A closer look at the web's new world order

By Carl Miller

I’D NEVER met him before, but he leaned towards me, so close that our faces almost touched.

It was just before Christmas 2016, and the pub was hot and cramped, full of musty clothes and yuletide hubbub. I stared at the phone he was holding. “Look,” he said. A video was playing.

On the screen was only darkness and the sound of ragged, uneven breathing. Ten seconds passed. Then 20. And suddenly the screen was full of light.

Fire streaked along the ground, weaving away from the camera and towards the dim outline of a car some metres away. Within a moment, it was covered in flames, rolling out from the undercarriage and licking up around and over the roof.

A scrap of paper was held up to the camera, “a dedication” it read. And there lit a lurid orange by the car now torching ferociously in the background, this man’s name, Chris, was printed in large, black font.

Early 30s, smartly dressed and with black hair cropped close to his head, Chris looks like any of the thousands of central London workers that pour into the pubs after office hours.

And by day, this is exactly who he is: An IT specialist — a “sysadmin” — at a large company in central London. But the reason we met is because of what Chris does when he gets home from work.

Darknet researcher, ethical hacker, cybercrime investigator, I’m not sure there is yet a neat label for what Chris is. But in his flat, six screens in front of him, Chris plunges into the darkest and most dangerous places that exist on the internet to investigate what they’re really like.

Eyes cast down onto the table in front of him, Chris explained that he was deep into his most serious of forays into a strange, scary world. For over a year, he had been investigating one of the most pervasive rumours about what the internet could now provide.

Something he’d been sure was a scam, a myth. Yet “scammers don’t do that”, said Chris, contemplating the video. For the first time in all of Chris’s investigations, it was ambiguous whether he’d found a real operation. One selling murder on demand.

Chris was only one of a remarkable cast of people that I met over the next year.

There was Eliot Higgins, the softly spoken, details-obsessed citizen journalist who had begun by arguing in the comment threads of newspapers and leapt onto the front page of the New York Times.

There was the middle-aged hacker who casually told me how he’d managed to reset the mini-bar bill of everyone staying at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, just using the television’s remote control.

I’d come face-to-face with the blanched, terrified face of a cyber-criminal who was part of a community of thousands of men stealing private sexual images from women’s iPhones and trading them as a currency.

Surrounded by the towering neon of Seoul, I’d met a teenager known as a “hikkikomori”, one of tens of thousands of young South Koreans who had departed from society.

He never left his house, and only lived his life online. I’d gone on a cybercrime raid with the police, lived in a political-technology commune in east London (twice), peered into the mechanics of algorithms that have been kept secret. It was the strangest year of my life.

I had immersed myself in the stories and lives of these people because I was searching for a single idea. One I thought we needed to understand the world today.

Across the world, again and again, the old familiarities were tumbling down and new social orders, new hierarchies, new winners were emerging that all, in one way or another, traced back to digital technology.

The idea we needed was power. Who could reach into our lives and change them? What shaped our choices and preferences? Whether soft and subtle, or coercive and scary, power over people was what I was trying to understand: How it was being won and lost, fought over and transformed across almost every aspect of our lives.

Understanding the reality of power was, I thought, the best way of understanding the world today. And it was people like Chris that could teach us what power, now, was really like.

Chris’ target was an assassination market nestled on the darknet, a slice of the internet where nobody knows who you are and nobody knows where you go.

“Hire a killer or a hacker,” reads the website’s slogan. “If you want to kill someone,” it promises, “we are the right guys.”

Killings start from $5,000 (€4,250) for “basic killers”, but for $30,000 you could hire an “ex-military trained hitman with a sniper rifle on buildings”. The site’s USP was that technology now meant that contract killings, like anything else, could be transacted distantly and anonymously. Clients interested in these services were directed towards an online order form.

Chris had tweaked and probed and before long a spectacular breakthrough led him deep into the workings of the site. He’d found a way to download the entire message database, and built a window into what was really happening there: Who was registered, what they were saying, even who was paying money.

For months he quietly waited, watching the site in operation and recording the 800 messages that were exchanged between its users and a shadowy administrator.

I’d be scrolling through the messages,” said Chris. “Troll, troll, troll, troll.

As he suspected, Chris found that the website never actually supplied murders, preferring instead to extort money from the people seeking to use it. But some of the messages sent to the site seemed genuine.

He’d found 12 significant targets for whom money had been paid, and about as many people again who had wanted, possibly, to sign up to carry out killings and other forms of violence. As he began to publicly debunk it, he’d started to receive those threats.

He'd gone to his local police station. He’d phoned the British police. He’d phoned the LAPD, then the FBI. From Chris’ perspective at least, nobody was taking him seriously. An Albanian mafia group conducting murder-for-hire as an e-commerce venture? The darknet? Bitcoin?

