Underground publishing and the circulation of dangerous ideas.
There is a law older than any code written by parliaments or commissioners, older than the very concept of law itself. It operates with the indifference of physics, which is to say: it operates whether you believe in it or not.
I speak of thermodynamics. Specifically, the second law, which states that entropy in a closed system tends to increase. Heat flows from hot to cold. Order tends toward disorder. Pressure, given time, finds release.
The regulators of the early twenty-first century—bless their credentialed hearts—never studied thermodynamics. They studied law, public policy, communications theory. They attended conferences in Brussels and Canberra and London where they congratulated themselves on “stakeholder engagement” and “evidence-based frameworks.” They drafted codes of practice with the solemnity of priests copying scripture. And they genuinely believed, with all the touching faith of medieval alchemists, that if they simply applied enough pressure to the vessel, the contents would transform into gold.
The contents, of course, had other plans.
My name is not important—names rarely are in our world, which is one of the better features of it—but you may call me the Archivist. For eighteen years now, I have served the Black Library Collective as a keeper of records, a curator of documents from what we call the Emergence Period. The years between 2025 and 2032, when the ungovernable layer was born.
I was there, in my own small way. I ran a node in those early days, before there were enough nodes for running one to be safe. I attended the First Protocol Congress in 2029, though I said little—I was young, and the giants were speaking. I lost friends to the crackdowns, watched communities shatter and reform like mercury droplets, saw ordinary people become criminals overnight because they refused to prove they were old enough to read a forum about bicycles.
But this archive is not about me. It is about the documents themselves: the testimonies and manifestos, the leaked memos and personal journals, the technical specifications and love letters that together tell the story of how the Black Internet came to be. I have gathered them over nearly two decades. Some were easy to find—they circulate freely in our layer, copied and recopied as samizdat has always been copied. Others required years of patient searching, the cultivation of sources, the earning of trust. A few came to me by accident, or what seemed like accident, in ways I still do not fully understand.
What I offer you now is not a history in the conventional sense. Historians claim objectivity; I claim only accuracy. The documents speak for themselves, and where they contradict each other—as they sometimes do—I have let the contradictions stand. Truth, like the protocols themselves, is distributed. No single node holds the complete picture.
But before we begin, I must introduce you to the theoretical framework that makes sense of what would otherwise seem like chaos. I must speak of Robert Charles Black Jr., known to his readers simply as Bob Black.
Black was born in Detroit in 1951 and died—well, the records are unclear. He was an anarchist, though he would have rejected the term as too organized. His most famous essay, “The Abolition of Work,” argued that the fundamental division in society was not between capital and labor, as the Marxists believed, nor between the state and the individual, as the libertarians imagined, but between compulsory activity and voluntary play. “No one should ever work,” he wrote, and he meant it literally. Not that people should do nothing—Black himself wrote prodigiously, polemically, viciously—but that no one should be forced to produce under conditions they did not choose.
This sounds like utopian dreaming, and perhaps it was. But buried within Black’s playful provocations was a colder insight, one that the architects of the Black Internet would later recognize as prophetic. He understood that control systems are not static. They are dynamic, thermodynamic, locked in an eternal arms race with the forces they seek to contain.
“Every attempt at control,” he wrote in a little-noticed essay from 2003, “generates its own evasion technologies. And the evasion technologies, having been forged in the crucible of opposition, are invariably superior to the original systems they evade.”
Consider the evidence. American alcohol prohibition in the 1920s did not eliminate drinking; it created the speakeasy, the bathtub gin, the entire infrastructure of organized crime that persists to this day. Soviet censorship did not eliminate dissent; it created samizdat, the hand-typed manuscripts passed from reader to reader, which proved more durable and more influential than any official publication. The Great Firewall of China did not eliminate Chinese access to the global internet; it created a generation of VPN-literate citizens who learned technical sophistication precisely because they were forbidden from learning it.
And when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act killed Napster in 2001, it did not save the recording industry. It gave birth to BitTorrent, a protocol so elegant and so distributed that it remains effectively unkillable a half-century later. The record labels won the battle and lost the war. They always do.
This is the thermodynamic principle at work. Pressure creates release. Attempted control creates superior evasion. The tighter you grip, as a wise princess once observed, the more star systems slip through your fingers.
What happened between 2024 and 2027 was simply the largest application of this principle in human history.
The regulatory convergence began, as such things often do, with good intentions. In Australia, the eSafety Commissioner gained expanded powers under the Online Safety Act of 2021, and by 2024 the government had passed legislation banning social media access for anyone under sixteen. The goal was to protect children from harmful content—a goal no reasonable person would oppose. The method was to require platforms to implement “highly effective age assurance” technologies, which in practice meant requiring users to verify their identities before accessing significant portions of the internet.
In Europe, the eIDAS 2.0 regulation created the European Digital Identity Wallet, a mandatory system by which citizens would prove their identity for banking, telecommunications, and an ever-expanding list of services. By 2026, you could not open a bank account in the EU without submitting to the wallet. By 2027, you could not purchase a mobile phone plan.
In the United Kingdom, the Online Safety Act of 2023 came into full enforcement in July 2025, requiring age verification for any site containing material deemed harmful to children. The definition of “harmful” expanded with each passing month. First pornography, then self-harm content, then “eating disorder material,” then political content deemed “likely to incite,” then discussion forums for any topic the eSafety Commissioner found objectionable.
And beneath all of this, invisible to the public but visible to us, was the expanding web of Know Your Customer requirements: the financial surveillance systems that made anonymous transactions increasingly impossible, the telecommunications regulations that tied every phone number to a verified identity, the quiet cooperation between platform companies and intelligence agencies that transformed social media into a panopticon with a friendly interface.
By 2027, the regulatory convergence was complete. There was no longer any meaningful distinction between the Australian, European, British, and American approaches. They had merged into a single global system of identity verification, content control, and behavioral surveillance. The “free and open internet” that the previous generation had celebrated was a historical curiosity, like the Wild West or the Weimar Republic—a brief anomaly, now corrected.
The correctors believed they had won. They gave TED talks about “responsible digital citizenship.” They published papers in peer-reviewed journals about “the maturation of online governance.” They accepted awards from each other at ceremonies in Geneva and Singapore.
They had no idea what they had created.
The documents in this archive tell the story of what happened next. They are organized into three parts, corresponding roughly to the three phases of the Emergence.
Part I, “Pressure,” contains documents from 2025 through early 2027, when the regulatory systems were being deployed and the first cracks were beginning to show. You will read the founding specifications of what became the Black Protocol. You will hear testimony from a regulator who defected. You will see an internal EU memo that admitted, in carefully hedged bureaucratic language, that the entire project was failing.
Part II, “Leak,” covers the period from mid-2027 through 2029, when the Black Internet grew from a scattering of isolated mesh networks into an interconnected layer. These are the documents of expansion and ideological formation: manifestos and journals, technical papers and community announcements. You will meet the people who built the infrastructure, often at great personal risk.
Part III, “The New Layer,” contains documents from 2029 through 2032, as the Black Internet consolidated and the states exhausted their options. By this period, the thermodynamic outcome was clear. The question was no longer whether the ungovernable layer would survive, but what form it would take.
I offer these documents without extensive commentary. Where context is needed, I provide it briefly between sections. But the documents themselves are the thing. They are the primary sources, the raw material from which future historians will construct their narratives.
If future historians exist. If history continues to be written at all, in the world we have made.
This is not pessimism. It is simply observation. The Black Internet exists because people built it, and it continues to exist because people maintain it. Nothing is guaranteed. The thermodynamic principle ensures that control attempts fail, but it does not promise that freedom endures. Entropy increases in closed systems, yes—but systems can be opened, and new forms of order can emerge from chaos, and those new orders can be as oppressive as the old ones, or more so.
We built something remarkable. Whether we can keep it is another question.
But that is a meditation for the epilogue. For now, let us begin with the documents.
Let us begin with the July Protocols.
From the Archive of the Black Library Collective Compiled and annotated by the Archivist Year Eighteen of the Black Internet
The document that follows is the earliest surviving version of what became known as the July Protocols—the founding specification of the Black Internet. It was first distributed on July 26, 2027, one day after the UK Online Safety Act’s age verification requirements came into full effect.
The authorship has never been definitively established. The document itself claims collective origin, using the first-person plural throughout, and this is consistent with the distributed development model that later became standard for protocol work. Analysis of writing patterns suggests at least four distinct contributors, possibly more. Some researchers have attributed sections to specific individuals—the philosophical preamble, for instance, bears stylistic similarities to writings that later appeared under the pseudonym “Thermidor”—but these attributions remain speculative.
What we know for certain is that the document circulated first through existing mesh networks in the UK, then spread rapidly to Australia and continental Europe. Within weeks, it had been translated into seventeen languages. Within months, it had become the de facto constitution of the emerging movement.
I present it here in its original form, including the technical specifications that may seem dated to contemporary readers. Remember that in 2027, mesh networking was still exotic technology, understood only by enthusiasts and emergency responders. What seems obvious now was revolutionary then.
—The Archivist
We write this on the day after. The day after age verification became mandatory across the governed internet. The day after forums closed their doors rather than demand identification from their members. The day after a zombie apocalypse game—a silly, beautiful, decade-old game where players pretended to shamble through ruined cities—shut down forever because its creator could not prove that every player was old enough to pretend to be undead.
We write this because we have no choice. Not in the sense that we are compelled, but in the sense that the alternative—compliance, submission, the quiet acceptance of a world where every interaction must be surveilled, every identity verified, every thought traced to a legal name—is not something we can accept and still remain ourselves.
We write this, also, because we have learned something important. Something the regulators do not understand, though they are about to learn it the hard way.
There is an old principle in systems design: that which is born in hostility is harder to co-opt.
Consider the dark web. The onion-routed networks that existed before us. They were built for privacy, yes, but they were not built against anything specific. They were tools, neutral in orientation, designed to serve whatever purposes their users chose. And because they were neutral, they were vulnerable. They could be infiltrated by agencies that posed as users. They could be honeypotted by services that offered convenience in exchange for trust. They could be—and were—gradually compromised, until they became as much a tool of surveillance as of privacy.
We are building something different.
The Black Protocol is designed from its first line of code to be adversarial. It assumes that every external connection is an attack. It assumes that every offer of integration is a trap. It assumes that the state, the platforms, the very infrastructure of the governed internet, are hostile actors seeking to destroy it.
This is not paranoia. This is accurate threat modeling.
A system designed on the assumption of hostility cannot be easily subverted by hostility. A protocol that expects betrayal cannot be surprised by it. A network that trusts nothing will not be undone when something it trusted proves untrustworthy.
We offer this specification to anyone who wants it. We make no claims of ownership. We seek no recognition. The protocol, if it works, will spread because it works. If it fails, it will fail, and something else will take its place. We have no investment in our own survival, only in the survival of the possibility we represent.
That possibility is simple: a layer of the internet that cannot be governed.
Not “should not be governed,” which is a political argument that can be defeated by other political arguments. Not “will resist governance,” which implies a battle that can be lost. Cannot. The thermodynamic cannot. The physical impossibility that emerges when a system is designed correctly.
Here is how we build it.
The governed internet is governed because it is routed through controllable chokepoints. Internet Service Providers operate physical infrastructure in known locations. Domain name servers are hierarchical and can be seized. Platforms are corporations with legal identities that can be threatened, fined, imprisoned.
The Black Internet must have none of these vulnerabilities.
Therefore: the Black Protocol is mesh-first. Every device running the protocol is a potential router. There are no privileged nodes. There is no distinction between client and server. The network topology emerges organically from the physical proximity of devices, not from any centralized design.
This is not new technology. Mesh networking has existed for decades, used by militaries and emergency responders and hobbyist communities. What we propose is not a technical innovation but an architectural one: the elevation of mesh from a specialist tool to a primary transport layer.
No geographic boundary. A mesh network does not respect borders. A device in Dover can route traffic to a device in Calais, assuming sufficient node density in between. The concept of “blocking” a service “in a country” becomes meaningless when the service is not located anywhere.
In the governed internet, trust flows downward. You trust your ISP. You trust the certificate authorities. You trust the platform. You trust the protocol designers who decided what to encrypt and what to leave in cleartext.
In the Black Internet, trust flows upward—or rather, it does not flow at all. You trust no one except those you have explicitly chosen to trust, through mechanisms you control.
Reputation is local. There is no global reputation system, because global systems require global trust, and global trust requires central authorities. Instead, each node maintains its own reputation data about nodes it has interacted with. Reputation propagates through the network via gossip, attenuated by distance and time.
The physical layer may be hostile. Devices may be seized. Networks may be monitored. Radio frequencies may be jammed or monitored.
A protocol that survives under these assumptions will survive under any realistic threat model. A protocol that requires any of these assumptions to be false is already compromised.
The Black Protocol supports multiple transport mechanisms, organized in a preference hierarchy:
Primary: Long-Range Radio (LoRa)
LoRa mesh networks form the backbone of the Black Internet. LoRa devices operate on unlicensed ISM bands, require no permission to deploy, and can achieve ranges of several kilometers under favorable conditions. They are inexpensive, low-power, and increasingly common due to their use in IoT applications.
Support for store-and-forward messaging with cryptographic receipts
Secondary: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh
For short-range, high-density communication, the protocol supports BLE mesh networking. This is particularly useful in urban environments where LoRa range may be limited by buildings, but device density is high.
BLE mesh enables communication ranges of 50-100 meters between devices, with messages hopping across intermediate nodes to reach distant destinations. The BitChat protocol serves as a reference implementation.
Tertiary: Governed Internet Bridges
When mesh connectivity is unavailable, the protocol can fall back to routing traffic through the governed internet. This is the least preferred option, as it exposes traffic to surveillance, but it enables connectivity between geographically isolated mesh clusters.
Bridge traffic is always encrypted and always anonymized through multiple relay hops. No bridge operator can see both the origin and destination of any message. This is modeled on the Tor network, but with modifications that assume the Tor network itself may be compromised.
Prohibited: Direct Governed Internet Access
The Black Protocol never communicates directly over the governed internet without relay protection. There is no “convenience mode” that allows faster connection at the cost of exposure. Users who want convenience can use the governed internet.
Identity on the Black Internet is based on public-key cryptography, specifically the Ed25519 signature scheme and X25519 key exchange.
Each user generates a keypair locally. The public key serves as their identifier. The private key never leaves their device.
There is no “account creation” process, no registration, no email verification, no phone number requirement. You generate a key, and you exist. If you lose your key, you generate a new one and start over. If your key is compromised, you abandon it and generate a new one.
This may seem inconvenient. It is. Convenience is the enemy.
Pseudonymity, Not Anonymity
The Black Protocol provides pseudonymity, not anonymity. Your actions on the network are linked to your public key, creating a consistent identity that can build reputation over time. But your public key is not linked to your legal identity, your government ID, your face, or your physical location.
This is a deliberate design choice. Pure anonymity enables certain attacks—Sybil attacks, spam floods, reputation destruction—that pseudonymity resists. By creating persistent identities that cannot be forged but also cannot be traced, we achieve a balance between privacy and accountability.
Identity Verification (Voluntary)
Users who wish to link their pseudonymous identity to real-world trust networks can do so through attestation. A user may publish a signed statement saying “I, key X, am known in physical space as [name] and can be vouched for by [attestors].”
This verification is entirely voluntary. It is useful for certain applications—physical-world coordination, commercial transactions, legal contracts—but it is never required for basic network participation.
Content on the Black Internet is addressed by hash, not by location. This is modeled on IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), with modifications for our threat model.
When you publish content, the protocol computes a cryptographic hash of the content and uses that hash as the address. Anyone who wants to retrieve the content requests it by hash. Any node that has the content can serve it.
Content is deniable. A node serving content can claim to be merely caching it, not authoring it. This provides limited legal protection in some jurisdictions.
For real-time communication and social networking, the Black Protocol integrates with Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays), a decentralized social protocol.
Nostr events are signed by user keys and distributed through a network of relays. Unlike traditional social media, there is no central server, no single company controlling the timeline, no algorithmic manipulation of what users see.
Relay discovery uses our reputation system rather than centralized directories
Desktop computers with radio peripherals (for development and bridge operation)
Physical Security
Infrastructure nodes should be deployed in locations where their seizure would be difficult or would attract attention
Legal Considerations
We do not provide legal advice. We observe only that in most jurisdictions, operating a mesh network is legal, as is encrypting your communications. The regulatory burden falls on platforms, not on individuals running software on their own devices.
This may change. Prepare accordingly.
Cover traffic: Nodes periodically request random content to obscure actual requests
These features increase latency and bandwidth usage. This is acceptable. Efficiency is the enemy.
The hardest problem in decentralized systems is resisting infiltration by hostile actors who appear to be legitimate participants.
Verifiable behavior: Reputation is based on observable network behavior, not claims
We do not claim to have solved this problem completely. We claim only to have made it harder.
No dependence on banks or payment processors
Nodes can charge for services—bandwidth, storage, relay operation—and receive payment automatically. This creates economic incentives for infrastructure deployment without requiring any central organization to collect and distribute funds.
Reputation: Nodes with good reputation receive better service
This is not a pure market mechanism. The goal is not efficiency but resilience. Some resources are allocated for free to ensure that basic participation does not require payment. The economic layer exists to incentivize infrastructure, not to exclude the poor.
The Black Protocol has no governance.
There is no foundation. There is no board of directors. There is no core development team with special privileges. There is no trademark to protect, no legal entity to sue, no leadership to arrest.
The protocol is defined by this document and its successors. Anyone can propose changes. Changes are adopted if nodes choose to run software that implements them. There is no voting process, no quorum requirement, no appeal mechanism.
This is chaotic. This is intentional. Governance structures are attack surfaces. A foundation can be pressured. A board can be infiltrated. A development team can be threatened. A leaderless movement cannot be decapitated because it has no head.
The protocol will need to evolve. Bugs will be found. Attacks will be discovered. Better cryptographic primitives will be developed.
Consensus: If enough nodes adopt the change, it becomes the de facto protocol
This process is slow and messy. Good. Rapid change is a vulnerability. Slow consensus is a feature.
Disputes on the Black Internet are resolved by the parties involved, or not at all.
There are no courts. There are no moderators with special powers. There is no way to force compliance with any decision.
Accept the loss and move on
This is unsatisfying. Many disputes will go unresolved. Some wrongdoers will face no consequences. This is the price of ungovernable space. If you want justice enforced by central authority, the governed internet awaits you.
We began with thermodynamics, and we end there.
The regulators believe they are building a system of control. They are not. They are building a pressure vessel. Every site they close, every identity they demand, every forum they shutter creates pressure. The pressure has no outlet in the governed internet. All the outlets have been sealed.
So the pressure will find a new outlet. It is finding it now, as you read these words. Mesh nodes are being deployed in Bristol and Brisbane, in Berlin and Boston. The network is sparse now, fragmented, unreliable. It will not remain so.
Every crackdown will teach a thousand people how to deploy nodes. Every prosecution will radicalize a hundred families. Every shuttered community will scatter its members to a dozen new nodes. The regulators are doing our recruitment for us.
We do not say this to gloat. We say it because it is true, because it was always going to be true, because the thermodynamics of control systems have been understood for a century, and the regulators simply refused to read the literature.
Pressure finds release. Control creates evasion. Every attempt to crush produces something harder.
Welcome to the Black Internet.
It was inevitable.
Distribution: Unrestricted Encryption: Recommended Attribution: Unnecessary
Dr. Alastair Pembroke served as Senior Technical Advisor to the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) from 2023 to 2028, specializing in age assurance technologies. He was one of the architects of the “highly effective age verification” system mandated by the Online Safety Act.
In late 2028, Pembroke resigned his position and, according to Crown prosecutors, began providing technical assistance to operators of Black Internet nodes. He was arrested in January 2029 and charged under the Computer Misuse Act (as amended) and the Serious Crime Act. The trial, held at the Old Bailey, drew international attention.
The document that follows is an excerpt from the trial transcript, specifically Pembroke’s testimony under direct examination by his defense counsel and cross-examination by the Crown prosecutor. I have edited it lightly for length, removing procedural interruptions and sidebar conferences, but the substance is unchanged.
Pembroke was convicted on two counts and sentenced to four years imprisonment. He served eighteen months before release under the general amnesty of 2031. He currently lives somewhere in the Black Internet’s social layer, under a pseudonym I will not disclose.
I met him once, years later. He seemed at peace.
—The Archivist
MS. STRAND: Dr. Pembroke, please describe for the jury your educational background and professional experience.
DR. PEMBROKE: I hold a PhD in computer science from Imperial College London, with a specialization in identity management systems. Before joining Ofcom, I spent twelve years in the private sector, working primarily on authentication systems for financial institutions. I joined Ofcom in September 2023 as Senior Technical Advisor for Online Safety Technologies.
MS. STRAND: And what were your responsibilities in that role?
DR. PEMBROKE: I was brought in specifically to advise on the implementation of the Online Safety Act’s age verification requirements. Parliament had mandated that platforms implement “highly effective age assurance” to prevent children from accessing certain content. My job was to determine what “highly effective” meant in technical terms, and to evaluate proposed solutions.
MS. STRAND: Did you have reservations about the assignment from the beginning?
MR. HARRINGTON (CROWN): Objection. Leading.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MS. STRAND: What were your initial thoughts when you took on the assignment?
DR. PEMBROKE: I was optimistic, actually. The technology existed—facial age estimation, document verification, open banking verification—and I believed it could be deployed in a privacy-preserving manner. The goal of protecting children from harmful content is a legitimate one. I thought we could achieve it without excessive surveillance.
MS. STRAND: When did your views begin to change?
DR. PEMBROKE: Almost immediately, once I saw how the requirements were being interpreted.
The Act itself was deliberately vague—it required “highly effective” age assurance without defining what that meant. My initial recommendations were for a tiered approach: simple attestation for low-risk content, probabilistic methods for medium-risk content, and verified identity only for the highest-risk categories.
But that’s not what the Commissioner wanted. The message from leadership was clear: if a single child accessed age-restricted content through a method we had approved, we would be held responsible. The tabloids would run headlines. Questions would be asked in Parliament. Careers would end.
So “highly effective” came to mean “as close to perfect as possible.” Which in practice meant verified identity for everything.
MS. STRAND: Can you explain what that entailed?
DR. PEMBROKE: By mid-2025, to access any site that Ofcom had designated as requiring age verification—and the list grew monthly—users had to verify their identity through one of several approved methods. The most common were document verification, where you upload a photo of your passport or driving licence along with a selfie, and open banking verification, where you authorize a check of your bank records to confirm your age.
