When it came time to release their new song "Continuum," Young and Sick didn't want to go through a traditional
English: Tor Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
record label. It was tempting -- the LA-based fashion music and art project had been getting real traction on some of their previous songs, and they'd attracted deals reaching into the six figures. Still, for a group who enjoyed being independent, the idea of the dotted line proved a little much. Looking past that, they didn't even want to go through a mainstream internet service like Bittorrent or The Pirate Bay. For what they considered a dark song, they wanted something darker still.
They chose instead to release it on the Tor underweb, a massive collection of hidden, dangerous and terrible content lurking where the average internet user doesn't dare to go. Tor is an acronym for "The Onion Router" a nifty program that routes your information through a huge number of anonymous layers until what comes out the other side is utterly untraceable. It was originally developed by the Navy, but its found a large and eager user base for anyone who'd prefer not to be identified. It houses some of the worst -- and best -- of what the internet has to offer. It's where we find wholesale drug markets, killers for hire and disturbing porn alongside genuine freedom fighters from countries where opposing the government can be a capital offense. In fact, Tor receives federal US funding for this very reason. This walk through on Business Insider shows you some of what's on offer.
That disturbing and contradictory identity of the Tor underweb is one of the reasons Young and Sick wanted to release their new single there. It's a part of the internet that the vast majority of users have no interaction with, but it's there all the same. We've all piqued our curiosity peaking into the stranger parts of Craigslist. This is that on a grand scale. In a world where people routinely tweet their breakfast, Young and Sick became fascinated by this idea of total anonymity.
“The single continuum is a dark enough love song that it should be living in the middle of the most violent, illegal, and mysterious part of the web," they said. "The privacy of the deep web struck is beautiful and fits best with our views. Why is it that people embrace and encourage sharing so much of your life’s content with strangers? It isn’t normal."
Young and Sick is a different kind of modern recording artist -- in an era where performers are expected to constantly push their own brands through social media, they prefer to keep real life a bit closer to the chest -- they requested that their real name not be revealed for this article. Whereas the rest of internet has increasingly moved towards breaking down informational barriers through constant sharing, the underweb stands as a striking example of the other way that the technology can be used.
"Young & Sick as an act hasn't taken the same routes prescribed to most (especially in music)," they said. "We don’t have a Twitter, or Facebook, as it would be too forced, exposed. Staying in the shadows of the online world allows us to maintain the life we want to, without crafting a life narrative to what will get the most re-tweets from people we don’t know. So when it was finally time to share a piece of our soul, the place to do so was with people who also like reserving a bit of their anonymity.”
Young and Sick's manager told me that releasing the single on the Tor network was supposed to get average internet users to think about that vast sea of information lurking beneath the curated experiences of Amazon and Facebook. Love can be dark, he said. Humanity can be dark and incredible all at the same time. The underweb is one of those places where that's on full display.
