New literary journal hosted on Tor. We aim to foster cooperation between technical & humanities-based communities. Email & XMPP: [email protected] http://toristinkirir4xj.onion/ https://twitter.com/thetorist
In January 2016, we released the first issue of the first literary magazine hosted inside the Tor anonymity network. We knew this project would cater to a niche audience. In fact, that was precisely the point: to create an artistic outlet for the growing communities of people interested in topics such as cryptography and anonymity, and to help these technologies realize their positive potential.
Nonetheless, we were taken aback by the breadth of its success. Major media outlets including Motherboard, Lit Hub, Deutschland Radio, and the Atlantic ran pieces on The Torist’s inaugural issue. William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, even retweeted an article about us—a cyberpunk’s dream come true.
Buoyed by the surprise popularity of The Torist Issue 1, we’re excited to release this call for fiction, poetry, non-fiction and visual art for our second issue.
What to Submit
Prose submissions should not exceed 4000 words, though there can be a degree of flexibility, for instance if your work is exceptional or is suitable to be excerpted. Prose submissions may encompass fiction, non-fiction, and reviews.
Non-fiction could include a broad range of material, for instance journalism, essays and op-eds. Please note we do not provide academic peer review.
With works of fiction, we are less concerned about genre and more about whether the work strikes us as insightful, exciting, forward-thinking, and enjoyable.
Reviews could deal with (but need not be limited to):
books or other publications
films
music
technologies
websites (especially in the deep web)
events (technology conferences, art exhibitions)
Poems should not exceed five pages in length, though there may be exceptions made for outstanding work.
Visual artwork will be used on the cover and for illustrations throughout the issue. Submissions can encompass most formats which can be sent electronically including photography, graphic design, and photographs of physical works such as paintings, drawings, and sculptures. We would also be interested in sequential art such as comics.
Your work doesn’t have to address themes such as cryptography, anonymity or surveillance, though that, too, is welcome. The purpose of The Torist is to engage with communities of people interested in those topics and encourage their creativity to grow. The themes those communities address can arise organically.
How to Submit
We have two main ways of submitting: by email at [email protected] or through our GlobaLeaks submissions site toristfgqiroaded.onion. If you use PGP email encryption, please make use of our public key.
We accept most file types. If we are unable to open a file, we will contact you if possible and ask for an alternative. Please only use PDFs if it is necessary to preserve special formatting; in particular, PDFs can make it more difficult to edit extended prose. For written work, it is fine either to attach the file or to put it in the body of the email.
You may publish under any name you wish, but please avoid offensive ones. If you do not provide us with a name, we will simply publish you as Anonymous. If you have a preference please let us know by putting it in the document containing your work, in an email, or in the “Full description” box in the GlobaLeaks submissions form. Providing a name is completely optional.
Key Dates
For inclusion in Issue 2, we require submissions by August 1, 2016.
Been thinking a lot lately about counter-police methods and technology recently. Like putting stealth RFID tags on police vehicles and tracking them for example. There’s a potentially revolutionary benefit to being able to track the police and their every move. And the beautiful thing is you don’t even need RFID tag or GPS locators, you could use hidden cameras/license plate readers, or even networks of drones to monitor them.
There’s tons of applications and reasons where this could be beneficial especially for anarchists but there’s not enough technologically inclined anarchists tbh. We’re gifted with an amazing technological capacity and are sitting on tumblr not exploiting it. We’re in an age where we can produce our own high tech circuitry with programmable Raspberry Pi’s, there’s drones, open source software, there’s TOR, I mean, this stuff is a dream but we’re failing utterly to exploit it.
We should be *doing* more (not to be ableist or exclusionary; there’s a role or job for everyone out there regardless of ability or able-bodiedness) and theorizing less. I mean it’s a little embarrassing because even ancaps are better at this than us. It’s a crime we on the far/ultra left have barely exploited this technological golden age.
Too many theory anarchists, not enough STEM anarchists.
I mean I’m half kidding. It would be nice to see a few more of you in the maths department, but I think it’s unfair to say the domain of modern technology has been completely unexploited.
Just the existence of open source software, or efforts to circumvent censorship and intellectual property, etc., suggests there are plenty of skilled individuals who, while perhaps not classifying themselves as anarchists, are at least broadly aligned with such principles. Then of course you’ve got the more expressly political cyber attacks on private corporations and so on—it’s a reactive approach, of questionable effectiveness, but that’s genuine resistance.
That’s broadly my point yea. I understand the justified stigma of STEMlords but that doesn’t mean we should completely abandon STEM in favor of the humanities. Like I think this broadly speaks to the rut that anarchism has been stuck in since the post-WTO riots (sry ameri-centrism) which is this malaise and hopelessness that has lead to a lack of *doing* and more about theorizing. That’s obviously a generalization but we’re focusing our efforts in the wrong places.