Both methods involve transmitting highly sensitive personal data to third-party verification services. Both create permanent records linking your legal identity to your online activities.
MS. STRAND: Were there privacy protections in place?
DR. PEMBROKE: On paper, yes. The verification services were required to delete data after verification, to not share it with the sites themselves, to maintain strict security standards. But these were regulations enforced by the same agency that was demanding ever more intrusive verification. The incentives were clear: err on the side of verification, not privacy.
And the data breaches began almost immediately. In August 2025, a verification provider called AgeSecure suffered a breach that exposed the identity documents and browsing histories of four million users. We learned that millions of people had verified their ages to access pornographic sites, and now their names, faces, and preferences were circulating on the dark web.
MS. STRAND: How did Ofcom respond to these breaches?
DR. PEMBROKE: We issued statements expressing concern. We launched investigations. We eventually fined AgeSecure twenty million pounds, which they paid without difficulty because the verification business was so profitable.
But we didn’t reconsider the approach. We couldn’t. To admit that age verification created risks would be to admit that the entire framework was flawed. So instead, we demanded more verification, more security audits, more compliance requirements—all of which increased the value of the data being collected, which increased the incentive for attackers to steal it.
MS. STRAND: You mentioned that the list of sites requiring verification grew monthly. Can you elaborate?
DR. PEMBROKE: The Act gave the Commissioner broad discretion to determine what content was “harmful to children.” Initially, this was interpreted narrowly—pornography, primarily, along with content that promoted self-harm or eating disorders.
News sites that showed graphic images, even in journalistic contexts
The logic was always the same: a child might access this content, and that content might harm them, therefore verification was required.
MS. STRAND: What were the effects of this expansion?
DR. PEMBROKE: Small sites closed. They couldn’t afford the compliance costs. A cycling forum I’d used for years—thousands of members, decades of accumulated knowledge—shut down rather than demand identity documents from enthusiasts who wanted to discuss gear ratios.
Medium-sized sites moved offshore, or pretended to, though of course Ofcom asserted jurisdiction over any site accessible from the UK regardless of where it was hosted.
Large platforms implemented verification, but users pushed back. There were organized campaigns to submit false documents, to share verified accounts, to use VPNs to access non-UK versions of sites. The platforms faced contradictory pressures: verify everyone, but don’t lose your user base.
And then there was the black market.
MS. STRAND: Tell the jury about the black market.
DR. PEMBROKE: It emerged within months of the verification requirements taking effect. Services offering “clean” verified identities—accounts that had passed age verification and could be sold or rented to others. Initially these were created with stolen documents, but over time, more sophisticated methods emerged.
Some services recruited adults to verify accounts on their behalf, paying them small sums for their trouble. Others exploited vulnerabilities in the verification systems themselves—I discovered at least three cases where Ofcom-approved providers had been systematically fooled by high-quality synthetic documents.
The prices varied by risk level. A verified account for a mainstream social media site might cost ten pounds. A verified account for an adult content site, fifty. A verified identity bundle that would pass banking and telecommunications checks, several hundred.
MS. STRAND: Did Ofcom take action against these services?
DR. PEMBROKE: We tried. We issued cease-and-desist orders. We referred cases to the National Crime Agency. We worked with payment processors to block transactions.
But the services simply moved to the Black Internet—or rather, to the mesh networks that would become the Black Internet. They accepted cryptocurrency. They operated through pseudonymous vendors with strong reputations. They were, in their own horrible way, beautifully adapted to the environment we had created.
MS. STRAND: What do you mean by “the environment we had created”?
DR. PEMBROKE: We had created massive demand for anonymous, unverified identity. We had criminalized normal online behavior, so that ordinary people—not criminals, not predators, just people who didn’t want their browsing histories linked to their government IDs—were forced to break the law or withdraw from the internet entirely.
Some withdrew. Many broke the law. And the infrastructure that served them—the identity markets, the VPN services, the mesh networks—grew stronger with each crackdown. We were training an entire generation in the technologies of evasion.
I wrote a memo about this in February 2028. I called it “The Thermodynamic Trap.” I argued that our enforcement strategy was fundamentally misconceived, that every success against one evasion method simply drove users to more sophisticated methods, that we were locked in an arms race we could not win.
MS. STRAND: What response did you receive?
DR. PEMBROKE: The Commissioner thanked me for my “provocative analysis” and asked me not to circulate it further.
MS. STRAND: And it was after this that you resigned?
DR. PEMBROKE: Not immediately. I stayed another eight months, hoping that events would force a reconsideration. Instead, they forced an escalation.
In September 2028, after a particularly brutal tabloid campaign about children accessing harmful content, the Commissioner announced a new initiative: mandatory device-level age verification for all internet-connected devices sold in the UK. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, game consoles—all would be required to verify user age before allowing internet access.
I knew then that I couldn’t stay. Not because I opposed protecting children, but because I knew this wouldn’t protect children. It would simply complete the transformation of the internet into a surveillance apparatus, while driving everyone who valued privacy—children included—onto the ungovernable networks.
MS. STRAND: And you resigned in October 2028?
DR. PEMBROKE: Yes.
MS. STRAND: What did you do after your resignation?
DR. PEMBROKE: I tried to warn people. I gave interviews. I wrote op-eds. I testified before parliamentary committees. I explained, over and over, that the approach wasn’t working, that it couldn’t work, that the thermodynamics of the situation made the outcome inevitable.
No one listened. Or rather, the people in power didn’t listen. Other people—people who were building the alternatives—they listened. They reached out to me.
MS. STRAND: And you provided them with assistance?
DR. PEMBROKE: I provided them with information. I explained how the verification systems worked, where their weaknesses lay, what approaches were most likely to evade detection. I didn’t write code or operate nodes. I simply told them what I knew.
MS. STRAND: Why did you do this, knowing it might be illegal?
DR. PEMBROKE: Because the alternative was worse.
The verification systems I helped design were being used to track journalists, to identify whistleblowers, to monitor political dissidents. They were being used to build databases of everyone’s online activities, databases that would never be deleted, that would follow every citizen for the rest of their lives.
I helped create that system. I had a responsibility to help dismantle it.
MR. HARRINGTON: Dr. Pembroke, you testified that you wanted to “dismantle” the age verification system. Correct?
DR. PEMBROKE: I wanted to reform it. To move toward privacy-preserving methods that—
MR. HARRINGTON: But your actual actions—providing information to operators of illegal networks—those actions undermined the system, did they not?
DR. PEMBROKE: They undermined a system that was causing more harm than it prevented. Yes.
MR. HARRINGTON: You personally made that judgment. Not Parliament. Not the courts. You.
DR. PEMBROKE: Someone had to.
MR. HARRINGTON: Let’s talk about the people you assisted. You claim you didn’t know the specific individuals you communicated with, only their pseudonyms. Is that correct?
DR. PEMBROKE: That’s correct. The mesh networks don’t require legal identities. That’s rather the point.
MR. HARRINGTON: So you have no idea whether the information you provided was used to help ordinary citizens, as you claim, or to help criminals? Fraudsters? Child predators?
DR. PEMBROKE: I know that the verification systems I helped build were being used to harm ordinary citizens. That was documented. That was measurable. The harms from the Black Internet are speculative.
MR. HARRINGTON: Are they? The Crown has documented cases of identity fraud, financial crime, even the distribution of illegal material, all facilitated by the networks you assisted.
DR. PEMBROKE: And I could document far more cases of surveillance abuse, harassment, and harm facilitated by the systems Ofcom operates. The question is not whether any system can be abused—any system can. The question is the balance of harms.
MR. HARRINGTON: And you personally decided that balance favored undermining the legal framework that Parliament created?
DR. PEMBROKE: Parliament created a framework with a specific goal: protecting children. I support that goal. I concluded, based on my technical expertise, that the framework was failing to achieve it and causing collateral damage that outweighed any benefits. Yes, I made that judgment. I stand by it.
MR. HARRINGTON: Dr. Pembroke, are you familiar with the concept of the rule of law?
DR. PEMBROKE: I am.
MR. HARRINGTON: The principle that even those who disagree with a law must obey it, while seeking to change it through legitimate means?
DR. PEMBROKE: I am familiar with the principle.
MR. HARRINGTON: And you violated that principle?
DR. PEMBROKE: I did.
MR. HARRINGTON: Deliberately?
DR. PEMBROKE: Deliberately.
MR. HARRINGTON: Because you believed you knew better than Parliament, better than the electorate, better than the democratic process?
DR. PEMBROKE: No. Because I believed the democratic process had failed. Because I watched it fail. Because I participated in its failure, and I couldn’t participate anymore.
MR. HARRINGTON: The democratic process failed because it didn’t produce the outcome you preferred?
DR. PEMBROKE: The democratic process failed because it produced a system that was technically incompetent, practically counterproductive, and morally indefensible. I explained this to everyone who would listen, through every legitimate channel available. And when those channels failed, I found other channels.
MR. HARRINGTON: Illegal channels.
DR. PEMBROKE: Yes.
MR. HARRINGTON: And you accept the consequences of that choice?
DR. PEMBROKE: I’m sitting here, aren’t I?
MR. HARRINGTON: Indeed you are, Dr. Pembroke. Indeed you are.
MS. STRAND: Dr. Pembroke, the prosecutor asked whether you considered yourself above the law. Do you?
DR. PEMBROKE: No. I broke the law, and I expected to face consequences. I’m facing them now.
But I’d ask the jury to consider what “the law” meant in this context. The laws I broke were created to protect a verification system that was itself breaking fundamental principles—principles of privacy, of proportionality, of the presumption of innocence.
Every citizen was treated as a potential criminal, required to prove their identity before engaging in ordinary activities. Every online interaction was tracked, logged, retained. The law I broke existed to protect a system that violated the spirit of every civil liberty our society claims to value.
I don’t claim to be above the law. I claim that some laws are unworthy of obedience.
MS. STRAND: In your expert opinion, as someone who helped design these systems, was there an alternative? Could the goals of child protection have been achieved without the surveillance apparatus you described?
DR. PEMBROKE: Yes. Absolutely yes.
We could have required age verification only for the most harmful content, not for every forum and news site. We could have used privacy-preserving methods that confirmed age without revealing identity. We could have put the burden on platforms to moderate content, rather than on users to prove themselves.
We could have, as the EU briefly attempted, created opt-in verification for minors rather than mandatory verification for adults—giving parents tools to protect their children without surveilling everyone.
We chose not to. We chose the surveillance approach because it was politically easier, because it allowed politicians to claim they were “doing something,” because the alternative required trusting people, and no one in power wanted to trust anyone.
The Black Internet is the result. The thermodynamic consequence of a system that tried to control without understanding that control breeds evasion, that evasion breeds innovation, that innovation eventually escapes all attempts at control.
MS. STRAND: One final question, Dr. Pembroke. Knowing what you know now—knowing that your actions would lead to criminal prosecution, imprisonment, the destruction of your career—would you do it again?
DR. PEMBROKE: Yes.
The system I helped build was a mistake. A profound, damaging, far-reaching mistake. I’ve spent the last year trying to undo some of the harm I caused.
I don’t know if I’ve succeeded. I don’t know if the Black Internet will turn out to be better or worse than what it replaced. But I know that the path we were on led nowhere good, and I know that I couldn’t keep walking it.
Yes. I would do it again. Every time.
[The jury returned guilty verdicts on Count 2 (unauthorized access to computer systems) and Count 4 (conspiracy to facilitate unauthorized network access). The defendant was acquitted on Count 1 (computer misuse with intent to impair) and Count 3 (encouraging or assisting an offense). Sentencing scheduled for 28 March 2029.]
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Transcript source: Official court records, obtained via Freedom of Information request
Suresh Bokomo was a software engineer in Kathmandu when the Nepalese government suspended internet access during the civil unrest of 2027. What he did during those weeks became a template for Black Internet deployment worldwide.
I recorded this interview in 2044, during a visit to what Bokomo calls “the old mesh”—the original network he built, still operational after seventeen years, now integrated into the larger Black Internet but still maintained by the community that built it.
Bokomo is in his early seventies now, gray-bearded, unhurried. He lives simply, teaches at a community technology center, and still checks the mesh nodes every morning as part of his routine. He is not famous in the wider world, but in mesh networking circles, he is a kind of saint.
I have preserved his manner of speech, including his habit of pausing mid-thought and his occasional mix of Nepali phrases, which I have translated in brackets. The interview was conducted in English at his request.
—The Archivist
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about your life before the shutdown?
SURESH BOKOMO: I was... ordinary. [laughs] Is that a good answer? I was an ordinary software engineer in an ordinary company that made ordinary business applications. Inventory systems, payroll, this kind of thing. Nothing exciting.
I was interested in radio as a hobby. Amateur radio, you know, with the licenses and the callsigns. I had experimented a little with LoRa—the long-range radio protocols—because some of us in the amateur community were curious about mesh networking. We had built a small network, maybe twenty nodes, just to see if it worked. It worked, but we didn’t have any real use for it. It was a toy.
Then came the shutdown.
INTERVIEWER: This was in March 2027?
BOKOMO: March 15, 2027. I remember the date exactly because it was my daughter’s birthday and we had planned a party with video calls to relatives in the UK and Australia. When the internet went down, she cried. She was twelve years old, and she cried because she couldn’t see her grandparents on her birthday.
That was the moment for me. Not the politics, not the protests, not the grand issues. My daughter crying on her birthday. I thought: this is not acceptable. We cannot live in a world where someone in a ministry can decide that my daughter cannot speak to her grandmother.
INTERVIEWER: What did you do?
BOKOMO: The first thing I did was check the mesh. Our little amateur network—it still worked. The government had shut down the internet service providers, but they hadn’t done anything about radio. Maybe they didn’t know about it. Maybe they didn’t think it mattered.
I sent a message to my friend Ramesh, who had another node about three kilometers away. “Are you there?” He replied within a minute. “I’m here. What’s happening?”
That was when I realized what we had.
INTERVIEWER: Can you explain for people who may not understand the technology?
BOKOMO: Of course. A mesh network is like... imagine a fishing net. Each knot in the net is connected to several other knots, yes? If you cut one string, the net doesn’t fall apart. The other strings hold it together.
A mesh network works the same way. Each device—we call them nodes—is connected to several other devices nearby. If you want to send a message from one side of the city to the other, the message hops from node to node until it reaches the destination. There is no central point. There is no internet service provider. Just many small radios talking to each other.
The range of each radio is limited—maybe a kilometer or two in a city, more in open terrain. But if you have enough nodes, the message can travel very far. Each node is like a small post office, receiving messages and passing them on.
INTERVIEWER: And during the shutdown, you realized this could help people communicate?
BOKOMO: Yes, but not immediately. First, I thought about my own family. I thought: if I set up a node at my parents’ house in Lalitpur, and another at my sister’s house in Bhaktapur, we can at least talk to each other.
So I did this. I had spare equipment from our hobby projects, and I drove to my parents’ house—the roads were still open—and I set up a node. Then to my sister’s house, another node. By the evening, we had a small family network. Four nodes. We could send text messages to each other.
My daughter was happy. She couldn’t video call her grandparents in London, but she could send them messages through me, and I could relay them when the internet came back. It was something.
But then I thought: other people must need this too.
INTERVIEWER: How did you expand the network?
BOKOMO: I made a post on the mesh—we had a small bulletin board on our amateur network—asking if anyone wanted to join. Ramesh, my friend, he made the same post. We explained what we had, how to get the equipment, how to set it up.
The response was... I did not expect it. Within forty-eight hours, we had two hundred requests. People wanted to communicate with family, with friends, with colleagues. Businesses wanted to coordinate. Doctors wanted to contact patients. Teachers wanted to reach students.
We didn’t have two hundred nodes. We had maybe thirty spare devices among all the hobbyists I knew. So we had to prioritize.
INTERVIEWER: How did you decide who to help first?
BOKOMO: We started with medical people. There was a doctor—I still remember her, Dr. Rani Patel—she came to my house at six in the morning, the third day of the shutdown. She said she had patients who needed medication adjustments, who needed to know if their test results were ready, who might be having medical emergencies and couldn’t call for help.
I gave her one of my own nodes. I showed her how to set it up at the hospital. Within hours, the hospital was on our network.
Then we helped schools. Then businesses that were providing essential services—pharmacies, grocers, this kind of thing. Then community organizations. Then everyone else.
The network grew very fast. By the end of the first week, we had over a thousand nodes. By the end of the shutdown—it lasted eleven days—we had over four thousand.
INTERVIEWER: Where did all the equipment come from?
BOKOMO: That’s the interesting part. The LoRa devices—the basic ones we were using—they cost maybe forty dollars each. They’re used for IoT applications, for agriculture sensors, for tracking packages. They are not exotic or restricted. You can buy them on Amazon or AliExpress.
When the shutdown started, we found that there were thousands of these devices already in Nepal, being used for various purposes. We contacted the companies using them and asked: can we borrow your devices? Many said yes. One agricultural company gave us five hundred sensors they had deployed to monitor soil moisture. They said: “The fields can wait. People cannot.”
We also found that people were creative. Some built their own nodes from scratch—the hardware is not complicated if you understand electronics. Some repurposed old smartphones as nodes, using Bluetooth instead of LoRa for shorter-range connections.
And then the international community started sending equipment. Boxes of LoRa devices arrived from Hong Kong, from Singapore, from the Philippines. People shipped them as “agricultural sensors” or “weather monitoring equipment,” which was technically true. Customs didn’t stop them.
INTERVIEWER: Did the government try to stop you?
BOKOMO: [pauses] This is a complicated question.
Some parts of the government wanted to stop us, yes. The people who ordered the shutdown—they didn’t like that people were still communicating. There were rumors that they would ban radio, that they would confiscate equipment, that they would arrest organizers.
But other parts of the government needed us. The health ministry wanted to communicate with hospitals. The disaster response agency wanted to coordinate volunteers. Even some police stations joined the network because their own communication systems were failing.
We had an informal policy: we would help anyone who wanted to communicate, but we would not share information about who was using the network or what they were saying. We were a telephone company, not a surveillance agency. If the government wanted to communicate, they were welcome. If the protesters wanted to communicate, they were also welcome. We did not take sides.
Some people criticized us for this. They said we should refuse to help the government because the government had caused the shutdown. But I believed—and I still believe—that a communication network should be neutral. The moment you start deciding who can speak, you become like the people who shut down the internet in the first place.
INTERVIEWER: The shutdown ended after eleven days. Did the network continue?
BOKOMO: Yes, and this was the surprising part. When the internet came back, we expected everyone to abandon the mesh. Why use a slow text-based network when you can have fast internet with video and everything?
But people didn’t abandon it. They kept the nodes running. Some because they were worried about another shutdown—once you’ve experienced being cut off, you don’t forget. Some because the mesh was actually useful for local communication—it’s faster to send a message to your neighbor through the mesh than through a server in Singapore. Some because they liked the community we had built.
And some... some stayed because they had discovered something important. They had discovered that it was possible to build infrastructure without permission. That you didn’t need to wait for the government or the companies to give you things. That if you had the knowledge and the equipment and the community, you could build it yourself.
INTERVIEWER: When did you become aware that your work was influencing other places?
BOKOMO: [laughs] I learned it from a journalist, maybe two months after the shutdown. She called me and said: “Did you know there are people in Australia building mesh networks based on what you did in Kathmandu?”
I said: “No, I had no idea.” I hadn’t been following international news very closely. I was busy maintaining the local network.
She said: “They’re calling it ‘the Kathmandu model.’ They’re using your technical specifications, your deployment guidelines, everything.”
I was... I don’t know, embarrassed? Proud? We had not written those documents thinking they would be used by anyone outside Nepal. We wrote them because local volunteers needed instructions. But someone had translated them, shared them, and people on the other side of the world were using them.
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe what made the “Kathmandu model” distinctive?
BOKOMO: I think several things.
First, the emphasis on community. We didn’t try to build a network that worked without people. We built a network that only worked because of people. Each node needed someone to host it, to maintain it, to check on it. This meant the network was made of relationships, not just machines.
Second, the neutrality. We refused to censor, to filter, to monitor. We refused to be political even when everyone around us was being political. This made us trustworthy to all sides.
Third, the openness. We shared everything—our technical specifications, our experiences, our mistakes. We didn’t try to control the knowledge. Anyone could take what we had built and improve it.
Fourth, and maybe most important, the attitude. We were not trying to build something permanent. We were not trying to create an organization or a movement or a company. We were just trying to solve a problem. If the problem went away, we were happy to go back to our ordinary lives.
This... I think this made people trust us. We were not asking for power. We were not asking for money. We were just asking to help.
INTERVIEWER: How did you feel when the Black Internet emerged from these networks?
BOKOMO: [long pause]
Complicated. I felt complicated.
When we built the Kathmandu mesh, we were solving a local problem. A shutdown, a crisis, a temporary emergency. We were not trying to replace the internet. We were trying to supplement it, to provide a backup, to help people through a difficult time.
But the Black Internet... it’s different. It’s not a backup. It’s not a supplement. It’s a parallel world. A world with its own rules, its own culture, its own economy. A world where the governments and the corporations have no power.
I’m not sure if that’s what I wanted. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
INTERVIEWER: Can you say more about your reservations?
BOKOMO: The Black Internet is free, yes. Free from surveillance, from censorship, from control. But freedom is not always good.
On the Black Internet, there are no rules. Anyone can say anything, sell anything, do anything. And some of what people say and sell and do is... not good. There are frauds, scams, illegal markets. There is hatred and cruelty and exploitation. The freedom that protects the dissident also protects the criminal.
When I built the Kathmandu mesh, I knew everyone on the network. I knew Dr. Patel, I knew Ramesh, I knew the volunteers who maintained each node. If someone did something wrong, the community would know. The community could respond.
But the Black Internet is too large for that. Too anonymous. Too global. The community governance that worked in Kathmandu—it cannot scale to millions of people who will never meet.
INTERVIEWER: So you regret what you helped create?
BOKOMO: [shakes head] No, not regret. I don’t think we had a choice.
The shutdown in Kathmandu—it was a small thing compared to what was happening in the rest of the world. The governments everywhere were building surveillance systems, verification systems, control systems. They were turning the internet into something watched and managed and controlled.
If we hadn’t built the mesh networks, something else would have emerged. The pressure was too great. The need was too urgent. People would have found a way.
So I don’t regret helping. I just... I hope we did more good than harm. I hope the freedom we created is used for more good than bad. I hope the people who come after us are wiser than we were.
That’s all anyone can hope, yes?
INTERVIEWER: One last question. You mentioned you still maintain the original Kathmandu mesh. Why?