I knew for a fact the police were not looking into this,” Chris told me.

So he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Chris’ next move was a strike on the assassination market itself, an attack as surreal as anything on the site. Chris called it Operation Vegetable. He uploaded something called a “shim” to the website — a smuggled fragment of code.

That fragment opened a tiny lever of control for Chris within the website itself. On July 3, 2016, he struck, using that lever to wrestle the website offline. People trying to visit the site were now diverted to another that Chris had set up, with the message: “This website has closed for business.”

In the background a song was playing. “Goodbye, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.”

As I followed Chris through his journey into the heart of an assassination market, it was so otherworldly, so bizarre, that it felt disconnected from all the rest of us who do not choose — as Chris does — to spend time in the darkest recesses of the internet. His story was frightening, yes, but also distant.

A window into life at the fringes of society, but certainly not most people’s everyday.

But I slowly began to realise that Chris’ story was far from unusual. Again and again, I saw the same echoes of Chris in what was happening to power everywhere.

Organised societies have always tried to cage power. Professional standards, ethical frameworks, regulation, public scrutiny, the law itself, are all meant to keep power under control, to limit how people use it. But wherever I looked, the rules were breaking down.

The police were facing perhaps the worst crisis of law enforcement in their history. It had become unbelievably easy to do cybercrime and almost half of crime now happened through the internet.

Online fraud had become the most common crime in most developed countries. You are 20 times more likely to be robbed at your computer than mugged in the street.

Your social media accounts are as likely to be burgled as your house. You are more likely to be targeted by a computer virus than all forms of violent crime put together.

Yet thanks to the internet, crime could pass unbelievably easy across borders. Again and again, investigations foundered as the police struggled to locate the victims, perpetrators, and evidence scattered all across the world, separated by borders that they often couldn’t reach across.

The political mainstream was besieged. The monopolies mainstream parties are long used to holding — of mass messaging, the mobilisation of enormous numbers of people — things that used to be difficult and expensive, that needed planning and hierarchies and money, had come tumbling down.

Protests were becoming known by hashtags, and more and different kinds of digital-first political parties were jumping in to contend mainstream elections across the world, driven by rapidly changing forms of digital campaigning and activism that regulators struggled to even monitor, let alone enforce.

Media was faring little better. The famous global titles rumbled onwards, but underneath there was a bloodbath. Hundreds of local papers had shut, and as thousands of journalists lost their jobs, 2016 became the first year they were outnumbered by those in public relations.

It was the mediators of content — Google and Facebook — not the creators of it, that were now in the driving seat. Professional journalists told me they had become content factories, churning out newswires and borrowed stories to harvest the clicks they needed to keep things going.

It was now often citizen journalists, like Eliot, doing the tedious, gritty, investigative work because they had exactly the one thing that the professionals often lacked: time.

Capitalism itself was under strain by the new economies driven by data and platforms. The largest hotelier in the world is a software company. So too is the largest taxi company, telecoms provider, payments and recruiting and advertising firms.

But as software eats industry after industry, it created in each monopolies, duopolies, oligopolies, vast concentrations of wealth and power packed into the sprawling, primary-colour campuses that dot Silicon Valley.

The digital world didn’t create new markets, it created single, take-all winners, and the century-old laws that existed to protect the lifeblood of capitalism — open competition — simply didn’t recognise the new economic logics unleashed by the digital age.

Crime had changed, but the police couldn’t. Politics had changed, but parliaments stayed the same. Enormous new companies had exploded to the stop of the economy, but the laws governing them hadn’t stayed in touch.

In information warfare, the armies of liberal democracies that did play by the rules were the ones most disadvantaged. And the actual developers of technology could change each of our day-to-day outside of any kind of professional guidelines.

I’d met the makers of algorithms who could accidentally influence millions by tweaking a single digit in their unbelievably complicated creations. I’d sat next to the creators of bots who could build activists far louder and more tireless than any human could be in real life.

I’d seen citizen journalists break enormous stories from their arm-chairs half a world away. I’d seen hackers explain in dull monotone how they could cause wind farms to burst into flames, who could control laptops with just a flashing light.

The people who hold power over the lives of others are a little like the gods of Greek or Roman myth. They shape our preferences, choices, desires, indeed our lives.

We are stepping into a world where power is, I think, more accessible to each of us. We are all a little closer to the gods than we were before. But the gods are closer to us too. And they hold forms of power that we can’t always see.

We now face a world beset by the onrush of both liberation and control. A world where technology is allowing the more perfect expression of those conflicting qualities that humans have always carried inside themselves: the desire to dominate and control, and also the potential to be brave and selfless.

The new gods have broken out of their cages, and we are only beginning to comprehend the world they are making.

- The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab by Carl Miller is out now on William Heinemann.