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Some people call it Onionland. An encrypted part of the Internet that allows people to browse the web with a reasonable degree of anonymity. The onion is a link to the encryption levels. However, it is better known as TOR — from the Onion router — or the Dark Web.

Jamie Bartlett has spent time exploring this Dark Web. In his recent book, he explores what people do in anonymity on all sorts of fringes of the Internet. Looking at everything from Internet trolling to anarcho-primitivists, domestic pornography, neo-Nazis and suicide support forums, he readily admitted that it was quite difficult at times to research and write about it. “They're kind of censorship-free,” Bartlett explained. “And as a result, all the good, the bad and the ugly get along together.”

One possible theory of innovation is that they need as much freedom as possible to thrive. Bartlett said these communities “kind of extend freedom to its limits.” So are innovations widespread on the Dark Web? Yes and no, he replied. It's certainly an extremely inventive place, but necessity is pretty much the mother of invention here, and creativity is often born out of limitations.

Take, for example, the Silk Road drug market. “It's a pretty hostile place for the market to exist,” Bartlett said, as the vendor system is constantly under attack by hackers or the FBI, and there is almost no trust between users. Nevertheless, thousands of people still use Silk Road as a functioning market. Every time it closes, it just opens again under a different view.

Payment mechanisms are a particular problem. “The problem on these sites is that you are trading drugs and [digital currency] bitcoins,” he explained...And drug dealers tend to run away with your bitcoins. Thus, they have repeatedly changed the principle of operation of the payment mechanism.”

Try a simple bitcoin exchange, and dealers will rip you off. Try to store the currency on a third-party site until the buyers receive their medicines and the site administrators take it away. So, according to Bartlett, Silk Road has developed something called a multi-signature escrow system. “The site, the seller and the buyer create a wallet on the site, and everyone must use their encryption key to unlock it. The money is transferred only when all three parties are satisfied that the transaction has been completed. And in case something goes wrong, it is returned to the buyer.”

Bartlett continued: “The purpose of all this was to figure out how we could create a payment system that would not depend on the whim of either the drug dealer or the site administrator. And over the course of 18 months, they've developed something that really works... they had to do it because they're constantly under attack. But it's an incredibly smart and relatively simple way to get around the problem.”

User reviews have become another way to combat distrust of Silk Road. Bartlett said that the quality of the drugs is higher for this reason. “This brings an element of competition and choice to user reviews, forcing sellers to act in the best interests of the buyer, because otherwise they will get crappy reviews. And this completely changes the dynamics of the drug market.” As expected, there are also a lot of people trying to manipulate the verification system. But a community has grown up around Silk Road that tracks reviews, and some users there believe more in the idea of an anonymous market than in the drug business. People don't do this just for the money.

Bartlett argued that this reflected a more serious problem for these communities. “Anyone involved in the crypto-anarchy has tried to combine an anonymous system — where no one needs to disclose anything about themselves - with a trust system that is essential for any functioning market.” It's difficult. But Silk Road has coped with this task by combining smart technologies with complex social systems that maintain trust within the community.

However, this is not the cozy society they have created. There is what Bartlett described as “a strange paranoia inside that everything is bugged, everything is being watched. And you just don't know.”

We see such innovations born of challenge, not only in heavily encrypted TOR. “[These kind of] smart ways of using technology to create solutions to problems, I think, are usually found on the periphery of the Internet subculture,” Bartlett said.

He cited the example of the far-right, radically anti-Islamic group the English Defense League. “In 2009, it was a group of young people from Luton who didn't have much experience in politics or a lot of money, but who saw that if they could use Facebook, they could quickly create a political movement with minimal cost.” Bart Facebook explained that in about six months, the EDL had gained more likes on Facebook than any of the UK's leading political parties, adding that across Europe, the far-right had outperformed everyone else on Facebook by harnessing the power of social interactions, memes and forms of gamification.

There are other reasons why EDL and others receive the kind of support they provide, but social media has played a key role in their creation. “We see the English Defence League and imagine them as a group marching up and down the street,” echoing 20th-century fascist movements, but Bartlett said that “95 percent of their actions take place online.”

He also spoke sympathetically about sites promoting anorexia and suicide, suggesting that they, in a sense, fill the gap left by traditional health services. “These are peer-to-peer support networks that people have independently created,” he said. The people on these sites have created an online space to communicate with people like them in order to feel less lonely. ”It becomes part of the social environment; it creates a dynamic community of people who care about each other. This is very effective if you feel isolated and have low self-esteem. There is no alternative,” he said. Bartlett wanted to add that there is a lot of destructive behavior here, “but it's still a very independent way to try to solve this problem. Not being able to go anywhere when you felt like that.”

Returning to the encrypted TOR spaces, Bartlett explained that some people are driven simply by a desire to solve technological problems. Reflecting on the bitcoin developers he spent time with, he said, “They are obsessed with the idea of creating the perfect anonymous payment system that is untraceable... For many of these people, this is an exciting adventure. They are desperately trying to solve this puzzle.”

He also displayed a fair amount of ideological zeal based on radical libertarianism. The developers hope that anonymized payment systems will be able to weaken the government's power. If you can't keep track of who pays whom, you can't tax people. If you can't tax people, the government breaks up pretty quickly.

One of the most intriguing parts of Bartlett's book explores the murder market, a kind of crowdsourced murder conspiracy where people place bets on when someone will die. Anonymity is heavily embedded in this scheme, so there is a way to get money without having to reveal your identity.

It is important to note that the amount of money can become so large that there will be a great incentive to place a bet on a certain day and then commit a murder. “The idea behind this was that no government official, bureaucrat, or politician would ever have the courage to take office because they would be too scared,” Bartlett said. This is a kind of libertarian test of centralized power. “That's so smart,” he said with muted admiration. “But the whole point is to see if you can kill someone … I'm reading this thinking it's terrible, but it's so damn smart.”

Open source code also plays a role here. This is partly an ideological decision, since open source code corresponds to the ideas of freedom prevalent in TOR, whether it is freedom based on libertarianism, anarchism or something else. But users are also implementing it because it works. Drug traffickers use open source software because it's good for business — a way to deal with this hostile environment. Even ISIS, in some ways, adheres to open source. Or at least, Bartlett explained, it took open source encryption software and created its own private version.

“Open source means that more pairs of eyes are checking it,” he said, returning to the strange paranoia fueling many TOR. “Are there any flaws in it, any exploits, any backdoors that allow third parties to get in, and the more open the source code is, the more trust you can have in it … I think more and more people have moved to this open source software model, partly because they realize that in a world where no one understands the world completely, the more open it is, the probably safer it is,” Bartlett said.

This is a conscious approach to innovation. He added: “Many of them use open source materials because they understand that this is how we will come up with completely new ways to do things. They do this consciously, they write code in such a way that others can create on top of it. Because they know there will be a million different applications for things they haven't thought of yet.”