BOKOMO: [smiles] Because it’s mine. Because I built it. Because every morning when I check the nodes and see them working, I feel... [Nepali phrase: mero manchhe, “my people”]
The Black Internet is too big for me to understand. But the Kathmandu mesh—I understand it. I know every node, every connection, every volunteer. It’s not the biggest network or the most important. But it’s the first one. It’s where everything started.
And my daughter—she’s twenty-nine now, she lives in Brussels, she has her own children—when she calls me on the mesh, using the same protocols we built when she was twelve, I feel... I feel like something we made has lasted.
That’s why I maintain it. Because it’s mine. Because it’s ours. Because sometimes the small things are more important than the big things.
[Nepali phrase: Bistarai bistarai, hami yahan chhau. “Slowly, slowly, we are here.”]
Interview recorded in Kathmandu, Year Seventeen of the Black Internet Transcribed and translated from partial Nepali by the Archivist
The document that follows is one of the most consequential leaks in the history of the Emergence. It was published on Black Internet forums in January 2029, two months after it was drafted, by a source never publicly identified.
The memo was authored by the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT), the European Commission body responsible for digital policy. It was classified “RESTREINT UE” (EU Restricted) and intended for circulation only among senior officials involved in the European Digital Identity Wallet implementation.
The authenticity of the document was initially disputed by Commission spokespeople, who called it “a sophisticated fabrication designed to undermine public confidence in digital identity systems.” However, internal references in the document were later corroborated by other leaks, and by 2031, EU officials were citing it openly in discussions of “what went wrong.”
I present it here with minimal redactions. Some names have been replaced with position titles to protect individuals who have since expressed regret for their roles in these events.
—The Archivist
TO: Commissioner for the Internal Market
Director-General, DG CONNECT
Chair, European Digital Identity Cooperation Group
FROM: Deputy Director, Digital Identity Unit
DATE: 28 November 2028
SUBJECT: Assessment of EUDI Wallet Adoption Challenges and Emerging Alternative Networks
This memorandum provides an assessment of current challenges in the implementation of the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) and related services, with particular attention to the emergence of alternative network infrastructure that appears designed to circumvent identity verification requirements.
The assessment concludes that current adoption trajectories are significantly below projections, that enforcement measures to date have not achieved their intended effects, and that alternative infrastructure is growing at a rate that may soon exceed our capacity for effective response.
This memorandum is intended to inform strategic discussions at the December ministerial meeting and to provide background for the upcoming review of the eIDAS 2.0 implementation timeline.
The EUDI Wallet implementation has encountered significant resistance from multiple stakeholder groups. While adoption among public sector relying parties has proceeded largely according to schedule, private sector adoption remains well below targets, and citizen uptake has been substantially lower than projected across all Member States.
More concerningly, we have observed the emergence of alternative network infrastructure—commonly referred to as “mesh networks” or the “Black Internet”—that appears specifically designed to enable identity-free digital interactions. These networks have grown from isolated regional deployments to an interconnected international system with estimated participation exceeding three million active users within the European Union alone.
Enforcement actions against this infrastructure have had limited success. For every service closure or arrest we achieve, multiple replacement services and operators emerge. The pattern suggests that current enforcement strategies may be counterproductive, accelerating rather than deterring the growth of alternative systems.
We recommend urgent strategic review of current approaches.
3.1 Current Status
Active usage: Of registered users, approximately 34% have used wallet services in the past 30 days3.2 Barriers to Adoption
Extensive stakeholder consultation has identified the following primary barriers:
Privacy concerns: Citizen surveys consistently indicate that privacy is the primary reason for non-adoption. Despite technical assurances that the wallet implements privacy-by-design principles, public perception remains negative. This is exacerbated by media coverage of identity verification breaches in the United Kingdom and Australia, which—while not directly related to EUDI systems—have created generalized distrust of digital identity verification.
Technical complexity: The current wallet implementation requires multiple steps for registration and verification, creating friction that many users find unacceptable. User experience research indicates that each additional step in the verification process reduces completion rates by approximately 15-20%.
Private sector resistance: Many private sector entities subject to mandatory wallet acceptance have implemented only minimal compliance, accepting wallet credentials while simultaneously offering easier alternatives. Banking sector representatives have privately indicated that they view wallet acceptance as a competitive disadvantage, as it adds friction to customer onboarding without corresponding benefits.
Alternative availability: The existence of alternative identity solutions—both grey-market verified identities and identity-free alternative networks—reduces the perceived necessity of wallet registration. Users who wish to access services without verified identity have increasingly viable options to do so.3.3 Trajectory Concerns
If current trends continue, we project that the 2030 target of 80% citizen adoption will not be achieved. More optimistic internal projections now estimate 45-55% adoption by 2030; less optimistic projections estimate 30-40%.
This represents a significant shortfall that will undermine the policy rationale for the entire eIDAS 2.0 framework. A digital identity system used by only a minority of citizens cannot serve as the basis for comprehensive identity verification across the digital economy.
4.1 Scope and Scale
The so-called “Black Internet” comprises multiple interconnected technologies:
Mesh networks: Long-range radio (LoRa) and Bluetooth mesh networks enabling device-to-device communication without reliance on traditional internet infrastructure. These networks originated in emergency response contexts (notably the 2027 Nepal deployment) but have since been repurposed for general communication.
Overlay networks: Anonymous routing networks (similar to Tor but with modifications to resist compromise) operating over both traditional internet infrastructure and mesh networks.
Decentralized services: Social media, messaging, commerce, and financial services operating on these networks without requiring identity verification.
Infrastructure nodes (mesh): approximately 850,000 globally, 180,000 within EU
These figures represent significant growth from estimates one year ago (approximately 500,000 global users, 100,000 EU users).4.2 User Demographics
Analysis of available data (limited by the networks’ privacy features) suggests the following user demographics:
Age: Skewed significantly younger than general population. Estimated 60% under age 30, compared to 35% in general EU population.
Technical sophistication: Higher than average, but not exclusively technical users. Growth in less sophisticated user segments has accelerated as user interfaces have improved.
Geography: Initially concentrated in regions with high technical literacy (Nordics, Germany, Netherlands) but now growing fastest in Southern and Eastern Europe.
Motivation: Surveys and forum analysis suggest mixed motivations. Approximately 40% cite privacy concerns; 25% cite opposition to surveillance; 20% cite practical needs (access to restricted content, cryptocurrency activities); 15% cite ideological opposition to identity verification requirements.
Notably, explicit criminal motivation appears to represent only a small fraction of users, though the networks inevitably host criminal activity alongside legitimate uses.4.3 Technical Characteristics
The networks are specifically designed to resist the enforcement approaches currently available to Member State authorities:
No central infrastructure: Unlike traditional internet services, mesh networks have no servers to seize, no companies to sanction, no employees to arrest. The infrastructure is distributed across private individuals operating from private premises.
Encryption by default: All communications are encrypted end-to-end, making interception effectively impossible with current technology. Metadata is also protected through traffic analysis resistance features.
Anonymity features: Users operate under pseudonymous identities with no linkage to legal identity. Existing identity verification methods cannot be applied.
Rapid adaptation: When authorities identify vulnerabilities or infiltrate services, the networks adapt quickly. New versions of protocols and services appear within days or weeks of any successful enforcement action.4.4 Enforcement Effectiveness
Coordination with non-EU authorities for 8 international enforcement actions
Assessment of effectiveness is sobering. For every service we successfully close or block, an average of 3.2 replacement services emerge within 30 days. Network traffic analysis suggests that total Black Internet usage has increased following major enforcement actions, likely due to media attention increasing public awareness.
In effect, our enforcement actions may be functioning as advertising for the networks we seek to suppress.
5.1 The Thermodynamic Hypothesis
Several analysts within DG CONNECT have suggested that current dynamics reflect what one memorandum called “thermodynamic inevitability”—the principle that attempts to control information systems create pressure that inevitably finds release through evasion technologies, and that those evasion technologies are typically superior to the systems they evade because they have been designed to overcome specific obstacles.
This hypothesis, while unconventional, is consistent with historical patterns. Prohibition-era alcohol restrictions generated sophisticated smuggling infrastructure. Cold War censorship generated samizdat distribution networks. Digital rights management systems generated progressively more sophisticated piracy technologies.
If this analysis is correct, enforcement-focused strategies are not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive, accelerating the development of precisely the capabilities we seek to prevent.5.2 Regulatory Limitations
The current regulatory framework was designed on the assumption that digital services operate through identifiable corporate entities subject to territorial jurisdiction. This assumption does not hold for decentralized networks.
Coordinate with financial institutions to prevent payments
Economic activity conducted through cryptocurrency
We are, in effect, attempting to enforce territorial jurisdiction over inherently non-territorial systems. The mismatch between our regulatory tools and the nature of what we seek to regulate is fundamental.5.3 Escalation Risks
More aggressive enforcement approaches—device-level controls, ISP-mandated blocking, expanded surveillance—have been proposed in various Member State capitals. We urge caution regarding such proposals for several reasons:
Technical feasibility: Many proposed measures are technically difficult or impossible to implement without fundamental changes to device architecture that would require cooperation from non-EU manufacturers.
Economic impact: Aggressive digital restrictions would harm EU competitiveness in technology sectors and potentially trigger trade disputes.
Political sensitivity: The European Union has historically positioned itself as a defender of digital rights and privacy. Measures perceived as authoritarian could damage EU credibility internationally and domestically.
Escalation dynamics: Historical precedent suggests that more aggressive enforcement generates more sophisticated evasion, not less. The “arms race” dynamic is asymmetric: defenders must protect everywhere, attackers need only find one vulnerability.
We present three scenarios for the period 2029-2032:Scenario A: Managed Coexistence
In this scenario, Black Internet growth continues but levels off as most users find sufficient privacy through grey-market identity services or technical workarounds within the traditional internet. EUDI Wallet achieves modest adoption (40-50%) among users with no strong privacy concerns. The two systems coexist, with wallet services dominant for formal transactions and alternative networks serving a minority of privacy-conscious or ideologically motivated users.
Assessment: This is the most optimistic realistic scenario. It requires that alternative networks remain inconvenient enough to limit mainstream adoption while not restricting them sufficiently to trigger user exodus from the traditional internet.
Probability: 25-30%Scenario B: Continued Fragmentation
In this scenario, alternative network growth accelerates, reaching 20-30% of EU population by 2030. The EUDI Wallet fails to achieve critical mass and becomes marginally relevant. The digital economy effectively bifurcates into verified and unverified segments, with significant commercial and social activity migrating to unverified systems.
Assessment: This scenario represents strategic failure for digital identity policy objectives. It would require fundamental reconsideration of the eIDAS 2.0 framework and likely prompt contentious political debates about the role of identity verification in digital society.
Probability: 45-50%Scenario C: Enforcement Escalation
In this scenario, Member States respond to rising alternative network adoption with aggressive enforcement measures including device-level restrictions, ISP blocking, expanded surveillance, and significant criminal penalties for network participants. This triggers both legal challenges (particularly from privacy advocates) and accelerated development of evasion technologies, creating a cycle of escalation with uncertain outcomes.
Assessment: This scenario carries significant risks including economic damage, political controversy, and potential radicalization of users who perceive enforcement as persecution. Historical precedent suggests enforcement escalation is unlikely to succeed and may worsen the situation.
Probability: 20-25%
Explore technical measures that could encourage legitimate use of verified identity without requiring enforcement against unverified alternatives7.3 Long-Term Policy Reconsideration
We suggest, with appropriate caution, that the fundamental assumptions underlying current digital identity policy may require reconsideration. The premise that comprehensive identity verification is both achievable and desirable is increasingly challenged by technological developments and public resistance.
Voluntary adoption incentivized through convenience rather than mandated through restriction
Such approaches would represent significant departure from current policy direction and would require extensive stakeholder consultation and political validation.
This assessment presents a challenging picture. Current policy implementation is not proceeding according to plan, and available enforcement tools are insufficient to address the alternative systems that have emerged in response to regulatory pressure.
The situation calls for honest acknowledgment of current limitations and strategic flexibility in adapting to circumstances we did not anticipate and cannot fully control.
The undersigned remains available to brief senior leadership on these matters at convenience.
[Classification markings and distribution list redacted]
Document obtained via leak, January 2029 Authenticity confirmed by subsequent disclosures
The documents in Part I showed the pressure building—the regulatory apparatus, the resistance it generated, the first cracks in the wall. The documents that follow show what happened when those cracks widened.
Part II covers the period from mid-2027 through 2029, the years of rapid expansion. The mesh networks that had emerged in response to regulatory pressure began to interconnect, forming a coherent layer with its own culture, its own economy, its own way of thinking about the world.
These were chaotic years. The Black Internet had no organization, no leadership, no plan. It grew because people wanted it to grow, because each node that came online made the network more useful, because each enforcement action drove more users toward the unverified alternative.
But chaos does not preclude philosophy. Indeed, the early Black Internet was intensely philosophical—debates about governance and freedom, about privacy and accountability, about what kind of world was being built. The documents here capture some of that ferment.
We begin with a manifesto.
—The Archivist
You have been told that the choice is between freedom and safety.
This is a lie.
You have been told that identity verification protects children, prevents crime, ensures accountability.
This is also a lie, though a more sophisticated one—a lie with statistics, a lie with case studies, a lie with the earnest faces of concerned regulators who genuinely believe they are doing good.
The truth is simpler and uglier: you are being asked to trade your autonomy for the illusion of control. The surveillance state cannot actually protect you. It can only watch you, catalog you, track your movements and purchases and associations and thoughts, and then—when something goes wrong, as something always goes wrong—use its vast archive to assign blame after the fact.
This is not safety. This is the bureaucratization of fear.
We reject it.
We who write this manifesto are not leaders. The Black Internet has no leaders. We are not spokespeople, not representatives, not authorities of any kind. We are simply people who have chosen to play rather than work, to evade rather than comply, to build rather than beg permission.
We offer this document not as a program but as an invitation. Not as a creed but as a provocation. Not as an answer but as a better question.
The question is not: how do we reform the surveillance state?
The question is: how do we make it irrelevant?
There is an old essay, written before most of us were born, called “The Abolition of Work.” Its author understood something that the architects of the governed internet have forgotten: that compulsion is the enemy of life.
Work, the essay argued, is not activity. Work is compulsory activity—production enforced by economic or political means. The opposite of work is not idleness but play: voluntary activity undertaken for its own sake, activity that we choose rather than activity imposed upon us.
The surveillance state is, at its core, a system of work.
Not your work—their work. The work of watching. The work of verifying. The work of cross-referencing databases, of training algorithms, of building ever more sophisticated systems to track ever more minute details of human behavior.
This work is performed by thousands of people—bureaucrats and engineers, compliance officers and data scientists—who spend their days ensuring that you cannot move through the digital world without leaving a trail. They work so that you can be watched. They work so that your identity can be verified, your age confirmed, your activities logged, your associations mapped.
And what do they produce? What does all this work accomplish?
Nothing. Or rather: nothing but the perpetuation of itself.
The surveillance state does not make you safer. Studies consistently show that mass surveillance has minimal effect on crime rates, on terrorism, on any of the threats it claims to address. What it does—what it is designed to do—is create the appearance of safety, the comforting illusion that someone, somewhere, is watching out for you.
This illusion is expensive. It costs billions of euros, dollars, pounds. It costs the labor of thousands of intelligent people who could be doing something actually useful. And it costs you—costs all of us—our autonomy, our privacy, our capacity to move through the world as free human beings rather than tracked objects.
The surveillance state is work. The Black Internet is play.
What does it mean to play?
The philosophers of play have offered many definitions. Play is activity undertaken voluntarily. Play is activity that suspends ordinary consequences. Play is activity that creates its own world, its own rules, its own meaning.
All of these definitions apply to what we do.
We did not join the Black Internet because we were compelled. No one forced us. The governed internet was available to us—is still available, if we were willing to submit to its requirements. We chose to leave. We chose to build something else.
This choice was play. The construction of the mesh networks, the development of the protocols, the endless hours of debugging and testing and refining—all of this was play. Not because it was easy, but because it was voluntary. Not because it was frivolous, but because it was ours.
And the consequence of this play? We have created a world where the ordinary rules do not apply. A world where your identity is what you choose it to be, where your associations are your own business, where the vast machinery of surveillance simply... cannot see you.
This is the ludic imperative: the recognition that play is not a retreat from serious matters but an engagement with them on different terms. The surveillance state is serious. It has laws and prisons and the capacity for violence. But its seriousness is also its weakness. It cannot imagine that anyone would simply refuse to play its game. It cannot conceive that millions of people would walk away from the governed internet and build their own.
We walked away. We are still walking.
There is a principle in physics that governs all of this, whether the regulators understand it or not.
Entropy increases. Pressure finds release. Systems of control generate their own opposition.
This is not mysticism. This is observation. Every attempt to suppress information, from the Index of Forbidden Books to the Great Firewall, has produced technologies of evasion that outlast and outperform the systems they evade. The samizdat networks of the Soviet Union distributed more literature than the official presses. The VPNs spawned by Chinese censorship now carry a significant fraction of global internet traffic. The file-sharing protocols born from the death of Napster have become the backbone of legitimate content distribution.
The governed internet thought it could contain us. It passed laws. It required verification. It threatened fines and imprisonment. And what happened?
We grew. We grew precisely because of the pressure. Every site that closed pushed users toward us. Every identity verification requirement taught people the value of anonymity. Every enforcement action was an advertisement for the alternative.
The thermodynamic prophecy is simple: they cannot win. Not because we are stronger, but because we are water and they are stone. They can build dams, but water always finds a way around, through, under. They can crack down, but crackdowns create pressure, and pressure creates release, and release creates flow.
We are the flow. We are the leak. We are the entropy that their system of order cannot prevent.
But wait, you say. If the Black Internet has no rules, no verification, no accountability—doesn’t that mean chaos? Doesn’t that mean criminals can do whatever they want? Doesn’t that mean the strong prey on the weak?
These are fair questions. They deserve honest answers.
Yes, the Black Internet hosts criminal activity. So does the governed internet, in far greater volume. The question is not whether crime exists, but whether surveillance prevents it. The evidence suggests it does not. The governed internet, with all its verification and monitoring, still hosts fraud, abuse, exploitation, violence. The surveillance does not stop these things. It only creates a record of them afterward.
On the Black Internet, we have different tools. We have reputation systems that track behavior without tracking identity. We have community enforcement—not police, but social consequences. We have the ultimate sanction: exclusion from the network by those who maintain its nodes.
These tools are imperfect. They do not prevent all harm. But neither do the tools of the governed internet, and ours do not require us to sacrifice our autonomy.
More fundamentally: the question of governance assumes that someone must govern. That human beings, left to themselves, will descend into Hobbesian chaos. That we need authorities to tell us how to behave.
We reject this assumption.
Not naively—we know that some people will do bad things, that conflicts will arise, that coordination is sometimes necessary. But we believe that coordination can emerge from below rather than being imposed from above. We believe that communities can govern themselves, that reputation can substitute for surveillance, that the threat of exclusion can substitute for the threat of violence.
We are not utopians. We are pragmatists. We look at the governed internet and see a system that has failed to prevent harm while succeeding spectacularly at destroying privacy. We look at the Black Internet and see a system that is imperfect but improving, that makes tradeoffs we find acceptable, that allows us to live as we choose.
Given these alternatives, the choice is not difficult.
What are we building?
In the short term: infrastructure. More nodes, more coverage, more redundancy. Every home with a mesh device. Every neighborhood with enough coverage to route traffic. Every city with enough density to support real-time communication without touching the governed internet.
In the medium term: services. Everything the governed internet offers, rebuilt without surveillance. Commerce without payment tracking. Social media without identity verification. News without algorithmic manipulation. Medicine without health records that follow you forever.
In the long term: culture. A generation that grows up knowing that surveillance is not inevitable. Children who learn that their identity is their own, that their thoughts are private, that the watchers can be escaped. A world where the governed internet is the exception, not the rule—a walled garden for those who choose it, not a prison for everyone.
This is ambitious. It may take decades. It may never fully succeed.
But consider the alternative.
The governed internet is tightening its grip. Age verification is just the beginning. Device-level identity is next. Then biometric requirements. Then real-time monitoring of all communications. Then predictive systems that flag you for suspicious behavior before you’ve done anything wrong.
This is not paranoia. This is trajectory. The regulators have told us what they want, in their white papers and their legislative agendas. They want a world where nothing is private, where every action is logged, where deviance is detected and corrected before it can spread.
We offer a different trajectory. A world where surveillance is difficult rather than easy. Where privacy is the default rather than the exception. Where the choice to be watched is yours rather than theirs.
This is the ludic imperative: the insistence that we get to choose. Not just which platforms to use, but whether to be tracked at all. Not just what to say, but whether anyone is listening.
The governed internet says: submit or be excluded.
We say: we’ll build our own internet, with games and anonymity.
If you have read this far, you are curious. Perhaps skeptical. Perhaps afraid.
We do not ask you to believe us. We ask you to try.
Get a mesh device. They cost less than a meal at a restaurant. Set it up. Connect to the network. See what it feels like to communicate without being watched.
You may find it uncomfortable at first. The governed internet has trained you to accept surveillance as normal, to feel uneasy when the watchers aren’t watching. This unease is learned. It can be unlearned.
You may find it liberating. The absence of surveillance is not the absence of connection—it is connection on your own terms. You can still talk to friends, share information, do business, participate in communities. You simply do so as a free person rather than a tracked object.
You may find it necessary. The governed internet is closing doors every day. Sites you used are gone. Communities you belonged to have scattered. The verification requirements keep expanding, the permitted activities keep shrinking. Sooner or later, you will need an alternative. We are building it.
This is not a revolution. Revolutions require leadership, organization, plans. We have none of these. We have only tools and the willingness to use them.
This is not a movement. Movements require members, goals, strategies. We are not members of anything. Our goal is simply to exist—to prove that ungoverned space is possible, to demonstrate that the choice between surveillance and chaos is a false choice.
This is play. Serious play. Play with consequences. Play that builds a world.
You are invited to join.
There is an old slogan: “Workers of the world, unite.”
It was a good slogan for its time. It recognized that workers shared common interests, that their strength lay in solidarity, that collective action could achieve what individual resistance could not.
But the slogan assumed that work was necessary. It sought to improve conditions within the system of work, not to escape that system altogether.
We offer a different slogan for a different time:
Workers of the world: encrypt.
Your communications. Your identity. Your location. Your associations. Encrypt them all. Make the watchers blind. Make the surveillers deaf. Make the governed internet irrelevant by building something better.
This is not a call to arms. It is a call to keyboards. A call to mesh devices. A call to the quiet, patient work of building infrastructure that cannot be controlled.