Like, in my mind, we need to be creating dual power-structures in the first world and export our knowledge/technology and ideas to the third world. It’s an impossible task to take the great imperialist America out from within, let’s be completely honest. They have technology and training that would render any revolution or attack on the country a joke, they’ve been preparing for this shit for half a century.
For this reason I think if an armed struggle in the “first world” to be possible we must first build up the “third world”. In a post I made a few days ago I talked about how anarchist praxis should also focus on stealing corporate/commercial IP and open source it then translate it into different languages and spread it around. A Wikipedia clone where you could find instructions on how to manufacture a combine harvester for example. Those of us in the first world have easier access to the technology and ideas but not much access to raw materials whereas it’s the opposite in poor countries.
In other words (sorry I’m typing this on my phone so it’s probably very rambly and not terribly coherent), we should be creating bottom-up autonomous development societies. We should spread communism across the globe better than the USSR did during the cold war. We can pull it off better than the Leninists because our ideas don’t give space for the state to breathe. Detaching our anti-politics from the state gives us a luxury that Leninist programs didn’t have; it complicates the geo-politics and makes it harder for imperialist countries like the US a chance to react. It’s much easier to recapture a state, not so much an autonomous society.
Depending on who you ask, the "Dark Web"—the Internet's mysterious undercurrent accessible only through specialized software—is either a libertarian utopia or a
Lit Hub’s Amy Brady has given us a great interview. Give it a read if you want to learn more about our project.
When we published Jamie Bartlett's The Dark Net early last year (paperback coming in May 2016), we were pretty excited. Its full of absolutely true stories about sex, drugs, Bitcoins, and techno-utopian libertarians hell bent on achieving immortality! Great! Awesome! Weird!…
Introducing @thetorist, the first literary mag of the dark net.
Finally, what we believe to be the first dark web literary magazine is now online and ready for reading! In this issue you can look forward to:
Editors’ Note
Fiction
The Breakfast Room, by Peter Conlin
Chapter Nine of The United States of Air, by J.M. Porup
Shadowbook, by Miriam Rasch
Poetry
Two Poems, by Alissa Quart
Snowfall, by Vance Osterhout
Non-fiction
Disruptive anti-fraud artivism – Digital art exposing Internet scammers, by KairUs (Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle)
Misusing the Master’s Tools: Exploring the Capacity to Break from Prescriptive Use, by Nathanael Bassett
Here is the contents page for our imminent first issue, which we believe will also be the first darkweb literary zine. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
VICE: But how does suicide, which as you say, is epidemic, become these frightening acts of mass murder?
BIFO: Well, because those people hate everybody. The frequency of psychopathology is on the rise. You see, my book is also an attempt to find a possibility of understanding the spreading suicide of terror, the kind of acts that are currently being committed by the Islamic State, for example. This kind of phenomenon... I don't think we can possibly describe it only in terms of ideological or religious beliefs.
Of course these religious and political beliefs do exist and are important factors, but I believe that the deeper, more universal motivation of these acts is suffering. Because you just can't understand a young person coming from London and going to Syria to kill and be killed only on the basis of their religious beliefs. We have to try to understand their humiliation.... we have to try to understand what kind of hell is inside this person.
The latest addition to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense series is a set of tools and instructions aimed specifically at LGBTQ kids, who have unique threat models (being outed) and adversaries (homophobic friends, parents, pastors).
EFF’s guide gives already marginalized and threatened kids the ability to explore information related to LGBTQ issues with a much lower risk of censorship (by parental or school censorware, which typically blocks information related to sexuality) and discovery by snoops.
We’re very sorry to announce that we believe we have missed submissions sent to us through our GlobaLeaks. When working properly, GlobaLeaks is supposed to send our editors encrypted emails notifying us of new material. For some reason this silently stopped working at some point (we tested this feature early on in the node’s life and everything was fine). This, combined with the default expiration time of 2 weeks for all submissions, means the files sent to us have since then disappeared.
Admittedly, it would have been wise to log in and check our receiver accounts anyway and test the email function frequently enough to detect the error in good time. We apologize for not doing this and hope you don’t think we’ve been too negligent.
We kindly ask that if you submitted to us through our GlobaLeaks site that you re-submit if possible. Thank you!
We’re very sorry to announce that we believe we have missed submissions sent to us through our GlobaLeaks. When working properly, GlobaLeaks is supposed to send our editors encrypted emails notifying us of new material. For some reason this silently stopped working at some point (we tested this feature early on in the node’s life and everything was fine). This, combined with the default expiration time of 2 weeks for all submissions, means the files sent to us have since then disappeared.
Admittedly, it would have been wise to log in and check our receiver accounts anyway and test the email function frequently enough to detect the error in good time. We apologize for not doing this and hope you don’t think we’ve been too negligent.
We kindly ask that if you submitted to us through our GlobaLeaks site that you re-submit if possible. Thank you!
