[1] Cybertwee, “Bake Sale on the Deep Web!,” Kickstarter, 2015.

[2] Kari Paul, “I Bought Adorable Cookies on the Deep Web,” Motherboard, December 9, 2015, para. 6.

[3] GynePunk is based in Calafou, an industrial post-capitalist ecovillage in Catalonia. Their activities focus on subverting traditional physician-patient and gender roles in women’s health through open-source tools and DIY kits, e.g. 3D-printed speculums or do-it-yourself urinalysis Elise D. Thorburn, “Cyborg Witches: Class Composition and Social Reproduction in the GynePunk Collective,” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 2 (March 4, 2017): 153–67. 

[4] Zach Brooke, “A Marketer’s Guide to the Dark Web,” American Markeeting Association, July 15, 2015, “Sales and the Dark Web” para. 5.

[5] Brooke, “Sales and the Dark Web,” para. 3.

[6] According to the website Motherboard, “Cybertwee added that the experience underscored for them the volatility of Bitcoin, which saw a 70 percent spike in value in November, right when the bake sale was scheduled. The founders had sent out an email to backers before the sale began reminding them to buy bitcoins early, as the currency generally takes about a week to show up in wallets after being purchased, but the collective had to be flexible on prices for customers due to the constant fluctuation.” (Paul, “I Bought Adorable Cookies on the Deep Web”).

[7] Alexia Maddox et al., “Constructive Activism in the Dark Web: Cryptomarkets and Illicit Drugs in the Digital ‘Demimonde,’” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 111.

[8] Cybertwee, “Cybertwee Dark Web Handbook,” Cybertwee, November 30, 2016, para. 2.

[9] The complete Cybertwee’s manifesto: “the singularity is dear. far too long have we succumbed to the bitter edge of the idea that power is lost in the sweet and tender. romantic is not weak. feminine is not weak. cute is not weak. we are fragmented and multifaceted bbs. lack of emotion is oft favored because success is defined as the ability to be mechanical and efficient. but sentimentality, empathy, and being too soft should not be seen as weaknesses. we see the limitations of corporeality, as solipsists, we know the body is the original prosthesis for operating in this universe, we know the body illusory, we curate our candy. our sucre sickly sweet is intentional and not just a lure or a trap for passing flies, but a self-indulgent intrapersonal biofeedback mechanism spelled in emoji and gentle selfies” Cybertwee, “The Singularity Is Dear.,” Cybertwee, accessed May 8, 2018.

[10] Cybertwee, “The Cybertwee Manifesto,” 2014, para. 2.

[11] Gabriella Hileman, May Waver, and Violet Forest, The Journey of cybertwee into the Deep Web, interview by Emily Braun, online [Coin Cafe Blog], November 5, 2015, para. 6.

[12] Hjorth Larissa, “Digital Art in the Age of Social Media: A Case Study of the Politics of Personalization via Cute Culture,” 2009, 3.

[13] Larissa, 7.

[14] “Clearing Up Confusion - Deep Web vs. Dark Web,” BrightPlanet (blog), March 27, 2014, “Moving a Little Deeper” para. 1.

[15] “Clearing Up Confusion - Deep Web vs. Dark Web,” “Getting a Little Darker” para.1-2.

[16] Andy Greenberg, “Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Dark Web?,” WIRED, September 11, 2014.

[17] Caitlin Dewey, “In Search of the Darkest, Most Disturbing Content on the Internet,” The Washington Post, September 2, 2015, para. 3.

[18] Rob Waugh, “12 Scary Things Which Happen When You Go on the ‘Dark Web,’” Metro (blog), July 8, 2015; Jen Lennon, “18 Creepy True Stories About the Deep Web,” Ranker, November 6, 2015; Cale Guthrie Weissman, “The Creepiest and Most Bizarre Stories Told by People Who Explored the Internet’s Hidden Websites,” Business Insider, June 30, 2015.

[19] Germán Sierra, “Filth as Non-Technology,” KEEP IT DIRTY a. (2016): 2.

[20] Emily Braun, “The Sweetest Things on the Deep Web,” Coin Cafe Blog (blog), December 10, 2015, para. 6.

[21] Susanna Paasonen, Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The MIT Press, 2011), 208.

[22] Waugh, “12 Scary Things Which Happen When You Go on the ‘Dark Web,’” para. 14.