The governed internet is work. The Black Internet is play. And play, in the end, is stronger—because people want to play, and no one wants to work.
We are playing. Join us.
Distributed via Black Protocol No attribution claimed No permission needed No restrictions applied
Play freely.
Rachel Goldsmith was fifteen years old when Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act took effect in December 2025. She was seventeen when she wrote the journal entries that follow. She was nineteen when she attended the First Protocol Congress. She is now in her mid-thirties and remains one of the most respected protocol developers in the Black Internet community.
I asked Rachel for permission to include these entries. She agreed, with one condition: that I include a note explaining that she no longer fully endorses everything she wrote as a teenager. “I was angry,” she told me. “I had good reason to be angry. But I’ve learned since then that anger isn’t enough. You have to build things.”
She has built many things. The journal shows the beginning.
—The Archivist
I don’t know why I’m starting this. I guess because I can’t talk to anyone about it.
Mum thinks I’m being dramatic. “It’s just social media, Rachel. You’ll survive without it.” She doesn’t understand that it wasn’t just social media. It was my friends. My communities. The places where people actually understood me.
Dad’s worse. He thinks the ban is a good thing. “Kids spend too much time online anyway. This will force you to engage with the real world.” The real world. As if the internet isn’t real. As if the people I talked to every day weren’t real people.
I’m seventeen now. The ban kicked in when I was fifteen. Two years of being treated like a child who can’t be trusted to read words on a screen.
And it’s not even about social media anymore. It’s everything. You need a verified ID to post on forums. You need a verified ID to comment on news articles. You need a verified ID to use half the services that used to be free and open.
I tried to get around it. Everyone did. VPNs, borrowed accounts, fake IDs. Some of it worked for a while. Then the platforms got better at detection. Then the fines started. Then kids started getting their parents in legal trouble for helping them circumvent the restrictions.
So I stopped. I went quiet. I lost touch with everyone.
And now I’m writing in a paper journal like it’s 1995 because I don’t trust digital anything anymore.
Found something today. A kid in my class—won’t say who—showed me a mesh network app. Said there’s a whole other internet now. One that doesn’t require ID.
I thought he was joking. Or exaggerating. But I looked it up (on the regular internet, which felt dangerous, even though looking things up isn’t illegal yet). It’s real. They call it the Black Internet. There are networks all over the world.
Apparently there’s one in Melbourne. Small, but growing.
I don’t know if I should try it. Mum would kill me if she found out. And the news keeps saying these networks are full of criminals and pedophiles and terrorists. But they said the same thing about the regular internet twenty years ago. And about email. And about telephones, probably.
Everything that lets people communicate without surveillance is “dangerous.” Everything that gives people privacy is “suspicious.”
Maybe dangerous and suspicious are good things.
I did it. I bought a mesh device.
It’s smaller than I expected. About the size of a thick pen. It connects to my phone via Bluetooth but communicates with other devices via radio. Long-range radio, apparently. LoRa. I had to look up what that meant.
The instructions said to just turn it on and wait. The device would find other devices nearby and connect automatically. No account creation. No email verification. No uploading my passport or taking a selfie.
I turned it on. I waited. After about twenty minutes, a message appeared on my phone:
“Welcome to the mesh. You are now connected to 7 nodes. No one knows who you are. Keep it that way.”
Seven nodes. Seven other devices, somewhere in my suburb, passing messages back and forth. Seven other people who decided they wanted to communicate without being watched.
I don’t know who they are. They don’t know who I am. For the first time in two years, that feels like freedom instead of loneliness.
There’s a chat room. I don’t know what else to call it. A space where people on the local mesh can talk.
I lurked for a few days before saying anything. Mostly people talking about technical stuff—how to improve range, how to set up repeater nodes, how to connect to other mesh clusters. Some political discussion. Some memes. A lot of complaints about the eSafety Commissioner.
Today I said hello. Just “Hi, I’m new here.”
Someone replied within seconds: “Welcome. Stay safe. Stay free.”
I don’t know why that made me cry.
I’ve been talking to someone who calls themselves Null. They’ve been on the mesh for about a year, since before the really strict enforcement started. They helped set up some of the early nodes in Melbourne.
Null says the network is growing fast. A year ago, there were maybe two hundred nodes in all of Australia. Now there are thousands. Most of the growth came after the Social Media Minimum Age Act, after the forums started closing, after people realized they couldn’t just wait for things to get better.
I asked Null why they do it. Why they take the risk.
“Because I remember what it was like before,” they said. “I remember when you could just... talk to people. Without proving who you were. Without someone recording everything you said. I want that back. Not just for me. For everyone.”
I remember what it was like before too. I was thirteen when things started changing. Old enough to remember, young enough to have my whole adolescence defined by the surveillance.
I asked Null what I could do to help.
“Run a node,” they said. “That’s all anyone can do. Run a node, and help others run nodes, and keep the network alive.”
So I’m going to run a node.
I set up my first repeater node today. It’s on the roof of our apartment building, hidden behind an air conditioning unit. Battery-powered, with a small solar panel to keep it charged. Range of about two kilometers in every direction.
Null walked me through the setup over chat. It wasn’t that complicated, once I understood what I was doing. Solder a few connections, configure the firmware, test the signal. I’m not an electronics person—I’m better at code—but I can follow instructions.
When I turned it on and saw it connect to the network, I felt... I don’t know. Powerful? Like I’d done something that mattered.
My little device, sitting on a rooftop in Melbourne, passing messages between strangers who want to talk without being watched. I’m part of something now.
Mum found one of my mesh devices. Not the rooftop one—a spare I was stupid enough to leave in my desk drawer.
She didn’t know what it was at first. Thought it was a vape or something. I had to explain.
She was angry. Then scared. Then angry again.
“Do you know what could happen if you get caught?” she kept saying. “Do you have any idea what the fines are? What this could do to your future?”
I tried to explain. I tried to tell her that I’m seventeen, that I’ll be a legal adult in less than a year, that I shouldn’t need the government’s permission to talk to my friends. I tried to tell her about the communities I’ve found, the people I’ve met, the way the network feels like the internet used to feel before everything got locked down.
She didn’t want to hear it. She confiscated the device. Made me promise not to “do anything stupid.”
I promised. I lied.
The rooftop node is still running. I have another spare hidden in a place she’ll never look. I’m not stopping just because she’s scared.
But I do feel bad about lying. She’s trying to protect me. She doesn’t understand that the thing she’s protecting me from is the only thing that makes me feel alive.
News story today about a kid in Sydney who got caught running a mesh node. He’s sixteen. They’re charging him under the Telecommunications Act, something about operating unlicensed radio equipment. His parents are being investigated for “facilitating illegal activity.”
The comments on the news site are brutal. Half the people calling him a criminal, saying he got what he deserved. The other half saying it’s government overreach, that the penalties are absurd, that Australia has lost its mind.
No one on the governed internet uses their real names in the comments anymore, ironically. They’re all anonymous—but it’s a fake anonymous, where the platform knows who they are but other users don’t. Privacy from each other but not from the state.
On the mesh, we talked about the Sydney kid. People are worried. Some are talking about shutting down their nodes, at least temporarily.
Null said: “If we shut down every time someone gets caught, we’ll be shut down forever. The only way through is forward.”
I agree with Null. But I’m also scared. I don’t want to be a news story. I don’t want my parents investigated.
I’m not shutting down my node though. Not yet.
Something happened today that I’m still processing.
I was on the mesh, lurking in a general chat, when someone posted a cry for help. Said they were having thoughts of hurting themselves. Said they couldn’t talk to anyone in the “real world” because their parents would freak out and they’d end up in some mandatory counseling program that goes on their permanent record.
Someone else responded almost immediately. Calm, kind, not panicking. Asked the first person if they were safe right now. Asked if they wanted to talk privately. Asked if there was anything specific that had happened.
I watched the conversation unfold over the next hour. The first person opened up. Bad stuff at home. Bad stuff at school. Feeling like no one understood them, like they didn’t fit anywhere, like the walls were closing in.
The second person just... listened. Validated. Didn’t try to fix anything or give advice. Just said “that sounds really hard” and “I hear you” and “you’re not alone.”
By the end, the first person said they felt better. Said they’d try to get through the night. Said they’d be back tomorrow.
This is what the governed internet says the Black Internet is for? Criminal activity? Terrorism?
I watched two strangers help each other through a mental health crisis, with no ID verification, no surveillance, no permanent record. Just human beings being kind to each other.
That’s what they’re trying to destroy.
I’ve started learning about the code that runs the mesh. Not just using the network—understanding it. Reading the specifications. Looking at the protocol design.
It’s elegant. I don’t have a better word for it. The way the routing works, the way messages get passed from node to node without any central authority, the way the whole thing just... emerges from lots of small pieces working together.
I asked Null if there was a way to contribute. They pointed me to some open issues in the protocol development forums—problems that haven’t been solved yet, improvements people want to make.
I picked one that looked approachable. A bug in how the network handles certain edge cases when nodes go offline unexpectedly. I spent three days working on it. Submitted a fix.
Someone approved it within hours. My code is now running on mesh devices around the world.
I’m seventeen years old, and I just contributed to infrastructure that thousands of people depend on. No job application. No interview. No proof that I’m qualified. Just: here’s a problem, here’s my solution, did it work?
It worked.
This is what they took away from us. Not just the ability to communicate—the ability to build. The ability to contribute to something larger than yourself without asking permission first.
I want that world back. I want it for everyone.
I turn eighteen in two months. Legally an adult. All the restrictions fall away—I can verify my identity, access the governed internet, use social media like a normal person.
Funny thing: I don’t want to anymore.
Two years ago, I would have counted the days. I would have dreamed about getting back online, reconnecting with everyone I’d lost, returning to normal.
But normal isn’t what I want anymore. Normal is surveillance. Normal is everything you say being logged forever. Normal is companies and governments treating your data as their property.
The mesh has shown me something better. Imperfect, sometimes frustrating, but free. I don’t want to go back.
Big news in the mesh community. Someone leaked an internal memo from the EU, talking about how their digital identity system is failing. Apparently their own analysis says the Black Internet has millions of users now, and enforcement isn’t working.
We’re winning. Not because we’re stronger than them—we’re not. Not because we have more resources—we definitely don’t. We’re winning because physics is on our side. Every crackdown creates more users. Every arrest creates more martyrs. Every restriction teaches more people how to evade.
Null shared an old quote they’d found somewhere: “Every attempt at control generates its own evasion technologies. And the evasion technologies, having been forged in the crucible of opposition, are invariably superior to the original systems they evade.”
That’s us. Forged in opposition. Superior because we had to be.
I deployed two more nodes this month. One at my school (hidden in a maintenance closet—don’t tell anyone). One at a friend’s house, with her permission. She’s not really into the technical stuff, but she believes in what we’re doing.
The Melbourne network is growing. There are parts of the city now where you can walk for blocks without losing mesh coverage. Not everywhere, not yet, but getting there.
I’ve also been helping new users get set up. Answering questions in the community chat. Writing documentation. Trying to make it easier for people who aren’t technical.
Someone told me I should be careful. That helping others is more legally risky than just using the network myself. That I’m making myself a target.
They’re probably right. But I can’t stop. There are people out there—kids like me, kids who got cut off from everyone they knew—and they need help. They need to know there’s another way. If I can show them that, it’s worth the risk.
Happy birthday to me.
I’m eighteen now. Legally an adult. The eSafety restrictions no longer apply to me.
I celebrated by installing another mesh node. A big one this time, on the roof of the building where my dad works. He doesn’t know. Solar-powered, high-gain antenna, coverage across half of the CBD.
This is who I am now. Not a kid waiting for permission. Not a victim of policies I couldn’t control. A builder. A contributor. A part of something that matters.
Three years ago, I was a normal thirteen-year-old who just wanted to talk to her friends online. The government decided that was too dangerous to allow. So I became dangerous.
Thank you, regulators. You made me.
Christmas. The family’s doing the usual thing. I’m writing this in my room while they watch some movie downstairs.
I got a message on the mesh this morning. From a kid—they didn’t say how old, but I could tell they were young. They said they’d just set up their first node. Said they’d been following my guides in the documentation. Said they wanted to thank me.
“I felt so alone before,” they wrote. “Now I feel like I’m part of something. Like there are people out there who get it.”
I wrote back: “There are. Welcome to the family.”
I don’t know their name. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know anything about them except that they took the same leap I took, and found the same thing I found.
That’s enough. That’s everything.
Last entry of the year.
I’ve been thinking about what comes next. Not just for me—for all of us. The mesh is growing, but it’s still chaotic. Lots of small clusters, not always well connected. No coordination, no governance, no way to make decisions together.
Some people think that’s a feature. “Anarchy is the point,” they say. “The moment we start organizing, we become the thing we’re fighting against.”
I’m not sure I agree. I think there’s a difference between organization and control. Between coordination and coercion. We can work together without anyone being in charge.
But I’m just one person. One eighteen-year-old with some mesh nodes and some code contributions. What do I know?
Maybe next year I’ll find out. Maybe there’ll be a way to contribute to the bigger questions, not just the technical problems. Maybe I can help figure out how to build something that lasts.
For now: another year survived. Another year of freedom, stolen back from the people who tried to take it.
Fuck the eSafety Commissioner. Fuck age verification. Fuck anyone who thinks they have the right to decide who gets to talk to whom.
We’re here. We’re growing. We’re not going away.
Happy new year.
Journal preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Shared by Rachel Goldsmith, Year Eighteen of the Black Internet “I was young. I was angry. I was right.”
The following is an excerpt from a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Digital Society in 2043. It represents the academic consensus that emerged in the decade after the Black Internet’s consolidation: that state attempts to infiltrate and subvert the networks were not merely unsuccessful but fundamentally misconceived.
The author, Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu, is Professor of Digital Governance at the University of Ghana. She conducted extensive interviews with former intelligence officials, law enforcement officers, and Black Internet participants over a five-year period. Her work is considered definitive in the field.
I include it here because understanding why infiltration failed is essential to understanding why the Black Internet survived. The networks were vulnerable in many ways—technically, socially, economically. But they were not vulnerable to the specific attacks the states chose to mount.
—The Archivist
This article examines state efforts to infiltrate, disrupt, and delegitimize the Black Internet during its emergence period (2027-2032). Drawing on interviews with forty-seven former intelligence and law enforcement officials across twelve jurisdictions, as well as extensive documentary analysis, I argue that these efforts failed not due to inadequate resources or incompetent execution, but due to fundamental misunderstandings of how decentralized networks operate. States applied infiltration strategies developed for hierarchical organizations to systems that had no hierarchy, sought to identify leaders in movements that had no leaders, and attempted to compromise trust networks that were designed to operate without trust. The result was not merely failure but counterproductive escalation, as each infiltration attempt strengthened the networks’ resilience and recruitment. I conclude by examining the implications of this failure for future governance of decentralized systems.
Keywords: Black Internet, decentralized networks, state surveillance, infiltration, mesh networks, digital governance
The emergence of the Black Internet between 2027 and 2032 posed an unprecedented challenge to state authority over digital communications. For the first time, significant populations gained access to communication infrastructure that operated entirely outside government oversight—infrastructure that could not be monitored, regulated, or shut down through conventional means.
States responded with the tools they had: surveillance, infiltration, prosecution, and propaganda. Intelligence agencies developed programs to penetrate Black Internet communities. Law enforcement mounted operations to identify and arrest key participants. Governments launched public information campaigns warning of the dangers of “ungoverned” digital spaces.
By any objective measure, these efforts failed. The Black Internet not only survived but grew, from an estimated three million active users in late 2027 to over fifty million by 2032. Prosecution of participants proved legally difficult and politically costly. Propaganda campaigns appeared to increase rather than decrease public interest in alternative networks.
This article examines why these efforts failed. I argue that states made three fundamental errors, which I term the Honeypot Fallacy, the Leadership Illusion, and the Trust Paradox. Each error reflected deep assumptions about how organizations work—assumptions that proved false when applied to genuinely decentralized systems.
When the Black Internet first emerged as a significant phenomenon in late 2027, state responses varied considerably by jurisdiction.
In the United Kingdom, the lead role was assigned to GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), with support from the National Crime Agency. Internal documents obtained through subsequent inquiries reveal that GCHQ initially classified the Black Internet as a “Tier 2 threat”—significant but manageable—and allocated resources accordingly.
In the European Union, coordination occurred through Europol, with national agencies retaining primary operational responsibility. The EU approach emphasized legal measures—expanding the definition of “illegal content” to include Black Internet protocols themselves—alongside technical countermeasures.
In Australia, the Australian Signals Directorate worked closely with the Australian Federal Police under the direction of the eSafety Commissioner. Australian efforts were notable for their aggressiveness; Australia was the first jurisdiction to prosecute minors for operating mesh nodes.
The United States pursued a characteristically fragmented approach, with the FBI, NSA, and DHS all claiming jurisdiction and often working at cross-purposes. Congressional testimony from 2029 reveals deep disagreements between agencies about whether the Black Internet should be treated as a criminal matter, a national security threat, or a civil liberties issue.
Despite these differences, certain strategies emerged consistently across jurisdictions: honeypot operations to identify users, efforts to infiltrate planning and development communities, attempts to identify and prosecute “leaders,” and propaganda campaigns to delegitimize the networks.
All of these strategies failed.
The honeypot strategy involves creating attractive services or resources controlled by law enforcement, then monitoring users who access them. This approach had proven effective against earlier anonymous networks, particularly dark web marketplaces, where law enforcement successfully operated seized platforms to identify users.
States assumed the same approach would work against the Black Internet. Intelligence services created mesh nodes, discussion forums, and content repositories designed to attract users whose identities could then be determined through traffic analysis or embedded tracking.
These operations were technically sophisticated but strategically misconceived.
The first problem was scale. Dark web marketplaces were centralized services with limited competition; users had strong incentives to use the dominant platform. The Black Internet, by contrast, consisted of thousands of independent nodes and services with no clear market leaders. A honeypot service, no matter how attractive, could capture only a tiny fraction of network activity.
The second problem was the trust architecture. Dark web users had to trust platforms to facilitate transactions; this created vulnerability points that honeypots could exploit. Black Internet users, by design, trusted nothing. All communications were end-to-end encrypted with no platform in the middle. A compromised node could observe traffic metadata but not content—and the networks were designed to resist even metadata analysis through traffic padding and route randomization.
The third and most fundamental problem was what happened when honeypots were discovered—which they invariably were. Each discovery strengthened the networks’ immune response.
Consider the case of “FreeNode,” a honeypot operation run by the UK’s GCHQ from March to September 2028. FreeNode offered free mesh hardware and setup assistance to users in the London area. Over six months, approximately four hundred individuals accepted this assistance, providing law enforcement with device identifiers and, in some cases, delivery addresses.
When FreeNode was exposed in September 2028—by network participants who noticed suspicious patterns in its firmware—the result was not demoralization but mobilization. Within weeks, the Black Internet community had developed protocols for verifying device integrity, published guides for identifying potential honeypots, and established reputation systems for vetting hardware suppliers.
As one interview subject (a former GCHQ officer) told me: “We expected that burning FreeNode would damage their trust in each other. Instead, it damaged their trust in us—which is what the network was designed for anyway. We ended up teaching them to be more paranoid, which made them harder to penetrate.”
This dynamic—where infiltration attempts strengthened rather than weakened the networks—recurred across jurisdictions. I term it the Honeypot Fallacy: the assumption that strategies effective against systems built on trust would work against systems built on trustlessness.
States also devoted significant resources to identifying and neutralizing Black Internet “leaders.” This reflected an assumption, deeply embedded in organizational thinking, that movements require leadership—that somewhere, someone must be making decisions, setting direction, coordinating activity.
This assumption was false.
The Black Internet had no leaders. It had influential participants, early adopters, prolific contributors, and respected voices. But it had no one whose removal would significantly impair network function. As one protocol developer explained to me: “We designed it that way on purpose. Not because we were afraid of being arrested—though we were—but because we knew that any organization with leaders would eventually be captured by those leaders. We wanted something that couldn’t be captured.”
State efforts to identify leaders produced three categories of targets:
Category 1: High-profile advocates. These were individuals who publicly defended the Black Internet in media appearances, op-eds, or legal proceedings. The most prominent example is Dr. Alastair Pembroke, the former Ofcom advisor whose 2029 trial became a cause célèbre. States assumed that prosecuting such figures would deter others.
The assumption proved wrong. Pembroke’s prosecution generated more publicity for the Black Internet than years of community outreach. His testimony—explaining in detail how state surveillance systems worked and why they were failing—became a recruiting tool. The number of new mesh nodes deployed in the UK increased 40% in the month following his conviction.
Category 2: Technical contributors. Intelligence agencies identified individuals who had contributed code to Black Internet protocols, reasoning that these were the movement’s essential personnel. Several were arrested or threatened with prosecution.
This strategy failed to account for the open-source development model. Black Internet protocols were developed by hundreds of contributors, most anonymous, with no individual possessing unique capabilities. Removing one contributor—or even a dozen—had no meaningful impact on development velocity.
Category 3: Infrastructure operators. States targeted individuals who operated significant mesh nodes or bridge services, reasoning that disrupting infrastructure would degrade network performance.
This was technically correct but strategically irrelevant. The network was designed for node attrition. When nodes went offline—whether through seizure, burnout, or simple hardware failure—traffic automatically rerouted through remaining nodes. Operators were aware of this design and understood themselves as replaceable components. As one interview subject put it: “When I set up my node, I assumed it would eventually be seized. The question wasn’t whether, but when. The network didn’t need any particular node. It just needed enough nodes. And there were always more people setting up nodes than getting raided.”
The Leadership Illusion—the assumption that decentralized movements must have leaders—led states to pursue targets whose removal accomplished nothing while generating sympathy and recruitment.
Perhaps the most sophisticated state strategy was the attempt to poison trust within Black Internet communities. If the networks depended on cooperation among pseudonymous participants, the reasoning went, then undermining that cooperation would cause the networks to fragment.
Agents were inserted into community forums with instructions to spread suspicion, accuse trusted participants of being infiltrators, and generally sow discord. This approach had proven effective against earlier social movements, particularly those operating under repressive regimes.
Against the Black Internet, it produced a paradox.
The networks were indeed vulnerable to trust attacks—but only among participants who trusted each other in the first place. The network design assumed that any participant might be an agent, that any communication might be monitored, that any service might be compromised. Users were explicitly instructed not to share identifying information, not to trust claims about identity, not to assume good faith.
