick Spencer

Image from wikipedia available in the public domain