[23] “5 Surprisingly Wholesome Things I’ve Found on the Dark Web,” The Next Web, February 24, 2018, para. 2.

[24] Wilson, para. 13.

[25] Nicholas Nakayama Shapiro, “The 7 Cutest Puppies On The Dark Web,” Odyssey, February 28, 2017, para. 7.

[26] Bryan Clark, “Kittens on the Blockchain Is the Future Nobody Asked For,” The Next Web, December 2, 2017, para. 3.

[27] Axiom Zen, “CryptoKitties | Collect and Breed Digital Cats!,” CryptoKitties, accessed May 10, 2018.

[28] Jordan Hoffman, “How Cats Took over the Internet: New Exhibition Is Catnip for Feline Fans,” The Guardian, August 7, 2015, sec. Art and design.

[29] Leigh Alexander, “Why The Internet Chose Cats,” Thought Catalog (blog), January 25, 2011, para. 7.

[30] Adam Vaughan, “How Viral Cat Videos Are Warming the Planet,” The Guardian, September 25, 2015, sec. Environment.

[31] Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 17.

[32] “Cat Videos and the Superflat Cinema of Attractions,” Film Criticism 40, no. 2 (July 2016): 16.

[33] Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,” Hyperallergic (blog), March 1, 2013, para. 41.

[34] According to Eler and Durbin: “In the Internet land of immediate responses, reactions, and reprimands via text chatter, reblogs, deleted comments, likes, and unlikes, hearts, and de-hearted emotional Tumblr affirmations, Elisa Lam’s 19-year-old friend Jialin began Tumblr blogging about her friend’s death. Was she a bad friend? How could this have happened to Elisa? ‘She’s a real person. Stop it. The autopsy results were inconclusive. I have anger issues,’ she writes on the portion of her tumblelog tagged “Elisa Lam.” She poured her emotions out through Tumblr, the simple instant blogging platform founded by young entrepreneur David Karp in 2007 for exactly that purpose. Forbes dubbed it Karp’s $800 million art project, and it does indeed exist for personal expression” Eler and Durbin, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic.”

[35] Eler and Durbin, para. 4.

[36] Kate Durbin, Where Are The Girls, Online? Part Two of an Interview with Kate Durbin, online [Hyperallergic], January 16, 2013, para. 4.

[37] Paul, “I Bought Adorable Cookies on the Deep Web,” para. 11.

[38] Cybertwee, “Bake Sale,” para. 1.

[39] Wilson, “5 Surprisingly Wholesome Things I’ve Found on the Dark Web,” para. 4.

[40] Izabella Scott, “A Brief History of Cyberfeminism,” Artsy, October 13, 2016, para. 2.

On November 13, 2015, the Internet art group Cybertwee, founded by the artists Gabriella Hileman, May Waver, and Violet Forest, held a 24-hour bake sale on the dark web. They sold 95 rosewater cookies sprinkled in edible gold glitter. The cookie recipe, made available in Cybertwee’s Kickstarter, was as follows:

Every five cookies, baked by Hileman and Wave (Forest handled the website programming) cost $7 or 0.0212 BTC,[2] and the proceeds from the sale, just over $300, were donated to the feminist biohacker collective GynePunk.[3] The Dark Web Bake Sale was the result of a Kickstarter held the month before, in October 2015, raising money for ingredients and shipment costs. The 53 backers who contributed with $5 or more received an invitation to the bake sale via email, including the time and date of the event, and a link to Cybertwee’s .onion website and password-protected Tumblr. Backers also received a unique bitcoin wallet address and an informational PDF on how to use the Tor software, bitcoin, and the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), for added security during the transaction.[4] “We wanted to make the Dark Web more accessible to ourselves and others,” Hileman explained in an interview. “We felt like it was made out to be this difficult and dangerous thing, but we thought it was a really valuable tool. We were really inspired by whistle-blowers, and wanted to make it easier to understand for others like us who may have felt alienated or intimidated by the process.”[5] The bake sale made the members of Cybertwee aware of the challenges of the cryptocurrency market, as the constant fluctuations in bitcoin value forced them to be flexible with prices.[6] A video screen capture of the Deep Web Bake Sale is available on Cybertwee’s website (http://cybertwee.net/), [Video 1] along with the description and documentation of the collective’s other activities, such as exhibitions, installations, and app/ Internet art, including the Cybertwee Headquarters, the Cybertwee bb Dome, the Shared Memory Emotional Infiltration, and The Oracle.