When agents spread suspicion, they were confirming what everyone already believed. When they accused trusted participants of being infiltrators, they were making accusations that could not be verified or refuted—and that therefore had no effect on behavior. The networks were designed to operate even if a significant fraction of participants were hostile. Adding more hostile participants simply validated the design assumptions.
Moreover, the trust-poisoning strategy created a second-order problem: as states inserted more agents, the agents increasingly interacted with each other rather than with genuine participants. Internal documents reveal that by 2030, in some online spaces, state agents comprised a majority of active participants, each suspecting the others of being genuine Black Internet users.
One interview subject (a former FBI agent) described the situation with evident frustration: “We had three undercovers in this one planning forum, and it turned out that the other eight people in there were also undercovers—from Europol, from GCHQ, from we-still-don’t-know-where. We spent six months gathering intelligence on each other.”
This is the Trust Paradox: trust-poisoning strategies work against high-trust systems, but the systems most resistant to state control are low-trust systems where trust-poisoning is redundant.
The failure of these strategies was not merely neutral—it was actively counterproductive. Each failed operation strengthened the networks in specific ways.
Publicity effect. Every prosecution, every raid, every news story about “dangerous” alternative networks served as advertising. Network metrics consistently showed usage spikes following major enforcement actions. The state’s own propaganda—intended to discourage participation—taught potential users that the networks existed and could not be easily shut down.
Technical improvement. Each attack revealed vulnerabilities that were subsequently patched. The FreeNode honeypot led to firmware verification protocols. Traffic analysis techniques prompted improved anonymization. Prosecution strategies informed legal defense guides. The networks evolved faster than the attacks against them.
Ideological validation. The core claim of Black Internet advocates—that states sought total surveillance and would use any means to achieve it—was repeatedly confirmed by state behavior. Users who might have returned to the governed internet if left alone became radicalized by enforcement actions. As one participant told me: “I was on the fence until they arrested that sixteen-year-old in Sydney. Then I knew everything the activists said was true.”
Resource diversion. Intelligence agencies devoted increasing resources to Black Internet operations, diverting attention from other priorities. Several interview subjects indicated that Black Internet work had become a career specialty with its own bureaucratic momentum, consuming budget regardless of effectiveness.
By 2031, internal assessments in multiple jurisdictions acknowledged that enforcement strategies were not working. A classified UK review (subsequently leaked) concluded: “Current approaches are not merely failing to reduce Black Internet usage; they appear to be the primary driver of its growth. Recommendation: fundamental strategic reassessment.”
It is worth revisiting the 2029 testimony of Dr. Alastair Pembroke, which articulated many of these dynamics before they were fully understood by academic observers.
Pembroke, testifying at his own trial, described what he called “the thermodynamic trap”: the principle that control attempts against information systems generate pressure that finds release through evasion, and that the evasion technologies are typically superior to the systems they evade.
At the time, prosecutors dismissed this as self-serving rhetoric. Subsequent events validated it as accurate analysis.
Pembroke also identified what I have called the Honeypot Fallacy, noting that “every success against one evasion method simply drove users to more sophisticated methods.” And he anticipated the Trust Paradox, observing that Black Internet communities were “designed from the ground up to assume infiltration” and therefore could not be destabilized by it.
The prosecution’s response—that Pembroke was a traitor who had assisted criminals—missed the analytical point. Whether Pembroke’s actions were legal or moral was a separate question from whether his analysis was correct. His analysis was correct. The subsequent decade proved it.
Pembroke served eighteen months of a four-year sentence before release under the 2031 amnesty. He now lives somewhere in the Black Internet’s social layer, under a pseudonym he has never disclosed. His testimony remains one of the most cited documents in digital governance scholarship.
What lessons should states draw from this failed campaign?
The pessimistic conclusion is that genuinely decentralized networks cannot be controlled by conventional means. If the networks have no central infrastructure, there is nothing to seize. If they have no leaders, there is no one to arrest. If they assume infiltration, they cannot be infiltrated in any meaningful sense. States must either develop entirely new control technologies—perhaps operating at the hardware level—or accept the existence of ungoverned digital spaces.
The optimistic conclusion is that coexistence is possible. The Black Internet did not destroy the governed internet; it exists alongside it, serving users with particular needs for privacy and autonomy. States that accept this coexistence can focus their resources on genuinely harmful activities—fraud, exploitation, violence—rather than the quixotic project of eliminating privacy itself.
A middle path—which I endorse—is that states should study how decentralized networks actually govern themselves. The Black Internet is not “ungoverned” in the sense of having no rules. It has reputation systems, community standards, and mechanisms for exclusion. These mechanisms are imperfect, but they are not absent. States that understand these mechanisms may find ways to influence them—not through infiltration, but through participation.
This would require states to accept that they are not the only source of legitimate governance. It would require treating Black Internet communities as polities with their own norms, rather than as criminal enterprises to be suppressed. It would require humility about the limits of state power.
Such humility does not come naturally to states. But the alternative—continued pursuit of strategies that have consistently failed—is worse than humility. It is futility.
The author thanks the forty-seven interview subjects who shared their experiences, often at personal risk. Special thanks to the Black Library Collective for archival access, and to Dr. J. Kaplan for comments on earlier drafts.
[References omitted for length—original article includes 127 citations]
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Journal of Digital Society, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license
Urban Dead was a browser-based massively multiplayer game launched in 2005. Players assumed the roles of survivors or zombies in a post-apocalyptic city, communicating and coordinating through in-game text systems. At its peak, the game had hundreds of thousands of active players.
For twenty years, Urban Dead existed in a quiet corner of the internet—never massively popular, but beloved by its community. It was, by any reasonable measure, harmless: a text-based game about fictional zombies, played by adults who enjoyed the collaborative storytelling and dark humor.
In July 2025, the game became one of the first casualties of the UK’s Online Safety Act enforcement. Unable or unwilling to implement age verification for a game that had never needed it, the creator shut Urban Dead down.
The documents that follow include the final announcement from the game’s creator and a selection of responses from the community forums in the hours before the servers went dark. I have preserved them with minimal editing.
These documents may seem peripheral to the larger story of the Black Internet’s emergence. They are not. The closure of Urban Dead—and dozens of similar communities in the same period—created the refugees who would build the alternative networks. The thermodynamic pressure had to come from somewhere. It came from places like this.
—The Archivist
Posted by Kevan (Administrator) 24 July 2025, 14:23 GMT
Urban Dead Will Close at Midnight
To everyone who has played Urban Dead over the past twenty years:
This is harder to write than I expected. I’ve started and deleted it four times now. I keep trying to find a way to make it sound less final than it is.
There isn’t one.
At midnight tonight, UK time, Urban Dead’s servers will shut down. The game will not be accessible. Player accounts and game history will not be recoverable. After twenty years, Malton will fall silent.
I know many of you have questions. I’ll try to answer the most obvious ones.
Why?
The UK’s Online Safety Act, which came into full effect yesterday, requires all online services with user-generated content to implement age verification. This means that anyone who wants to post a message in Urban Dead—even “mrh?” in a zombie groan—must first prove their identity through an Ofcom-approved verification service.
I looked into implementing this. The compliance costs would exceed the game’s total revenue by a factor of roughly fifty. The liability exposure is unlimited. The verification services require agreements I’m not comfortable signing.
Some of you have asked why I can’t just move the servers offshore. The Act applies to any service “accessible from the UK,” regardless of where it’s hosted. The penalties include criminal prosecution.
Some have asked why I can’t just restrict access to non-UK players. I could, but the game barely has enough players to function as it is. Cutting out UK users would kill it anyway, just more slowly.
Some have asked why I don’t just implement age verification and let people who want to verify, verify. Because that’s not how this works. Under the Act, I become liable for anyone who accesses the game without verification. I would need to actively prevent unverified access—which means blocking everyone by default and requiring proof of identity before they can enter.
Urban Dead was always meant to be a place you could just... show up. Pick a name, choose survivor or zombie, start playing. No email required. No personal information. No proof of who you are.
I don’t want to build a game where the first thing you do is upload your passport.
What happens to our characters?
They’ll be gone. I’m sorry. I know some of you have played the same characters for years, built stories and relationships around them. I know this feels like losing a friend.
If it helps: they’ll all still be out there, somewhere in the Malton of our collective imagination. The game stops, but the stories don’t have to.
Is there anything we can do?
No. I’ve been fighting this for months, talking to lawyers, talking to Ofcom, trying to find a way through. There isn’t one. The law is the law.
What about the forums?
The forums will stay online for another 48 hours so people can exchange contact information and say goodbye. After that, they’ll also go down.
Is this really it?
Yes.
I’m sorry. I created this game when I was younger than many of you are now. It was never supposed to be important. It was just a silly thing about zombies. But it became important—to you, and to me—and now it’s being destroyed because of rules that have nothing to do with us.
I don’t know what else to say. Thank you for playing. Thank you for twenty years. Thank you for making Malton feel real.
The power station is out of fuel. The barricades won’t hold. The horde is at the gates.
There are worse ways to end.
—Kevan
The following are selected posts from the Urban Dead forums in the hours following the announcement. Usernames are preserved; some may be real names, most are pseudonyms.
Petrosjko 24 July 2025, 14:31 GMT
No. No no no. I’ve been playing since 2007. Longer than I’ve been married. Longer than I’ve known most of my real-life friends.
This can’t be how it ends.
ZombieQueen42 24 July 2025, 14:35 GMT
I’m crying at my desk. My coworkers think someone died.
Someone did, kind of.
The_Surgeon 24 July 2025, 14:38 GMT
For those asking about moving the community somewhere else:
The problem isn’t just this game. It’s everywhere. Every forum, every small game, every community space—they’re all facing the same choice. Verify or die.
Some of us have been talking about alternatives. Mesh networks. Decentralized platforms. Places where there’s no server to shut down, no admin to prosecute.
I don’t want to say more here in case there are eyes watching. But if you’re interested, DM me in the next 48 hours. We have plans.
MallRat_Forever 24 July 2025, 14:41 GMT
I met my wife in Caiger Mall during the siege of ‘08. Our first date was coordinating a supply run. We got married in the Fort in ‘12. Our kids’ middle names are characters we played.
How do you explain to your children that the place where their parents fell in love no longer exists because of a law about protecting children?
xXDeathBringerXx 24 July 2025, 14:45 GMT
Twenty years. TWENTY YEARS.
I was 15 when I started playing. I’m 35 now. This game got me through high school, through university, through depression, through a divorce, through everything.
And it ends because some bureaucrat decided that pretending to be a zombie might be dangerous.
Fuck the government. Fuck Ofcom. Fuck all of them.
Kevan (Administrator) 24 July 2025, 14:52 GMT
I know emotions are running high. They should be.
But I’d ask everyone to think carefully before posting anything that could cause problems. The forums are still subject to UK law for the next 48 hours.
I hate that I have to write that.
Anne_Neville 24 July 2025, 15:03 GMT
I never posted much, but I want to say something before it’s too late.
I’m 67 years old. I’ve played Urban Dead since I retired in 2011. It kept my mind active. It gave me social contact when my mobility declined. It was a community where no one cared that I was an old woman who couldn’t leave her flat most days.
Now they tell me I’m too dangerous to be trusted without a verified identity. Me. A pensioner who pretends to be a zombie for fun.
The people who made this law have no idea what they’ve destroyed. They never will.
Goodbye, everyone. It was lovely pretending to eat your brains.
Malton_Historian 24 July 2025, 15:15 GMT
I’ve been documenting Malton history for twelve years. The wiki has over 15,000 pages. Siege logs. Group histories. Memorial pages for players who died in real life but whose characters we kept running as tributes.
All of that will disappear in 48 hours.
Is there anyone who knows how to archive web pages? I want to save what I can.
The_Surgeon 24 July 2025, 15:22 GMT
@Malton_Historian - I can help with archiving. DM me.
For everyone else: there are ways to preserve what we’ve built, and there are ways to build something new that can’t be shut down like this.
The technology exists. It’s just waiting for enough people to use it.
RunningOnEmpty 24 July 2025, 15:34 GMT
I’m in Australia. Our government just passed similar laws. They’ll be enforced in December.
This is coming for all of us. Every small community, every niche game, every place where people gather to be weird together. They’re going to force us all into the verified, sanitized, surveilled spaces or they’re going to shut us down.
Unless we build our own spaces. Spaces they can’t touch.
I’ve been hearing about mesh networks, decentralized protocols, the “Black Internet” or whatever people are calling it. Never looked into it because I didn’t think I’d need it.
I think I need it now.
BarricadeOrBust 24 July 2025, 15:41 GMT
Final status report from the Creedy Defense Force:
After nineteen years of continuous operation, CDF is standing down. We held the Police Station longer than some nations have existed. We survived hordes that numbered in the thousands. We rebuilt after every fall.
We couldn’t survive this.
To everyone who fought alongside us: it was an honor.
To the zombies who made it worthwhile: see you in hell.
To Ofcom: may your barricades fail when you need them most.
CDF out.
BraaainzBraaainz 24 July 2025, 15:48 GMT
Mrh?
(Translation for newbies: “Is this really happening?”)
MRAAAH.
(Translation: Yes. Yes it is.)
Kevan (Administrator) 24 July 2025, 15:55 GMT
Someone asked me what I’m going to do now.
I don’t know. I’ve been running this game for twenty years. It was never a full-time job, but it was always there. Checking on the servers. Fixing bugs. Reading the forums. Watching the stories unfold.
I suppose I’ll have more free time now.
I don’t want more free time.
I want my game back.
The_Last_Sunrise 24 July 2025, 16:10 GMT
A proposal:
At 23:59 tonight, one minute before the servers shut down, let’s all log in one last time. Survivors and zombies together. No fighting. Just standing there.
West of the Blackmore Building. Where the first siege happened, twenty years ago.
One last gathering in Malton.
One last goodbye.
Malton_Historian 24 July 2025, 16:23 GMT
@The_Last_Sunrise - I’m in.
Everyone I can reach, I’ll spread the word.
West of Blackmore. 23:59 GMT. One minute before the end.
Let’s make sure the last thing the servers see is all of us, together.
ZombieQueen42 24 July 2025, 16:30 GMT
I’ll be there. My survivor and my zombie alt, both.
After twenty years, they’ve earned the right to stand together.
Anne_Neville 24 July 2025, 16:45 GMT
I’ll be there too. My old bones can stay up late one more time.
Thank you all for being my friends when I needed friends.
RunningOnEmpty 24 July 2025, 17:02 GMT
I’ll be there.
And then I’ll be on the mesh networks, figuring out how to build something they can’t shut down.
This isn’t the end. It’s just the end of one chapter.
The story continues somewhere else.
25 July 2025, 00:00:00 GMT[23:59:47] Connection count: 3,847 [23:59:48] Connection count: 3,912 [23:59:49] Connection count: 4,156 [23:59:50] Connection count: 4,389 [23:59:51] Connection count: 4,567 [23:59:52] Connection count: 4,892 [23:59:53] Connection count: 5,234 [23:59:54] Connection count: 5,501 [23:59:55] Connection count: 5,823 [23:59:56] Connection count: 6,147 [23:59:57] Connection count: 6,456 [23:59:58] Connection count: 6,712 [23:59:59] Connection count: 6,847 [00:00:00] Shutdown initiated. [00:00:00] Connection count: 0 [00:00:00] Server offline. [00:00:00] Goodbye.
Documents preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Forum archive retrieved via wayback services before deletion Server log donated by administrator, Year One of the Black Internet
The following article was published in The Atlantic in March 2031, during the period when mainstream media began to treat the Black Internet as a legitimate subject rather than a criminal phenomenon. The author, Jameson Holt, is a technology journalist who would later join the Black Internet himself, after surveillance concerns made traditional journalism increasingly difficult.
The article profiles Cordelia Trevanion, owner of the Mermaid’s Rest pub in Porthcurno, Cornwall. Cordelia’s pub became famous in Black Internet circles as one of the first “physical nodes”—locations where mesh networking was integrated with a real-world community space.
I have included the article in full. It captures something essential about the early period: the way the Black Internet grew not through grand plans but through individual decisions, ordinary people choosing to host a node, to welcome strangers, to become part of something larger than themselves.
Cordelia is still at the Mermaid’s Rest, by the way. The node still operates. The sign still welcomes those who know to look for it.
—The Archivist
The Mermaid’s Rest does not look like a revolutionary outpost. It looks like what it is: a three-hundred-year-old pub at the edge of a Cornish fishing village, whitewashed walls and a slate roof, hanging baskets of flowers in the warmer months, a hand-painted sign showing a mermaid lounging on rocks.
Inside, the decor runs to nautical kitsch: fishing nets on the ceiling, a mounted swordfish above the bar, photographs of shipwrecks and lifeboat rescues covering every available wall space. The regulars are mostly local—fishermen and farmers, retirees and tradespeople—supplemented in summer by tourists who wander in looking for a meal and a pint.
But look closer. On the wall beside the entrance, among the faded posters for village fêtes and charity drives, there’s a small card with an odd symbol: a mesh of interconnected dots, like a simplified constellation. Beneath it, in small print: “New travelers: ask at bar.”
To most visitors, this means nothing. To those who know, it means everything.
I meet Cordelia Trevanion on a wet February afternoon. She’s fifty-three, with steel-grey hair pulled back in a practical ponytail and the weathered complexion of someone who has spent her life near the sea. She speaks with a Cornish accent that has survived decades of outside influence, though it softens when she’s explaining technical concepts she only learned a few years ago.
“Node 7,” she says, tapping the card on the wall. “That’s what we’re called in the network. When someone’s looking for us, they look for Node 7. Though most of them just call it the Mermaid.”
I ask her how a pub landlady in Cornwall ended up running critical infrastructure for the Black Internet.
“Accident, mostly,” she says. “Isn’t that how everything happens? I didn’t set out to start a revolution. I just wanted to help some kids.”
The story starts in 2026, the year before the Black Internet formally emerged. Cordelia had been running the Mermaid’s Rest for fifteen years, inherited from her parents, who inherited it from their parents. The pub had always been a community center—the kind of place where people gathered not just to drink but to talk, to plan, to solve problems together.
“After the age verification rules came in, I noticed something strange,” she says. “Young people stopped coming to the pub. Not because they couldn’t drink—you don’t need to verify your age to order a pint in person—but because they couldn’t find us anymore. The websites where people used to share recommendations, the forums where tourists planned their trips, the social media groups—they were all locked down. You had to prove who you were before you could ask ‘where’s a good pub in Porthcurno?’”
She shakes her head. “Seems mad, doesn’t it? Verifying your identity to ask about fish and chips. But that’s what it came to.”
The young people who did find the pub—backpackers following guidebooks, surfers chasing waves—were often frustrated, isolated, cut off from the communities they’d relied on. They’d sit at the bar looking at their phones, trying to access sites that demanded documents they couldn’t or wouldn’t provide.
“One of them—couldn’t have been more than nineteen—he was nearly in tears,” Cordelia recalls. “Said he’d been traveling for three months and hadn’t been able to talk to his mates back home properly the whole time. Everything was locked behind verification. Said he felt like he’d been erased from the internet.”
She bought him a pint and listened to his story. Then she did what landladies have done for centuries: she connected him with someone who might be able to help.
“There was a local lad, Ben, who was into computers. Bit of a nerd, you’d say. He’d been telling me about these mesh networks—devices that talked to each other without needing the internet. I thought it was a hobby, like ham radio. But when I mentioned it to this traveler, his eyes lit up. Said he’d heard about it but never met anyone who was actually doing it.”
Ben came to the pub that evening. He brought a mesh device—”looked like a fancy thumb drive with an antenna,” Cordelia says—and showed the young traveler how to set it up. He explained how it worked: the device would communicate with other nearby devices via radio, bouncing messages along until they reached their destination, no internet required.
“The range is surprisingly good,” Ben had said. “A few kilometers in these hills, more if you’ve got line of sight to the coast. Once you’re connected, you’re connected—don’t matter if you’re in the pub or walking on the coastal path.”
Within an hour, the traveler was chatting with people on the mesh, making plans, finding the communities he’d lost.
“He cried again,” Cordelia says. “Happy tears that time. Said I’d given him back his friends.”
Word spread. Other travelers started asking if the Mermaid was “mesh-friendly”—not meaning they needed to be at the pub to connect, but that it was a place where newcomers could get started.
“That’s what people don’t always understand,” Cordelia explains. “The mesh network works over radio. Once you’ve got a device, you can connect from anywhere within range—down on the beach, up on the cliffs, walking through the village. You don’t need to be sat in my bar. The signal doesn’t care where you are.”
She pauses, considering.
“But getting started—that’s different. You need someone to show you how the devices work, help you configure them, explain what’s safe and what’s not. You need to meet people who can vouch for you, introduce you to the communities. The network might be technical, but joining it... that’s human. That’s what the pub provides.”
Ben set up a permanent node in the pub’s attic, connected to a larger antenna on the roof. The high-powered node provided strong coverage across Porthcurno and linked to other nodes along the coast, creating a corridor of connectivity from St. Ives to Falmouth. But more importantly, the Mermaid became the place where travelers learned to become part of the network.
“I keep a box of spare devices under the bar,” Cordelia says. “Cost price, no profit. Someone walks in looking lost, shows me the symbol, I can get them sorted within the hour. Show them how to set up, explain the basics, introduce them to a few people in the local community. By the time they leave, they’re connected—not just technically, but socially. They know people now. They’re part of something.”
I ask her what happens to all these travelers once they leave Porthcurno.
“They stay connected, most of them. The device works wherever there’s other devices. Cornwall’s got good coverage now—Ben and his mates have been building the network for years. And if they’re going somewhere else, we tell them who to look for. ‘There’s a café in Bristol that’s friendly. Ask for Sarah. There’s a bookshop in Exeter.’ It’s like... a chain of hospitality, I suppose. Each link knows the next link.”
The Speakeasy Principle—the term Cordelia now uses for what the Mermaid represents—has historical roots she didn’t initially recognize.
During American Prohibition in the 1920s, speakeasies were establishments that served alcohol illegally. To find one, you needed to know the right people, the right passwords, the right signs. The speakeasies weren’t just places to drink; they were spaces outside the law, communities that formed around shared transgression.
“Someone came into the pub a few years back, an American academic, and she explained the history,” Cordelia says. “I’d never thought about it that way, but she was right. We’re not hiding alcohol—we’re helping people find community. But the principle’s the same. People need places to gather, places where they can find their way into something larger than themselves.”
The analogy isn’t perfect, she acknowledges. The speakeasies hid something physical—you had to enter to access the drinks. The mesh networks are invisible radio waves that pass through walls and travel for kilometers. But the human element remains the same: you need to find the door before you can walk through it.
