New Books Network Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
Mar 30, 2026
Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology, offers ethnographic insight into digital communities. Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer and author of Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, explores Tor’s history, infrastructure, and community. They discuss how Tor works, volunteer relay operators, political tensions within the project, Tor’s role against censorship and surveillance, and its mainstreaming into everyday tech.
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How Tor Hides Who Communicates
- Tor is an anonymity infrastructure that bounces traffic through volunteer-run nodes to hide sender and recipient metadata.
- Ben Collier compares it to sending a postal letter that the post office cannot trace, highlighting network-level anonymity rather than content encryption.
Fieldwork Inside Hacker Conferences
- Fieldwork involved attending distinct in-person conferences for engineers, maintainers, and activists which revealed different cultures and rituals.
- Ben recalls hacker conferences where people rode giant mechanized spiders, showing the playful, festival-like maintainer scene.
Get Into Tech Communities By Contributing
- To gain access and trust in technical communities, join in and contribute concrete work rather than only observing.
- Ben started presenting academic work at conferences to provoke discussion and make himself known to participants.