The Dark Web Bake Sale also encouraged the members of Cybertwee to educate themselves and others on technologies with little female participation, pushing against the image of macho cybercrime often associated with the dark web. (Although, according to some accounts, even the infamous online black market Silk Road once served as a site of “constructive activism”[7]). In addition to the Dark Web Bake Sale, Cybertwee produced the Dark Web Handbook, a zine on how to access the dark web and use bitcoin. Each zine came with $15 in bitcoin, “which you can use to make a bitcoin transaction and have homemade super cute edible cookies sent to your house.”[8] The zine included a moiré animation (an optical illusion created by parallel lines crossing over each other) of a golden ring from the Sonic The Hedgehog videogames—a cuter, more nostalgic kind of virtual “coin.” The Dark Web Bake Sale’s visuals emphasized the feminine and innocent connotations of the bake sale with cursive letters and floating stars on bright pastel backgrounds, rainbow gradient, cute GIFs of laughing cookies, computers with ribbons, glitter flowers, butterflies, and so on. [Figure 1] This aesthetics aligns with Cybertwee’s manifesto, “The singularity is dear,” available on the website’s homepage,[9] whose title is a cutified pun on The Singularity Is Near, the influential 2005 book about artificial intelligence by Ray Kurzweil.

Cybertwee’s online manifesto includes a facsimile of the typewritten document decorated with cute stickers of flowers and bugs, a transcription of the text, and a video of Cybertwee’s members reading the manifesto out loud. [Video 2, Figure 2] In this video, Gabriella, May, and Violet are snuggled up against each other, bathed in a dreamy light, enclosed by a frame in gradients of yellow and pink. “Romantic is not weak. Feminine is not weak. Cute is not weak,” Cybertwee declares. “Lack of emotion is oft favored because success is defined as the ability to be mechanical and efficient. But sentimentality, empathy, and being too soft should not be seen as weaknesses.”[10] Cybertwee’s affirmative “politics of emotional experience and social bonding”[11] speak of the decolonizing power of cuteness as a tool for techno- and cyberfeminism. By strategically deploying its “emotional vernacular”[12] creativity, cute aesthetics, and the kawaii in particular, push against the male-dominated Internet, cyberspace, and new media technologies where misogyny, sexism, and racism often run loose. As scholar Larissa Hjorth puts it, cute has become “integral in the politics of personalization in the age of affective technologies”[13] like social media. And while this customization often takes place in the capitalist realm, cuteness’s grassrootness and the affects orbiting around it—the intimate, the feminine, the romantic—can be reclaimed as a mobilizing strength, capable of opening up emancipatory spaces and conversations.

Before I continue, I will make a short interlude to address the phenomeno-poetics of the dark web. According to most definitions, “the Surface Web is anything that a search engine can find while the Deep Web is anything that a search engine can’t find,”[14] including perfectly harmless if ungoogleable contents that one can only access via search boxes within websites. The dark web, in turn, is a small part of the deep web, intentionally hidden so that it can only be accessed through non-standard web browsers like Tor, allowing for anonymous and untraceable communication.[15] Tor’s domain suffix, “.onion,” is an acronym derived from the original software name, The Onion Router. In turn, Tor’s logo features an onion in place of the “o,” with a quarter of its bulb sliced off, revealing the hidden layers of scale leaves beneath the tunica. [Figure 3]

Tor’s onion imagery is appropriate, considering how it introduced a sense of inscrutable deepness into the otherwise panoptical World Wide Web. The growing awareness of a negative space lurking under, or beyond, the traditional Internet, contributed to the fact that despite relatively small-sized, the dark web gained the reputation of a readily accessible cyber underworld of child pornography, illegal drugs, weapons, and other criminal activities.[16] As a result, the creepypasta multiplied, feeding off the “the myth that, if you dig deep and long enough, you will find the furthest reaches of human depravity—torture, murder, terrorism, you name it—on the Dark Web.”[17] The dark web is the site of fabled “red rooms,” live streaming assassination and rape, of cannibal recipes for cooking women, DIY vasectomy kits, and spine-chilling stalking tales.[18] Not unlike the exploding television in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the dark web threatens to spill its viscera onto our everyday “normal” lives, to leak out of its constraints like radioactive waste. [Figure 4] The tagline of the American procedural drama CSI: Cyber (2015-16), “It can happen to you,” captures very well this techno-miasmatic image of the dark web. [Figure 5] As author Germán Sierra puts it, the dark web points towards the unsettling realization that our digital culture is haunted by “a more problematic, deep wet interiority fighting against its own limits to pour itself out.”[19] 