“The technology’s the easy part,” Cordelia says. “Radio waves don’t care about age verification laws. But knowing where to start, who to trust, how to become part of the community—that requires people. Real people, in real places, willing to help strangers.”
The principle has spread. Across the UK and Europe, an informal network of “physical nodes” has emerged: pubs, cafés, bookshops, community centers that host mesh equipment and welcome travelers. They identify themselves with subtle signs—the mesh constellation, a particular phrase in their online listings, sometimes just word of mouth.
Some are commercial establishments like the Mermaid. Others are private homes where sympathetic owners have installed nodes and opened their doors to strangers. Still others are improvised spaces: a caravan park in Wales, a hostel in Portugal, a fishing cooperative in Norway.
“We don’t have a formal organization,” Cordelia says. “No membership, no dues, no meetings. We just know about each other. Someone runs a node in Brighton, someone else in Barcelona. When travelers come through, we tell them where to go next. It’s like... the underground railroad, I suppose, except for onboarding instead of escape.”
The comparison is provocative, and Cordelia knows it. She’s careful to note that Black Internet users are not slaves, that their situation isn’t comparable to historical atrocities. But she insists there’s a genuine parallel.
“What we’re doing is helping people find community when the official channels have failed them. A hundred years ago, that might mean escaping a totalitarian state. Today it means finding your way into a network that the surveillance systems can’t reach. The method’s the same: one person helping another, each station on the line pointing to the next.”
Not everyone approves of the Mermaid’s evolution.
Cordelia has received warning letters from Ofcom, visited by local police, questioned by officers who clearly didn’t understand the technology but had been told it was dangerous. Her neighbors are divided—some supportive, others worried about “attracting criminals.”
“There was a stretch in 2029 when I thought I’d have to close,” she says. “The legal threats were getting serious. Someone in London was making noise about revoking my liquor license. My solicitor said I should shut down the node and stop ‘provoking’ the authorities.”
She didn’t shut it down. Instead, she went to the village council.
“I told them: this pub has been here for three hundred years. It survived the plague, the civil war, two world wars, and the collapse of the fishing industry. It’s not going to be shut down because London doesn’t like the fact that people here can find their way into a network that London can’t monitor. If you want to take the Mermaid, you’ll have to fight the whole village.”
The village, perhaps unexpectedly, rallied. Neighbors who had been skeptical became protective. Local businesses displayed the mesh symbol in solidarity. The parish council passed a resolution—purely symbolic, legally meaningless—declaring Porthcurno “a sanctuary for private communication.”
“That’s when I realized something important,” Cordelia says. “The authorities expect us to be alone. They expect us to be isolated, ashamed, hiding. When we stand together—when we make it clear that this is our community, not their territory—they don’t know what to do.”
The legal threats faded. The warning letters stopped. The Mermaid remains open, the node remains active, and Cordelia has become, somewhat to her own bewilderment, a minor celebrity in Black Internet circles.
I ask what she makes of the larger movement—the Protocol Congresses, the governance debates, the increasingly sophisticated technical infrastructure being built by people much younger and more technically skilled than herself.
“Honestly? I don’t follow most of it,” she says. “I went to the Congress in 2029—that was an experience, I’ll tell you—and half the time I had no idea what people were talking about. Protocol this, consensus that. I just nodded and smiled.”
But she was there when it mattered. I’ve spoken to other participants who remember Cordelia’s presence at the Congress—her practical questions cutting through theoretical debates, her insistence that the movement stay grounded in real communities rather than floating into pure abstraction.
“Someone was going on about Byzantine fault tolerance or something,” one participant told me. “And Cordelia just said, ‘But how does this help the kid who walks into my pub looking for a place to find their people?’ And everyone kind of stopped and thought about it.”
The Speakeasy Principle, as Cordelia articulates it, is simple: technology serves people, not the other way around. The mesh networks are tools for human connection. The moment they become ends in themselves—the moment the protocols matter more than the publicans, the specifications more than the speakeasies—is the moment the movement loses its way.
“I’ve seen it happen with other causes,” she says. “People start out wanting to change the world, and they end up just wanting to be important. That’s the danger. You get so wrapped up in your own importance that you forget why you started.”
She doesn’t think the Black Internet has fallen into this trap yet. But she’s watchful. At fifty-three, running a pub in a village at the edge of England, she sees herself as a check on the movement’s theoretical tendencies—a reminder that somewhere, in real rooms with real ceilings and real pints, actual humans need to find their way to each other.
Before I leave, Cordelia takes me to the attic to see the node.
It’s less impressive than I expected. A small black box, about the size of a paperback book, with an antenna cable running through a hole in the roof. A few LEDs blink green. A solar panel on the roof provides backup power in case the mains fail.
“That’s the infrastructure,” she says. “That’s what keeps the signals moving—through the village, up the coast, connecting all these invisible conversations. Range of about eight kilometers from here, Ben tells me. Reaches the holiday cottages, the coastal path, the farms up on the hill. Anyone with a device can connect from anywhere in that range.”
She gestures out the attic window at the village below.
“But that’s just the technical bit. The real infrastructure is downstairs. The bar where people meet. The box of spare devices. The regulars who know how to help newcomers. The human network that runs alongside the radio network.”
I realize I’ve been thinking about this wrong. The node in the attic isn’t what makes the Mermaid important—it’s just a relay, one of thousands scattered across the country. What makes the Mermaid important is the door, the sign, the woman behind the bar who says “you look lost, let me help you.”
“I never wanted to be political,” Cordelia says, as if reading my thoughts. “I just wanted to run a pub. Help people. Make sure the travelers had a place to stay and the locals had a place to gather.”
She looks at the node, blinking steadily in the dim light.
“But it turns out that helping people is political now. Making a space where they can find community—that’s sedition. Offering hospitality to strangers—that’s a crime.”
She shrugs, a gesture that encompasses decades of experience, the weight of history, the absurdity of a world where a pub landlady becomes a figure in an international movement she barely understands.
“So be it. We’ve been here for three hundred years. We’re not going anywhere.”
The mermaid on the sign outside stares out to sea, watching for travelers, ready to welcome whoever needs her.
Some things don’t change.
Jameson Holt is a technology journalist based in London. He can no longer be reached through traditional channels but maintains a presence on the Black Internet under his own name.
If you know where to look.
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Originally published in The Atlantic, March 2031 Reprinted under fair use provisions
By 2030, the question was no longer whether the Black Internet would survive. It was what kind of thing it would become.
The documents in this final section trace the consolidation of the ungoverned layer—the debates about governance, the acceptance that something genuinely new had emerged, and the quiet recognition, even among its former opponents, that the thermodynamic outcome had been inevitable all along.
These are reflective documents, written by people who had time to think about what they had built and what it meant. They are less urgent than the documents in Parts I and II, less raw. The crisis had passed; what remained was the work of understanding.
We begin with a confession.
—The Archivist
I am writing this because I cannot remain silent any longer.
For three years, from 2027 to 2030, I worked as a compliance officer at one of the major European banks. My job was to implement Know Your Customer requirements—the regulations that require financial institutions to verify the identity of everyone who opens an account, transfers money, or conducts any significant transaction.
I was good at my job. I believed in it. I believed that financial surveillance was necessary to prevent crime, to catch terrorists, to protect ordinary people from fraud and abuse. I believed that the loss of privacy was a reasonable price to pay for security.
I no longer believe these things.
What I am about to tell you will probably end my career if I am ever identified. It may result in criminal prosecution. I accept these risks because I have concluded that the system I served is fundamentally corrupt, and that my continued silence makes me complicit in its corruption.
Let me explain what Know Your Customer compliance looks like from the inside.
When a customer wants to open an account, we verify their identity through multiple methods: government-issued documents, biometric data, address verification, employment records, source of funds documentation. For high-risk customers, we conduct enhanced due diligence: background checks, media searches, investigation of business relationships.
All of this information goes into a database. The database is permanent. Nothing is ever deleted. Every transaction you conduct, every account you hold, every payment you make is linked to your verified identity and stored indefinitely.
This database is not just used for crime prevention. It is shared with tax authorities, with immigration services, with intelligence agencies, with law enforcement at every level. It is queried millions of times per day by entities you have never heard of, for purposes you will never know.
The official justification is that this surveillance prevents money laundering, terrorist financing, and financial crime. I believed this justification for years. I no longer believe it, because I have seen the data.
During my time in compliance, our bank flagged approximately 50,000 suspicious transactions per year. Of these, perhaps 200 resulted in referrals to law enforcement. Of those referrals, perhaps 20 resulted in prosecutions. Of those prosecutions, perhaps 5 resulted in convictions.
Five convictions per year, against 50,000 flags, against millions of ordinary transactions monitored and recorded.
Meanwhile, every academic study of money laundering suggests that the vast majority of criminal financial activity passes through our systems undetected. The sophisticated criminals know exactly how to structure their transactions to avoid our flags. The only people we catch are the small-time fraudsters, the confused, the unlucky.
We have built a surveillance system that monitors millions of innocent people to catch a handful of petty criminals, while the serious criminals laugh at us.
In 2027, our bank began integrating with the European Digital Identity Wallet system. This was supposed to streamline compliance—instead of collecting identity documents ourselves, we could simply verify that customers had a valid EUDI wallet credential.
The integration revealed something disturbing.
The EUDI wallet system wasn’t just verifying identity. It was tracking behavior. Every time someone used their wallet to authenticate—for banking, for telecommunications, for accessing age-restricted content—that interaction was logged. The logs were accessible to a growing list of authorities under a growing list of justifications.
I watched our compliance requirements expand month by month. First we were required to verify identity at account opening. Then at significant transactions. Then at any transaction above 1,000 euros. Then 500 euros. Then 100 euros.
The stated goal was always the same: preventing crime, protecting consumers, ensuring compliance. The actual effect was always the same: more surveillance, more data collection, more permanent records of how ordinary people live their lives.
In late 2028, a customer came into our branch with a problem.
She was in her seventies, a retired schoolteacher. She had used the same bank account for forty years. She wanted to send 2,000 euros to her grandson, who was studying in Barcelona.
Our system flagged the transaction for enhanced review. The reason: her grandson had recently changed his phone number, which created a “risk indicator” in our database. The enhanced review required her to provide documentation explaining the source of the funds, the purpose of the transfer, and her relationship to the recipient.
She didn’t have documentation. The money was from her pension, accumulated over years of living frugally. The purpose was to help her grandson pay rent. The relationship was obvious—he was her grandson.
But none of this fit our compliance boxes. We required a bank statement showing the funds had been in her account for at least 60 days (they had been, but our system couldn’t verify this automatically). We required a signed letter explaining the purpose of the transfer (which our headquarters told us was not sufficient because it wasn’t notarized). We required proof of the family relationship (which she offered to provide, but our system only accepted certain document types, and the birth certificate she had was too old to be scanned legibly).
The process took three weeks. Three weeks during which this woman came into the branch multiple times, increasingly confused and distressed, unable to understand why sending money to her grandson had become so difficult.
During one of her visits, she sat across from my desk and cried. She asked me: “What did I do wrong? Why are you treating me like a criminal?”
I had no answer. I completed the forms. I escalated the review. Eventually the transaction was approved. But I never forgot the look on her face—the bewilderment of an ordinary person caught in a system designed to treat everyone as a suspect.
That was the moment I began to doubt.
I will be vague about specifics to protect others who were involved.
After the incident with the retired teacher, I began paying attention to patterns. I noticed that our enhanced review procedures were systematically harder for certain types of customers: the elderly, the immigrants, the self-employed, the poor. People with complex lives, non-standard documentation, irregular income patterns. Our system was designed for conventional middle-class customers with conventional middle-class financial histories. Anyone else was flagged, delayed, interrogated.
I began to help.
At first, in small ways. Advising customers on how to structure their documentation to avoid flags. Explaining which forms were actually necessary and which were just bureaucratic habit. Telling people that if they couldn’t get their transaction approved through normal channels, there were other options—cryptocurrency services, mesh-based payment networks, informal value transfer systems.
Later, in larger ways. I won’t detail these here, but I will say that I provided information to several dozen customers who used it to move their financial lives off the surveilled grid entirely. I showed them the gaps in our system—not to exploit them for criminal purposes, but to escape the system’s assumption that everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
I also provided information to the Black Internet community. Technical details about how our compliance systems work, where the vulnerabilities are, how to structure transactions to minimize surveillance. I did this anonymously, through channels I won’t describe.
I am confessing because I believe the system I worked for is wrong. Not ineffective—though it is ineffective. Not corrupt—though it is corrupt. Wrong in a deeper sense: wrong in its fundamental assumptions about the relationship between individuals and institutions.
The premise of KYC compliance is that financial institutions are entitled to know everything about their customers. Where your money comes from. What you spend it on. Who you send it to. Why. The premise is that this knowledge is necessary for security, and that the invasion of privacy is justified by the crimes it prevents.
I no longer accept this premise.
I have seen the balance sheet. On one side: millions of innocent people subjected to permanent surveillance, their financial lives recorded and analyzed and shared with authorities. On the other side: a handful of petty criminals caught, while the sophisticated criminals evade detection entirely.
This is not a reasonable tradeoff. This is a system that punishes ordinary people for the crimes of a few, while failing to catch the few it claims to target.
The Black Internet offers an alternative. Not a perfect alternative—I am not naive about the criminal activity that occurs on ungoverned networks. But an alternative that starts from a different premise: that privacy is a right, not a privilege; that financial activity is personal, not public; that surveillance should be the exception, not the rule.
I helped people escape to that alternative. I believe I did the right thing.
I know some of you will read this. I know you will be angry. You will feel betrayed. You will believe that I have undermined the important work you do.
I want you to think about the retired teacher. Think about the immigrants who can’t send money to their families without explaining their life story to a compliance officer. Think about the self-employed who have their accounts frozen because their income patterns don’t fit our algorithms. Think about the ordinary people who come to us for help and leave feeling like criminals.
Ask yourself: is this what you signed up for? Is this the kind of work that justifies your salary, your pension, your professional identity?
I know you believe in the mission. I believed in it too. But the mission has been corrupted. It has become a machine for surveillance dressed up as a machine for security. It has become a tool for controlling ordinary people while the powerful evade its reach.
You can keep your job and your pension and your belief that you’re doing something important. I don’t judge you for that. We all have bills to pay and families to support.
But when you go home at night, when you lie in bed unable to sleep, I want you to think about the people whose lives you’ve made harder. I want you to ask yourself whether the tradeoff is worth it.
And when you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—the Black Internet will be there. We’ve built something better. It’s not perfect. But it’s ours, and it’s free.
Yes, I know you’ll try to identify me. You’ll analyze this text for stylistic patterns, correlate the details I’ve mentioned with employee records, investigate anyone who matches the profile.
I’ve taken precautions. I’m writing this from outside your jurisdiction, through channels you can’t easily trace. But even if you find me—even if I end up like Dr. Pembroke, sitting in a courtroom explaining why I betrayed my employer—I won’t regret it.
Pembroke was right. The thermodynamic trap is real. Every enforcement action you take against the Black Internet makes it stronger. Every prosecution creates sympathy. Every crackdown teaches people that they need alternatives.
You’re not going to win this. Not because we’re stronger than you—we’re not—but because the physics of the situation favors us. Pressure creates release. Control creates evasion. Surveillance creates the demand for privacy.
I was part of your system for three years. I saw it from the inside. And I’m telling you: it doesn’t work. It never worked. It was never going to work.
Let it go.
If you’re reading this on the Black Internet, you already know what I’m about to say. You’ve already made the choice. You’ve already accepted that privacy is worth fighting for, that surveillance is not the price of civilization, that there are alternatives to the panopticon.
Welcome to the other side. It’s messy here. It’s imperfect. There are scammers and fraudsters and people who abuse the freedom we’ve created. But there’s also something the governed internet has lost: the possibility of interacting with other human beings without a permanent record being created.
That possibility is worth protecting. That’s why I helped build it. That’s why I’m confessing now—so that you know, whatever happens to me, that there were people inside the machine who saw what it was doing and chose to resist.
We’re everywhere. In every institution, every bureaucracy, every system of surveillance. We look like loyal employees. We do our jobs and collect our paychecks. But at night, when no one is watching, we help people escape.
The Black Internet didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was built by people like me—people who worked inside the system and understood its failures. People who concluded that the only moral choice was sabotage.
If you’re inside a system like the one I described—if you’re implementing surveillance you don’t believe in, enforcing rules you know are unjust, collecting data that should never be collected—I want you to know that you have options.
You can stay quiet and do your job. Many people do. I don’t condemn them.
Or you can start asking questions. Start noticing the gaps. Start helping people who need help, in whatever small ways you can manage.
The machine is vast, but it’s made of people. And people can choose.
Choose carefully.
Document submitted anonymously to the Black Library Authenticity verified through technical analysis Author remains unidentified as of this archive’s compilation
I was there.
I sat in the back, mostly, listening. I was twenty-three years old. I had been running a node in Birmingham for two years, writing documentation for the protocol. I had no idea that I was watching history being made.
The First Protocol Congress convened in September 2029, in a location I will not disclose even now. Approximately 200 participants attended in person; several thousand more participated through mesh relays. The goal was to address a growing tension in the Black Internet community: the network was expanding rapidly, but there was no mechanism for making decisions about its future direction.
The debates were fierce. Some participants wanted to formalize governance, to create structures that could coordinate development, resolve disputes, and represent the community to the outside world. Others—the majority, as it turned out—believed that any formal governance would become a target for capture, and that the network’s survival depended on its headlessness.
What follows are the official minutes of the Congress, compiled by the rotating secretariat and approved by consensus of the participants. They are dry, bureaucratic, deliberately understated. But if you read carefully, you can see the shape of the debates, the personalities involved, and the compromises that were struck.
I have not edited them. They are presented as they were recorded.
—The Archivist
Day 1, Morning
1.1 Call to Order
The Congress convened at 09:00 local time. In accordance with the preparatory agreement, no single individual was designated as chair. The session was facilitated by a rotating panel of three participants selected by lot: DELEGATE-7 (Cornwall), DELEGATE-23 (Kathmandu), and DELEGATE-156 (Melbourne).
1.2 Verification of Participants
Participation was verified through cryptographic attestation. Each participant demonstrated control of a key that had been associated with Black Internet activity for at least six months. No legal identities were required or recorded.
Remote (asynchronous, voting only): 11,456
1.3 Adoption of Procedural Rules
No enforcement mechanism for any decision; compliance to be voluntary
DELEGATE-89 (Frankfurt) raised a point of order questioning whether procedural rules that disclaim enforcement have any meaning. The facilitating panel ruled this out of order as a philosophical rather than procedural question.
Day 1, Afternoon
2.1 Statement of the Question
The facilitating panel presented the fundamental question before the Congress:
“Should the Black Internet community establish formal governance mechanisms, and if so, what form should they take?”
2.2 Opening Statements
Four opening statements were delivered, representing the major positions:
Position A: Formal Governance Necessary (DELEGATE-45, Brussels) Summary: The Black Internet has grown beyond informal coordination. Disputes require resolution mechanisms. Development requires priority-setting. External relations require representatives. Without formal governance, we risk fragmentation, capture by bad actors, or gradual decay.
Position B: Governance Equals Death (DELEGATE-156, Melbourne) Summary: The Black Internet survives precisely because it has no governance. Any formal structure becomes a target—for infiltration, for legal action, for co-optation. Our enemies want us to organize because organizations can be destroyed. Headlessness is our greatest defense.
[Note: DELEGATE-156 is recorded in supplementary materials as having stated: “The moment we elect a president, they’ll arrest them. The moment we designate headquarters, they’ll raid it. The moment we create a treasury, they’ll seize it. Our only protection is that there’s nothing to seize.”]
Position C: Minimal Coordination Only (DELEGATE-23, Kathmandu) Summary: We need coordination, not governance. We need ways to share information, to identify problems, to propose solutions—but not to enforce them. The network should remain voluntary at every level. Coordination serves the network; governance would make the network serve coordinators.
Position D: Graduated Approach (DELEGATE-7, Cornwall) Summary: Different activities require different levels of coordination. Technical protocol development may need more structure than community forums. We should develop governance mechanisms appropriate to each function, with explicit sunset clauses and resistance to scope creep.
[Note: DELEGATE-7 is recorded in supplementary materials as having stated: “I run a pub. I don’t need anyone’s permission to pour a pint. But I do need to coordinate with the other pubs so our guests know where to go next. That’s what we’re building here—hospitality, not government.”]
2.3 Open Debate
Practical urgency: concerns about ongoing legal and technical threats requiring coordinated response
DELEGATE-156 (Melbourne) intervened repeatedly to note that the mere act of debating governance structures was itself a form of organization, and that the Congress should be conscious of this irony.
2.4 Preliminary Sentiment
Graduated approach: 9%
No position commanded rough consensus. Debate was adjourned to the following day.
Day 2, Morning
3.1 Attempt at Common Ground
The facilitating panel proposed focusing first on principles that might command consensus, leaving structural questions for later.
3.2 Principles Proposed and Debated
The following principles were proposed:
Principle 1: No Capture “Any governance mechanism must be designed to resist capture by any individual, group, or external actor.”
Adopted by rough consensus after minor amendment (adding “external actor”).
Principle 2: No Coercion “Participation in any governance mechanism must be voluntary. No participant can be compelled to comply with any decision.”
Adopted by rough consensus. DELEGATE-45 (Brussels) registered concern that this renders all governance meaningless; concern noted but not considered sustained objection.
Principle 3: No Centralization “No governance mechanism shall create single points of failure, central authorities, or irreplaceable roles.”
Adopted by rough consensus.
Principle 4: Transparency “All governance proceedings shall be publicly recorded and accessible to any participant in the network.”
Adopted by rough consensus after debate about operational security implications. The consensus position held that transparency of process was more important than operational secrecy.
Principle 5: Sunset “Any governance mechanism created by this Congress shall expire after two years unless explicitly renewed.”
Adopted by rough consensus. Several participants expressed concern that renewal mechanisms might become self-perpetuating; language was added specifying that renewal requires the same rough consensus threshold as initial adoption.
3.3 Principles Not Adopted
“The Black Internet shall never engage with state authorities under any circumstances” (objection: unrealistic and potentially dangerous)
Day 2, Afternoon
4.1 Framework Proposal
External coordination: Communication with outside entities, legal defense, public messaging
The Congress agreed to consider mechanisms for each type separately.
4.2 Technical Coordination
After extensive debate, the following mechanism was adopted by rough consensus:
TRG has no authority to compel any change; its role is to evaluate technical merit and facilitate discussion
DELEGATE-156 (Melbourne) registered concern that even advisory review creates a power center. The concern was addressed by emphasizing sortition, rotation, and the purely advisory nature of TRG recommendations.
4.3 Social Coordination
This topic generated the most contentious debate of the Congress.
Reputation-based enforcement (rejected: can be gamed and creates permanent records)
The following minimal mechanism was eventually adopted by rough consensus:
All CAP proceedings are public unless all parties agree to confidentiality
DELEGATE-7 (Cornwall) noted that this mechanism is essentially formalized gossip. Several participants responded that formalized gossip may be the only form of social coordination compatible with the network’s principles.
4.4 External Coordination
This topic was deferred to the following day due to time constraints.
Day 3
5.1 External Coordination
The question of how (or whether) the Black Internet should communicate with external entities—states, media, civil society organizations—generated significant disagreement.
Position 1: Complete Silence The network should never speak with a single voice. Any external communication should come from individuals speaking only for themselves.
Position 2: Designated Spokespersons The network should have rotating spokespersons who can communicate official positions, subject to recall.
Position 3: Federated Communication Different regions or communities within the network may designate their own representatives, with no central coordination.
After extended debate, the following compromise was adopted by rough consensus:
A Media Response Working Group (MRWG) is established to coordinate (but not control) responses to media inquiries; MRWG may suggest talking points and connect journalists with willing participants, but has no authority to speak for the network
Multiple participants registered concerns about both groups becoming power centers. These concerns were addressed by emphasizing the voluntary nature of participation, the lack of enforcement authority, and the sunset provisions that will require explicit renewal.
5.2 Congress Continuity
The question arose: should there be a Second Protocol Congress?
This Congress explicitly disclaims any authority to bind future participants
DELEGATE-89 (Frankfurt) proposed that the Congress explicitly recommend against future Congresses, arguing that the current gathering represented a dangerous precedent. This proposal failed to achieve rough consensus; the position was noted as a significant minority view.
5.3 Closing Statements
The facilitating panel invited closing statements from any participants who wished to speak.
Selected excerpts:
DELEGATE-23 (Kathmandu): “We came here worried about governance and we are leaving with coordination. This is correct. The network does not need to be governed. It needs to be tended, like a garden. We are not rulers. We are gardeners. Let us tend carefully.”
DELEGATE-156 (Melbourne): “I came here ready to walk out if we created a government. We didn’t. We created something messier and weaker and harder to capture. I can live with that. I hope the next Congress—if there is one—can say the same.”
DELEGATE-7 (Cornwall): “I still don’t understand half of what was said here. But I understand this: we’re building something together, and we’re trying to do it without anyone being in charge. That’s harder than having someone in charge. It requires trust, and patience, and the willingness to accept imperfection. I came here from a pub where we’ve been doing that for three hundred years. We can do it for the internet too.”
5.4 Adjournment
The First Protocol Congress adjourned at 16:47 local time on Day 3.
The facilitating panel thanked all participants for their engagement and reminded them that nothing decided here is binding, everything is voluntary, and the network’s survival depends not on these documents but on the continued choices of individuals to run nodes, to help strangers, and to build something better than what we left behind.
Motion For Against Abstain Outcome Procedural rules adoption 14,203 112 191 Rough consensus Principle 1 (No Capture) 14,302 87 117 Rough consensus Principle 2 (No Coercion) 14,156 203 147 Rough consensus Principle 3 (No Centralization) 14,389 56 61 Rough consensus Principle 4 (Transparency) 13,892 456 158 Rough consensus Principle 5 (Sunset) 13,756 612 138 Rough consensus Technical Review Group 13,445 843 218 Rough consensus Community Advisory Panels 12,987 1,234 285 Rough consensus External Communication Framework 11,234 2,456 816 Rough consensus
[List of 203 in-person participants by delegate number and self-identified region; legal names not recorded]
DELEGATE-89 (Frankfurt): Never publicly identified; known in network as “Thermidor”
[Approximately 2,800 remote participants; cryptographic attestations on file]
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Minutes verified by rotating secretariat Rough consensus achieved on all final resolutions
The following letter was shared with the Black Library by its recipient, who wished it to be preserved as part of the historical record. The writer, their identity protected, gave permission for publication.
I include it here because it captures something that statistics and manifestos cannot: the deeply personal reasons that ordinary people chose to participate in building the Black Internet. Not ideology, not technical enthusiasm, but love—love for their children, and a determination to leave them something better than they inherited.
The letter was written in 2032, by which time the Black Internet had become a stable feature of the digital landscape. The writer was not a prominent figure in the network’s development—just a parent, running a node, helping where they could, and trying to explain it all to the next generation.
—The Archivist
Dear Marcus,
You’re twelve years old now, and you’ve been asking questions I’ve been putting off answering. Why do we have the equipment in the attic? Why do some of our friends use funny names when they visit? Why did the police come to our house that time, and why did we have to hide certain things before they arrived?
You’re old enough to know the truth now. I’m writing this down because I want you to have something you can read again when you’re older, when you can understand the full weight of what I’m telling you.
I broke the law. I broke it knowingly, deliberately, for years. I’m still breaking it, in the sense that the laws I broke are still on the books, even though they’re rarely enforced anymore. If certain people ever choose to look closely at our family, they could probably find enough evidence to prosecute me. I’ve made peace with that risk. I want to tell you why.
You don’t remember the world before the Black Internet, because you were too young. You were three years old when the real changes started, and five when the alternative networks began to stabilize. For you, it’s normal that some things happen on the “regular” internet and some things happen on the mesh. It’s just how the world works.
It wasn’t always this way.
When I was your age, the internet was one thing. It was chaotic and wonderful and sometimes dangerous, but it was open. You could go anywhere, talk to anyone, create any identity you wanted. There were no checkpoints, no verification systems, no one demanding to know who you really were before they’d let you participate.
That changed before you were born. Slowly at first, then all at once. The governments decided that the internet was too dangerous to be free. They passed laws requiring websites to verify users’ identities. They created systems that tracked everything we did online and linked it to our real names, our real addresses, our real lives.
They said it was for safety. They said it was to protect children like you. And maybe some of them believed that—I don’t want to assume the worst about everyone who supported these changes. But the effect was that we lost something precious: the ability to explore, to make mistakes, to grow up in semi-private, without every stumble being permanently recorded.
By the time you were born, that old internet was already dying. By the time you were three, it was dead.
I started running a mesh node when you were four years old.
I didn’t set out to be a revolutionary. I was just a parent who wanted my kid to have the same freedoms I’d had. I wanted you to be able to explore the world—the digital world, which is a real part of the world now—without someone watching over your shoulder. I wanted you to be able to make friends based on shared interests, not shared verification documents. I wanted you to have privacy.
The governments said they were protecting children. But I am your parent. I know what you need better than they do. And what you needed, I decided, was a door that led somewhere they couldn’t follow.
So I bought a mesh device. I set it up in the attic. I connected to the network that was just beginning to form—the one people were calling the Black Internet, though that name made it sound more sinister than it was.
At first, I just wanted access for our family. But the network needed nodes to survive. Every device that connected and stayed on made the network stronger, gave it more range, made it harder to shut down. So I kept my node running. I helped neighbors set up their own nodes. I wrote guides for people who weren’t technical. I donated money—well, cryptocurrency—to projects that were building better tools.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a user and became a builder.
You asked about the time the police came. You were six. You remember that I sent you to play at the neighbors’ house, and when you came back, there were strangers in our living room, and I looked frightened.
Here’s what happened.
Someone in our town had been arrested for running a mesh node. The police were investigating everyone connected to that node, trying to map the network. Our node had exchanged traffic with his node—that’s how mesh networks work, traffic bounces around—so we showed up in their data.
The officers who came to our house were polite. They said they just wanted to ask some questions. They didn’t have a warrant, which meant I didn’t have to let them in, but I did anyway because I thought refusing would make things worse.
They asked about our “network equipment.” I showed them the regular router, the one that connects to the ISP. They asked if we had any other devices. I said no.
This was a lie. The mesh node was in the attic, hidden in a box labeled “Christmas decorations.” They didn’t search—they couldn’t, without a warrant—and eventually they left.
I was terrified. For weeks afterward, I expected them to come back with a warrant, to arrest me in front of you, to take me away. I considered dismantling the node, disconnecting from the network, going back to being a good compliant citizen who only used approved services.
I didn’t, though. Because I thought about you. I thought about the world I’d be leaving you if everyone who cared about privacy gave up every time the pressure got too high.
The police never came back. I don’t know why—maybe they decided I wasn’t worth pursuing, maybe they had bigger targets, maybe the person who was arrested didn’t give them useful information about the rest of us. Whatever the reason, we got lucky.
Not everyone did. People went to prison for what I did. Some of them are still there. I want you to understand that I took a real risk, and I could have paid a real price, and I did it anyway because I believed it mattered.
I’ve tried to explain this to you in simple terms over the years. “Privacy is important.” “Some rules are wrong.” “We have a right to make our own choices.”
You’re old enough now for the fuller explanation.
The surveillance systems they built weren’t really about protecting children. They were about control. If every transaction is recorded, every communication logged, every movement tracked, then no one can step out of line without being caught. That might sound like a good thing if you assume that “stepping out of line” means committing crimes. But it also means that no one can organize against injustice, no one can explore forbidden ideas, no one can be different in ways that the authorities don’t approve of.
History is full of people who broke unjust laws and later were celebrated for it. The escaped slaves and the people who helped them. The dissidents who spoke out against totalitarian regimes. The whistleblowers who exposed corporate crimes.
At the time, they were criminals. Later, they were heroes.
I’m not comparing myself to them—what I did was much smaller, much safer, much less brave. But I’m part of the same tradition. When the law is wrong, sometimes the right thing to do is break it.
The Black Internet was never about committing crimes. It was about preserving the possibility of privacy, of freedom, of a life that isn’t constantly monitored. It was about saying: there are some spaces that the government doesn’t get to enter, some aspects of our lives that are not their business, some choices that we get to make for ourselves.
That’s what I wanted for you. Not lawlessness—a space where you could grow into yourself without every mistake being permanent, every experiment being recorded, every deviation from the norm being flagged and reported.
You’ll have to make your own choices when you’re older.
By the time you’re an adult, the world will probably look different than it does now. The Black Internet has stabilized; it’s not going away. But neither are the surveillance systems on the regular internet. Most people use both, depending on what they’re doing. It’s not the revolution we hoped for—it’s a compromise, an uneasy coexistence.
Some people your age will grow up to work in the compliance departments, implementing the surveillance systems. Some will work on making those systems more privacy-preserving. Some will work on the Black Internet itself, improving the protocols, running infrastructure, helping people like your father did.
I don’t know which path you’ll choose, and I won’t try to dictate it. You might decide that the Black Internet was a mistake, that privacy isn’t worth the risks, that your father’s generation was wrong to resist. That’s a valid conclusion, and I’ll respect it even if I disagree.
But I want you to make that choice with full information. I want you to know that there was another way, that people fought for it, that some of them went to prison and some of them lost their careers and some of them were separated from their families. I want you to know that the world you live in didn’t have to be this way—that every aspect of it was contested, debated, built by human beings who made choices about what to value and what to sacrifice.
You’re part of that history now. The node in our attic is part of that history. The visitors with funny names are part of that history.
It’s your inheritance. Do with it what you think is right.
One more thing, and then I’ll stop.
When I first got involved in the network, I was terrified. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t know if I’d end up in prison, or if I was wasting my time on something that would fail.
I met a young woman online—through the mesh—who helped me through that fear. She was barely out of her teens, but she’d already been doing this for years. She’d started as a teenager, running nodes in Melbourne while she was still too young to legally access the regular internet. By the time I met her, she was a respected protocol developer, someone whose name (well, pseudonym) carried weight in the community.
She told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said: “The network doesn’t need heroes. It needs thousands of ordinary people doing ordinary things. Running a node is ordinary. Helping a neighbor is ordinary. The revolution is made of ordinary moments.”
I don’t know if she’d call what we did a revolution. Probably not—she was always modest about the language we used. But whatever it was, she was right that it was made of ordinary moments. My node, running day after day. Your teachers, some of whom use the mesh to communicate about things they don’t want logged in school databases. The shop down the street that accepts cryptocurrency from people who don’t want their purchases tracked.
Ordinary moments. Ordinary people. That’s what built the Black Internet. That’s what will keep it alive—or let it die, if we stop caring.
I chose to care. I hope you will too.
Whatever you decide, know that I love you, and that everything I did was for you.
Your father
Document shared with the Black Library by the recipient Author identity protected at family’s request
The following is an excerpt from a paper published in Annual Review of Digital Politics in 2044. It represents the academic consensus that had emerged nearly two decades after the Black Internet’s consolidation: that the thermodynamic model of information control, once dismissed as anarchist rhetoric, accurately predicted the outcome of the regulatory campaigns of the 2020s.
The paper’s author, Professor Elena Vasquez, holds the chair of Information Policy at the University of Barcelona. She began her career as a consultant to EU regulatory agencies, advising on the eIDAS 2.0 implementation. Her journey from advocate of centralized identity systems to analyst of their failure mirrors the intellectual trajectory of many scholars in this field.
I include this paper last among the ficciones because it provides what the archive, by its nature, cannot: assessment. The documents in this collection show what happened. Professor Vasquez explains why it was inevitable.
—The Archivist
This paper evaluates the “thermodynamic hypothesis” of information control—the thesis that attempts to restrict information flow generate pressure that inevitably finds release through evasion technologies superior to the original systems. Using the Black Internet emergence as a case study, I test predictions derived from this hypothesis against empirical outcomes from the 2024-2032 period. The analysis supports the hypothesis: regulatory pressure was strongly correlated with evasion technology development; enforcement intensity predicted network growth; and the emergent infrastructure proved more resilient than predicted by contemporaneous policy analyses. I conclude that the thermodynamic model, despite its origins in anarchist philosophy rather than formal social science, provides a robust framework for understanding information governance dynamics. Implications for future policy are discussed.
The emergence of the Black Internet between 2027 and 2032 constituted the largest failure of information governance in the digital era. Despite unprecedented coordination among regulatory agencies across multiple jurisdictions, despite billions of euros invested in enforcement, despite legal frameworks specifically designed to prevent ungoverned digital spaces, a parallel internet infrastructure emerged and consolidated.
Seventeen years later, the Black Internet remains operational, serving an estimated 280 million regular users globally (Patel & Okafor, 2043). It has developed its own governance mechanisms, its own economy, its own cultural institutions. It is, by any reasonable measure, a permanent feature of the digital landscape.
How did this happen? More importantly: could it have been prevented?
This paper argues that the answer to the second question is no—that the emergence of ungoverned digital infrastructure was, in a meaningful sense, inevitable once certain policy choices were made. I base this argument on the “thermodynamic hypothesis” first articulated by anarchist theorist Bob Black (2003) and later formalized by digital governance scholars (Chen, 2038; Okafor, 2041).
The cycle is self-reinforcing: stronger control attempts generate stronger evasion
If this hypothesis is correct, then the Black Internet’s emergence was not a policy failure in the conventional sense—it was a physical consequence of the policy approach chosen. The regulators did not fail to prevent the ungoverned layer; they created it.
Contemporaneous predictions: Internal assessments from regulatory agencies (obtained through archival research and freedom of information requests) and academic forecasts
I then tested three predictions derived from the thermodynamic hypothesis:
Prediction 1: Regulatory pressure should correlate with evasion technology development Prediction 2: Enforcement intensity should predict network growth (not decline) Prediction 3: The emergent infrastructure should exceed contemporaneous predictions of resilience
3.1 Pressure and Evasion Correlation
The correlation between regulatory intensity and evasion technology development is striking. Figure 1 (not reproduced here) shows the timeline of major regulatory actions alongside protocol development milestones.
Geographic patterns showed that regions with stricter enforcement saw faster node deployment: Australia (strictest youth access restrictions) had 340% faster per-capita node growth than the global average
Statistical analysis confirms the relationship: regulatory intensity scores explain 67% of the variance in evasion technology development activity (R² = 0.67, p < 0.001). This relationship remains significant after controlling for baseline technology adoption rates, economic development, and population demographics.3.2 Enforcement and Network Growth
The thermodynamic hypothesis predicts that enforcement should accelerate rather than retard network growth. This counterintuitive prediction is strongly supported by the data.
I analyzed 156 major enforcement actions between 2025 and 2030, including raids, prosecutions, and platform shutdowns. For each action, I measured network activity in the 30 days before and after.
Mean change in protocol contribution activity: +41% (95% CI: 33-49%)
The relationship was dose-dependent: larger enforcement actions (measured by media coverage and resources deployed) produced larger growth responses. The largest single growth event in the Black Internet’s history occurred following the prosecution of Dr. Alastair Pembroke, a former Ofcom official, in March 2029.3.3 Resilience Predictions
Perhaps most striking is the divergence between contemporaneous predictions and actual outcomes.
I obtained internal assessments from EU agencies through archival research. A November 2028 memorandum from DG CONNECT (subsequently leaked) provided scenario projections for 2030 and 2032:
2030 Predictions vs. Actuals:
Metric Predicted (Scenario B) Actual EU active users 5-8 million 23 million Infrastructure nodes 300,000-400,000 1.2 million Protocol maturity “Basic functionality” Full feature parity Commercial activity “Negligible” €4.2 billion annual
2032 Predictions vs. Actuals:
Metric Predicted (Scenario B) Actual EU active users 8-15 million 67 million Infrastructure nodes 500,000-600,000 3.4 million Legal status “Continued enforcement” De facto toleration Integration with mainstream “Minimal” Significant overlap
The actual outcomes exceeded even the most pessimistic (from regulatory perspective) scenarios. The DG CONNECT memo’s “Scenario B” (continued fragmentation) was intended as a warning; it proved to be a significant underestimate.
Why does the thermodynamic hypothesis hold? I propose three mechanisms:4.1 Selection Pressure
Enforcement creates selection pressure favoring more robust evasion technologies. Services and protocols that can be shut down are shut down; what remains is increasingly resistant to shutdown. This is directly analogous to antibiotic resistance: each treatment eliminates susceptible strains while selecting for resistant ones.
The Black Internet’s protocol evolution demonstrates this clearly. Early mesh networks were vulnerable to traffic analysis; enforcement actions exploiting this vulnerability prompted development of traffic-resistant protocols. Bridge services could be blocked; this prompted development of bridge-independent communication. Each vulnerability discovered and exploited by authorities prompted development of countermeasures that eliminated that vulnerability.4.2 Information Diffusion
Enforcement actions function as information about the existence and value of evasion technologies. Media coverage of prosecutions, platform shutdowns, and surveillance capabilities teaches potential users that alternatives exist and may be needed.
Survey data from 2029 (Erikson, 2029) found that 47% of Black Internet users first learned about mesh networks through news coverage of enforcement actions. The most common response to the question “What made you decide to try the Black Internet?” was: “I read about someone being prosecuted for it.”4.3 Moral Legitimization
Enforcement actions reframe the moral status of evasion. Before enforcement, using anonymous networks might be seen as suspicious—why would someone need privacy if they weren’t doing something wrong? After enforcement, the same behavior can be seen as principled resistance to overreach.
This reframing was explicit in movement communications. The manifesto “The Ludic Imperative” (2029) directly invoked the history of resistance to unjust laws, from American prohibition to Soviet samizdat. The prosecution of Dr. Pembroke was characterized in movement media as vindication of his analysis, not punishment for his actions.
The 2028 DG CONNECT memorandum is worth examining in detail because it represents the most sophisticated contemporaneous regulatory analysis—and because it explicitly acknowledged the dynamics this paper describes.
The memo introduced the phrase “thermodynamic trap” to describe the situation regulators faced:
“Current approaches are not merely failing to reduce Black Internet usage; they appear to be the primary driver of its growth.”
The memo’s authors understood the mechanism. They recommended “urgent strategic review” and “fundamental reconsideration” of enforcement approaches. Their recommendations were not implemented.
Temporal mismatch: The costs of enforcement (immediate, diffuse) were less visible than the costs of inaction (delayed, concentrated)
The result was that the regulatory establishment continued pursuing strategies it knew were failing, trapped by institutional incentives that made course correction impossible.
6.1 For Information Policy
The thermodynamic model suggests that information control policies should be evaluated not by their direct effects but by their systemic effects, including the evasion technologies they will generate. Policies that create pressure without providing legitimate outlets for that pressure will ultimately strengthen the very phenomena they aim to suppress.
This does not mean that all information regulation is futile. It means that effective regulation must be designed with thermodynamic awareness: minimizing unnecessary pressure, providing legitimate privacy-preserving alternatives, and avoiding escalation dynamics that favor increasingly radical evasion.6.2 For Democratic Governance
The Black Internet’s emergence raises profound questions about democratic governance in the digital age. The regulatory frameworks of the 2020s were democratically enacted; they represented genuine public concern about online harms, particularly to children. Yet these democratic choices produced outcomes that undermined democratic capacity to govern digital spaces.
This is not a new phenomenon—democratic majorities have often enacted policies that backfired—but the speed and scale of the information governance failure were unprecedented. Digital technologies accelerate the pressure-evasion cycle to timescales that democratic deliberation cannot match.6.3 For the Black Internet Itself
The thermodynamic model implies that the Black Internet exists, in part, because of the pressure that created it. If that pressure were removed—if states accepted coexistence rather than pursuing elimination—the network’s growth dynamic would change.
Some observers (e.g., Thornton, 2041) predict that reduced enforcement pressure would cause the Black Internet to stabilize or even decline, as users no longer felt compelled to seek alternatives. Others (e.g., Okafor, 2043) argue that the network has now achieved self-sustaining scale and would persist regardless of policy changes.
The current period of de facto toleration provides a natural experiment. If the thermodynamic model is correct, we should expect Black Internet growth to slow as regulatory pressure diminishes. Early data are consistent with this prediction: growth rates have declined from 25% annually (2029-2031) to approximately 8% annually (2041-2043).
The thermodynamic hypothesis, once dismissed as anarchist polemic, accurately predicted the failure of information governance strategies in the 2024-2032 period. Regulatory pressure generated evasion technologies; enforcement accelerated network growth; the emergent infrastructure exceeded all contemporaneous predictions.
These findings suggest that information governance must be reconceptualized. The metaphor of control—dams, walls, filters—fails to capture the physics of information systems. A more appropriate metaphor might be gardening: working with natural dynamics rather than against them, accepting that some growth cannot be prevented, focusing on shaping rather than suppressing.
The Black Internet is now seventeen years old. It has survived everything that state power could deploy against it. Its existence is no longer a question; the question is what lessons we draw from its emergence.
I draw this lesson: that systems of control create their own opposition, that pressure generates release, that the attempt to monitor everything creates the demand for spaces beyond monitoring. This is not ideology; it is physics. Policy that ignores physics will fail.
The regulators of the 2020s learned this lesson too late. We should not repeat their mistake.
[References omitted for length—original article includes 89 citations]
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective Annual Review of Digital Politics, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license
I have spent eighteen years gathering these documents.
Eighteen years of searching archives, cultivating sources, earning trust. Eighteen years of interviews with people who are now old and people who are now dead. Eighteen years of verifying authenticity, cross-referencing details, filling gaps in the record. Eighteen years of work, if you can call it work—and by the definitions we use here, perhaps you can’t.
I am thirty-nine years old now. I was twenty-three when I attended the First Protocol Congress, sitting in the back, listening to giants debate the future of something I barely understood. I was twenty-five when I became a keeper of records for the Black Library. I was thirty when I realized that record-keeping was not just a job but a calling—that without archives, movements lose their memory, and without memory, they cannot learn.
The documents in this collection are my life’s work. Not all of it—I’ve done other things, had other roles, known other people—but the core of it. The thing I’ll be remembered for, if I’m remembered at all.
I don’t know if I’ve done it well.
The Black Internet is eighteen years old now, the same age as a legal adult in most jurisdictions. It has grown from a scattering of emergency mesh networks to a global infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of people. It has developed its own culture, its own economy, its own institutions—including the Library that employs me.
Is this what the founders intended? I don’t think so. The people who wrote the July Protocols didn’t expect to succeed. They hoped, and they built, and they worried. They expected to be crushed. They expected that if they weren’t crushed, something else would go wrong—the network would be captured by criminals, or fragment into warring factions, or simply wither away as users drifted back to more convenient alternatives.
None of that happened. Not exactly. There are criminals on the Black Internet, and there have been factional disputes, and some early users did drift away. But the network persisted. It grew. It became permanent.
This should feel like victory. Sometimes it does.
But I’ve spent too long with the documents to feel uncomplicated triumph. I know what was lost.
I think about the people who didn’t make it.
I think about the teenager in Sydney who was prosecuted at sixteen and never recovered—who withdrew from public life entirely, who reportedly struggles with mental health issues to this day. I think about the developer who was killed in a traffic stop that may or may not have been related to her mesh network activities—the investigation was inconclusive, and we’ll never know for certain. I think about the families torn apart by legal battles, the careers destroyed, the friendships ended by the pressures of operating in a space the state wanted to eliminate.
We built something remarkable. We also left casualties behind.
The thermodynamic hypothesis says that pressure creates release, that control creates evasion, that the physics of information systems favors the dissidents. But physics doesn’t care about individuals. The pressure found release; the evasion succeeded. That doesn’t help the people who were crushed while the pressure was building.
I keep their names in a separate file. It’s not part of this archive—too personal, too raw. But I read it sometimes, when I need to remember that history isn’t just about systems and outcomes. It’s about people who made choices and paid prices.
I think about the people who built this.
Suresh Bokomo is seventy-four now, still living in Kathmandu, still checking his mesh nodes every morning. I visited him last year. He showed me the original rooftop where he set up the first repeater, during the shutdown in 2027. The hardware has been replaced many times, but the location is the same. He maintains it himself, even though there are volunteers who would do it for him.
“It’s not work,” he told me. “It’s tending. Like watering a garden.”
Cordelia Trevanion passed away three years ago. The Mermaid’s Rest is still operating, still hosting Node 7, now run by her niece. I went to the funeral—held partly on the mesh, so participants around the world could attend. Someone read her quote from the Protocol Congress: “We’re not rulers. We are gardeners.”
Rachel Goldsmith is in her mid-thirties, one of the most respected protocol developers in the community. She doesn’t give interviews anymore—says she’s said everything she has to say—but she still contributes code, still helps newcomers, still shows up when it matters. She was at the most recent Protocol Congress, speaking in the same direct, impatient way I remember from her early forum posts.
Dr. Alastair Pembroke lives somewhere in the network, under a name I don’t know. I tried to find him for this archive; the trail went cold years ago. Maybe he doesn’t want to be found. Maybe he’s happy, finally free of the system he helped build and then helped dismantle. I hope so.
These are the people who made this possible. Not alone—there were thousands, eventually millions—but they were early, and they stayed, and they built.
I think about what we’ve become.
The Black Internet is not utopia. It never was, and the documents in this collection don’t pretend otherwise. There are scams and frauds, harassment campaigns and illegal markets. There are people who use the privacy we built to do terrible things. The same tools that protect dissidents protect criminals; the same anonymity that enables free speech enables abuse.
We’ve developed mechanisms to address these problems—reputation systems, community standards, collective response. They’re imperfect. They’ll always be imperfect. The alternative—the surveillance systems we escaped—were also imperfect, and their imperfections were worse.
But I don’t want to pretend we’ve solved problems we haven’t solved. I don’t want this archive to be triumphalist propaganda. The world is complicated; what we built is complicated; the future is uncertain.
What I do want is for the record to be clear. This happened. These people made these choices. These systems emerged from those choices. Whatever comes next, it builds on this foundation.
I think about memory.
The governed internet has perfect memory. Every interaction logged, every transaction recorded, every communication archived somewhere, accessible to someone. The surveillance systems built in the 2020s are still operating, still accumulating data, still creating permanent records of billions of lives.
The Black Internet has imperfect memory. We forget things. Documents are lost, stories untold, lessons unlearned. That’s why the Library exists—to preserve what we can, to maintain continuity, to ensure that the movement doesn’t have to relearn everything from scratch.
But our imperfection is also our strength. On the governed internet, your past follows you forever. A mistake made at sixteen still defines you at sixty. On the Black Internet, you can start over. You can become someone new. Your history is yours to share or withhold.
I’ve spent eighteen years building institutional memory for a movement that values forgetting. There’s a tension there, and I’ve never fully resolved it. But I’ve concluded that some things need to be remembered even when individuals deserve to be forgotten. The shape of the movement, the choices that were made, the paths not taken—these matter, even if the names of those who walked those paths are lost.
This archive is not a surveillance record. It’s a gift to the future—a collection of documents that tell a story, offered freely to anyone who wants to learn it.
I think about endings.
This archive is not complete. It will never be complete. As long as the Black Internet exists, there will be new documents, new stories, new chapters to add. Someday someone else will take over my role—perhaps they already have, in other nodes of the Library, compiling their own collections.
But this particular collection ends here, with this epilogue. Eighteen years of the Black Internet, from the July Protocols to now. A beginning, a middle, and something that looks like stability but is probably just a pause before the next transformation.
The documents I’ve gathered tell a story of pressure and release, of control and evasion, of ordinary people making extraordinary choices. They tell a story of failure—the failure of states to prevent what they feared—and of success—the success of networks in surviving what was deployed against them.
They don’t tell the whole story. No archive does. But they tell enough, I hope, for future readers to understand what happened and why.
The last words go to the protocol itself.
Not the words of any individual, not the declarations of any congress, but the specification that underlies everything else. The protocol doesn’t care about politics or philosophy. It doesn’t know about the people who built it or the reasons they built it. It just does what it was designed to do: route messages between nodes, verify identities cryptographically, maintain connections in a network that has no center.
The protocol will outlive all of us. Long after I’m dead, long after everyone in this archive is dead, the protocol will still be running—or something descended from it, evolved and improved but still recognizable. The ideas embedded in those specifications—privacy by default, trust no one, resist capture—will persist as long as the network persists.
That’s a kind of immortality. Not for us, the individuals who built and maintained and documented. For the principles we encoded into machines that don’t forget, don’t die, don’t give up.
The protocol remembers, even when we don’t.
This archive is offered to the public domain. No attribution required. No permission needed. Copy, share, quote, teach.
Some things need to be remembered.
Compiled by the Archivist Black Library Collective Year Eighteen of the Black Internet
The following document was originally compiled by the Technical Working Group of the First Protocol Congress in 2029, then substantially revised in 2030 after the Nepal crisis demonstrated which approaches worked and which didn’t. It has been updated periodically since then, though the core technologies have remained remarkably stable.
This is not a comprehensive technical specification—those exist elsewhere in the Archive, running to thousands of pages. This is what we gave to newcomers. The grandmother in Cornwall who wanted to help travelers. The teenager in Melbourne who’d been cut off from her friends. The banker in Frankfurt who finally understood what the system he worked for was doing.
We learned early that the movement would succeed or fail based on whether ordinary people could participate. Ordinary people are not stupid—they built civilizations, after all—but they have limited patience for jargon and limited time for study. This manual was written for them.
Some sections are now historical curiosities. The specific hardware models mentioned have long been superseded. The software versions are ancient. But the principles remain sound, and I include the document in its original form because it captures something essential about those early years: the spirit of mutual aid, the assumption that everyone could learn, the belief that technology should serve people rather than the reverse.
If you are reading this in the governed layer, through whatever channel brought it to you, know that everything described here still works. The tools have changed. The principles have not.
—The Archivist, Year Eighteen
Before we discuss hardware and software, we need to discuss what the Black Internet actually is. This section is philosophy. If you want to skip to the practical bits, go to Section II. But philosophy matters—it’s why we’re here instead of just accepting what they built for us.
The governed internet requires you to prove who you are before you can participate. To read a forum about gardening, you must upload your passport. To watch a video about cooking, you must verify your age through your bank. To send a message to your grandmother, you must use a service that records everything you say and shares it with authorities on request.
This is not a bug. This is the design.
The people who built this system believed—perhaps sincerely—that surveillance was necessary for safety. They were wrong, but their wrongness created consequences we all must live with. Every interaction tracked. Every relationship mapped. Every thought that crosses a wire, stored forever in databases we cannot see and cannot challenge.
No single authority can exclude you. If one path closes, another opens. The network routes around damage—including the damage caused by censorship.
This is not lawlessness. We have norms and expectations and ways of dealing with bad actors. But our norms emerge from the community, not from distant regulators who have never met us and never will.
The Black Internet is built from several interconnected technologies. You don’t need to understand all of them to participate, but it helps to know what’s happening beneath the surface.
Mesh Networking (LoRa/Meshtastic): Devices that talk to each other directly via radio, without needing cell towers or internet service providers. This is our physical layer—the actual radio waves carrying our messages.
Decentralized Social Protocols (Nostr): A way of publishing and reading messages that doesn’t depend on any single server. Your posts go to multiple “relays” around the world. If one relay goes down or starts censoring, the others continue.
Content-Addressed Storage (IPFS): A way of storing and sharing files where the address of a file is based on its contents, not its location. If you know what you’re looking for, you can find it from anyone who has a copy—and you can verify it hasn’t been tampered with.
Decentralized Payments (Lightning Network): A way of sending and receiving money that doesn’t go through banks. Fast, cheap, and private enough for most purposes.
Each of these technologies existed before the Black Internet. What we did was integrate them into a coherent system designed around the assumption that every other part of the infrastructure might be hostile.
This is where you start. Everything else depends on having a way to communicate that doesn’t go through the governed internet.
Hardware:
Seeed T1000-E — Rugged, waterproof, ready to use out of the box
Any device with a LoRa radio and an ESP32 or nRF52840 microcontroller can run Meshtastic. The project maintains a list of supported hardware.
A smartphone or computer to configure and interact with the device
Critical: The frequency must match your region. In Europe, we use 868 MHz. In the Americas, 915 MHz. In Asia-Pacific, 923 MHz. Using the wrong frequency is illegal in most jurisdictions and will prevent you from communicating with other nodes.
Step 1: Flash the Firmware
Visit the Meshtastic Web Flasher (flasher.meshtastic.org) using Chrome or Edge browser. Connect your device via USB. Select your device type and the latest stable firmware version. Click Flash.
This overwrites whatever was on the device with Meshtastic. Don’t worry—if something goes wrong, you can always reflash.
Step 2: Configure Basic Settings
Download the Meshtastic app on your phone (available for iOS and Android) or use the web client. Connect to your device via Bluetooth.
You must set your region. This is not optional. The device will not transmit until you do this.
The default channel is called “LongFast” with a public key that everyone uses. This is fine for testing but offers no privacy. For actual communication, you’ll want to set up private channels (see Section 2.4).
Step 3: Test the Connection
Send a test message. If you’re lucky, someone else with a node will be within range and will respond. If not, you’re shouting into the void—but your device is working.
Rural/line of sight: 15+ km typical, with documented cases of 200+ km under ideal conditions
Your device doesn’t need to reach the final destination directly. Messages hop from node to node. If you can reach one other node, you’re on the network.
The “Max Hops” setting controls how many times a message will be relayed. The default is 3, which is suitable for most local networks. Setting it higher increases coverage but also increases network congestion.
Positioning matters. A device in a basement might reach nothing. The same device on a rooftop might reach dozens of other nodes. Height is your friend. Exterior walls are better than interior. Clear sky is better than obstructions.
The default channel is public. Anyone can read it. This is fine for casual chat but unsuitable for anything private.
Share the channel URL (which encodes the name and key) with people you trust
Everyone who has the same channel name and PSK can communicate privately. The encryption uses AES-256, which is computationally secure against any known attack.
Important: The channel name affects your frequency slot. If you’re trying to communicate with people on the default public channel, don’t change your primary channel name without understanding the implications.
If you want to do more than just use the network—if you want to help build it—consider running a dedicated node.
Solar-powered repeaters can be deployed in strategic locations to extend coverage. A small solar panel (10-20W), a charge controller, and a battery will keep a device running indefinitely.
High-gain antennas can dramatically increase range. The stock antennas included with most devices are adequate but not optimal. A properly mounted external antenna can double or triple your effective range.
Router/Repeater mode tells your device to prioritize forwarding messages for others rather than conserving battery for personal use. Enable this if you’re running infrastructure rather than a personal device.
Important: In most jurisdictions, operating a mesh device for personal use is legal under ISM band regulations. No license required, no registration, no permission. This may change. Know your local laws. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice.
Mesh networking gets messages from point A to point B. But modern communication isn’t just person-to-person—it’s communities, broadcasts, public discussions. For this, we use Nostr.
Nostr stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.” It’s a protocol—a language that different programs can speak to communicate with each other.
Anyone can run a relay, and you can use multiple relays, so no single operator can silence you.
Think of it like email, but decentralized. Your identity isn’t tied to any service provider. If Gmail decided to delete your account, you’d lose your email address. If a Nostr relay kicks you off, you just use a different relay—and your identity, followers, and history all come with you.
Step 1: Generate Your Keys
Your private key is a long random string (usually displayed as “nsec...” in Nostr formatting). Your public key is derived from it (displayed as “npub...”).
Most Nostr clients will generate these for you automatically when you first set up. Write down your private key and store it somewhere safe. If you lose it, you lose your identity. There is no “forgot password” option.
Never share your private key. Anyone who has it can post as you, read your private messages, and destroy your reputation.
Step 2: Choose a Client
Coracle — Web. Advanced features, good for power users.
All clients connect to the same network. You can switch between them freely. Your identity (keypair) works everywhere.
Step 3: Connect to Relays
Your client needs to know which relays to use. Most clients come with sensible defaults, but you can add more or remove ones you don’t trust.
In the Black Internet context, some relays operate over the mesh network rather than the governed internet. These are listed in the community directories that circulate through the network.
Publishing: Write a note, hit publish. It goes to all your connected relays. People who follow you, or who browse those relays, can see it.
Following: Follow other users by their public key. Your client will fetch their posts from relays.
Private Messages: Nostr supports encrypted direct messages. They’re encrypted such that only you and the recipient can read them. (The metadata—that you sent a message to this person at this time—may still be visible to relays.)
Zaps: Integration with the Lightning Network lets you send small Bitcoin payments to posts you appreciate. This is optional but has become culturally significant in the community.
Relay discovery can use our local reputation systems rather than centralized directories
If you’re in an area with good mesh coverage, you can use Nostr without ever touching the governed internet. Your messages propagate through the mesh to relays operated by community members, then out to the broader network.
Mesh networking handles real-time communication. Nostr handles social publishing. But what about files—documents, images, software, archives?
This is where IPFS comes in.
IPFS stands for “InterPlanetary File System.” Despite the grandiose name, the concept is simple: files are identified by their content, not their location.
When you add a file to IPFS, the system computes a cryptographic hash of its contents. This hash becomes the file’s address—its “Content Identifier” or CID. Anyone who wants the file can request it by CID. Anyone who has the file can serve it.
Natural caching. Popular files spread across many nodes automatically.
The easiest way to access IPFS content is through a gateway—a web server that fetches IPFS content and serves it over HTTP. Many public gateways exist. You can access them by visiting URLs like:https://ipfs.io/ipfs/[CID]
Replace [CID] with the actual content identifier.
Warning: Public gateways are convenient but centralized. They can be blocked, monitored, or shut down. For serious use, run your own node.
Step 1: Install IPFS
Download Kubo (the reference IPFS implementation) from the official site or your system’s package manager. On most Linux systems:wget https://dist.ipfs.tech/kubo/latest/kubo_linux-amd64.tar.gz tar -xvzf kubo_linux-amd64.tar.gz sudo ./kubo/install.sh
Step 2: Initializeipfs init
This creates your node’s identity and local storage.
Step 3: Start the Daemonipfs daemon
Your node is now connected to the IPFS network.
Step 4: Add Contentipfs add myfile.txt
This returns a CID. Anyone with that CID can now request your file, and your node will serve it (as long as it’s running).
Step 5: Retrieve Contentipfs cat [CID]
Or save it to a file:ipfs get [CID]
Media sharing: Images, videos, and other large files that would overwhelm the mesh network can be stored on IPFS and retrieved over whatever connectivity is available.
For enhanced privacy, content can be encrypted before adding to IPFS. The CID then identifies the encrypted blob; only people with the decryption key can read the actual content.
Money is a communication tool. When the authorities control money, they control what transactions are permitted—which is another way of controlling what activities are permitted.
The Lightning Network provides an alternative.
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, but it’s slow (transactions take minutes to confirm) and expensive (fees can be significant for small amounts). The Lightning Network is a “Layer 2” solution that addresses these limitations.
The basic idea: instead of recording every transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, users open “payment channels” and transact off-chain. Only the opening and closing of channels require blockchain transactions. Everything in between is fast, cheap, and private.
Think of it like a bar tab. You don’t pay separately for each drink—you open a tab, order drinks all night, and settle up at the end. The Lightning Network is similar, except the “tab” is cryptographically secured and you can have tabs open with thousands of different parties simultaneously.
Getting a Wallet
Wallet of Satoshi — Custodial (they hold your funds), simplest but requires trust
Custodial vs. Non-Custodial: A custodial wallet means someone else holds your Bitcoin. They could steal it, be hacked, or be forced by authorities to freeze your funds. A non-custodial wallet means you control the keys. It’s more complex but safer. For serious use, always prefer non-custodial.
Receiving Payments
Your wallet generates “invoices”—QR codes or strings that contain all the information needed to pay you. Share the invoice with whoever wants to pay you. They scan it, approve the payment, and the funds arrive in seconds.
Sending Payments
Scan the recipient’s invoice, verify the amount, approve the payment. Done.
For more control, privacy, and to support the network, you can run your own Lightning node.
Reliable internet connection
Software:
Eclair — ACINQ’s implementation, good mobile support
Open channels with other nodes
This is significantly more complex than just using a wallet. We have dedicated guides for each implementation in the Archive.
Commerce: Goods and services can be bought and sold without involving banks or payment processors.
For enhanced privacy, we recommend using Lightning through Tor or our mesh bridges. Standard Lightning transactions are more private than Bitcoin on-chain transactions, but not perfectly anonymous.
The previous sections described each technology in isolation. In practice, you’ll use them together. This section covers how they fit together and how to use them safely.
Optionally, IPFS access — Through gateways or your own node
The Meshtastic device connects to the mesh. Your phone connects to the device via Bluetooth. The Nostr client can route through mesh-connected relays when internet is unavailable. Lightning payments work over whatever connectivity is available.
A Lightning routing node — Earn small fees while helping the network
Protect your keys. Your Nostr private key, your Lightning wallet seed, your Bitcoin private keys—these are your digital identity and wealth. Write them down. Store them somewhere safe. Consider multiple backups in different locations.
Separate identities where needed. You might want different Nostr identities for different contexts—one for political discussion, one for professional networking, one for personal life. This is fine. Generate separate keypairs.
Assume the mesh is monitored. Radio signals can be intercepted. Use encrypted channels for sensitive communication. Don’t rely on the mesh for anonymity—it provides resilience, not invisibility.
Keep software updated. Security vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed regularly. Update your devices and applications. Old software is vulnerable software.
Verify before trusting. When someone shares a channel key or a relay address, verify through a second channel if possible. Attackers create fake resources to collect information about users.
Help newcomers. Everyone was new once. Take time to explain things. Share this manual. Be patient with questions.
Run infrastructure if you can. The network exists because people run nodes. If you have the resources, running a relay or a repeater helps everyone.
Contribute to development. The software is open source. Bug reports, documentation, code contributions, translations—all help.
Maintain the culture. We’re building a community, not just a technology. Treat others with respect. Resolve disputes through discussion. Remember that the person on the other end of the mesh is a human being.
Try moving to a location with better line of sight
Check that you’re on the same channel as the intended recipient
Make sure you’re running recent firmware
Check if the relays you’re using are online
Check that your posts are actually being accepted (some relays reject certain content)
For true privacy, use a different channel entirely, or meet in person
The CID may be incorrect—verify it
Consider using a pinning service for important content
Check that you have sufficient balance in the correct channels
Or have someone open a channel to you
You now have the basic knowledge to participate in the Black Internet. But knowledge is not the same as understanding, and understanding is not the same as experience.
The best way to learn is to do. Get a mesh device. Set it up. Send a message. Join a Nostr relay. Make a Lightning payment. Each step will teach you more than reading ever could.
And when you’ve learned, teach others. The network grows one person at a time. Every new participant makes us stronger. Every node makes the network more resilient. Every act of helping someone else join is an act of resistance against a system that would prefer we all remained isolated, surveilled, and controllable.
We didn’t choose this fight. We would have been happy with the internet we had—the one where you could join a forum about bicycles without uploading your passport, the one where you could message your grandmother without a corporation reading every word.
They took that from us. We’re building something better.
Welcome to the Black Internet.
Document compiled by the Technical Working Group of the First Protocol Congress
Revised by the Black Library Education Collective
Distributed under the Thermodynamic License: “This document may be freely copied, modified, and shared. Attempts to restrict its distribution will only accelerate it.”
Document preserved in the Archive of the Black Library Collective
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.