The promotional photographs for Cybertwee’s Dark Web Bake Sale were also not entirely devoid of eerie undertones. Instead of the natural look typical of food photography, Cybertwee displayed their heart-shaped cookies in purplish neon lights, with an uncanny glow reflecting on the aluminum foil underneath them, like bakeries out of Johnny Mnemonic or other old-school cyberpunk vision. [Figure 6] There were also slight mismatches in the photograph, emphasizing the digital medium like a glitch in the Matrix. It was as if the eeriness of the dark web stuck to the cookies. Indeed, Emily Braun, a writer for the Coin Cafe Blog who participated in Dark Web Bake Sale, describes her nervousness when unpacking the cookies, despite the legality and smoothness of the transaction, “perhaps due to the nefarious reputation of deep web purchases.”[20] The Dark Web Bake Sale played with one’s fear of the unresting digital substances that circulate the dark web, using something cute and innocent—a bake sale—to wreak havoc in the Internet’s “deep wet interiority.”

In the process, Cybertwee captured something cute about Tor itself with its onion imagery, like Apple with the bite. Among other Dark Web Bake Sale visuals, Cybertwee included Tor’s onion logo cutified with emoji flowers, as if the bulb was a flower vase. [Figure 7] Another GIF shows two browser tabs with colorful icons shaped like stars and hearts, with the words “deep” and “web” inside. [Figure 8] The cutification of Tor creates an unresolved tension with our mental image of the dark web as a “locus of the disgusting, the nasty, the excessive.”[21] This cutification, however, was not created artificially by Cybertwee; instead, it was a trend already brewing in the dark web. For instance, users of Tor have come across sellers of pointless goods like fresh-baked pretzels or carrots. One Redditor reports they “Found a guy selling carrots. Like, it wasn’t code for anything, he was literally just selling carrots for bitcoin. 10/10 would visit again.”[22] The effect of such accounts is comical and nonsensical. After all, minor goods like vegetables or cookies are inconsistent with the high technological hellhole that the dark web supposedly is.

In “5 surprisingly wholesome things I’ve found on the dark web,” Emily Wilson describes the dark web as “a mix of eBay for criminals, the weirdest flea market you’ve ever been to, and a bad guy meet-up.”[23] Wilson lists some of her cutest dark web finds, including a book called Mind Blowing Modular Origami, a guide to fishkeeping, a smooth jazz Internet radio station, a grilled cheese sandwich, and Tor Kittenz, an onion website consisting of “a never-ending slideshow of cat pictures.”[24] [Figures 9 & 10] Another article, by Nicholas Nakayama Shapiro, lists the “The 7 Cutest Puppies On The Dark Web.” [Figure 11] Poking fun at Internet pet celebrities, these puppies are, according to the author, “untraceable and irresistibly cute.” Shapiro’s dark web puppies include Roger The Next Incarnation of Christ, Buddy The Alien, Leila The Talking Pup, Harry The Cannibal, Fifi The Psychoactive Hallucination, and Rover The Dark Web Hit-man. One puppy, an adorable black pug, is simply labeled A Monster. “Nope. Not even gonna address what this one did. I hope they put him away for life,” Shapiro writes. “Still cute, though.”[25] The cryptocurrency technology itself has also been used for recreational purposes in virtual games like CryptoKitties, dubbed “2017’s version of Neopets,”[26] which exist within a decentralized Ethereum blockchain. Each kitty is “Collectible. Breedable. Adorable”[27] and possesses a “256-bit genome that holds the genetic sequence to all the different combinations kittens can have.” Such eruptions of cuteness in the dark web and related instances like cryptographic technologies may appear absurd at first. However, their intersections of affect, gender, and digitality invite us to consider not just the broader destiny of our digital culture, including the challenges of techno- and cyberfeminism in the twenty-first century.

From the first home computers emerging in the 1970s, the Information Age seemed to hold a potential to bring about our wildest transhumanist fantasies of physical and intellectual enhancement. Instead, we got cat videos and porn, both of which have attracted a considerable amount of scholarship in the 2010s. While books such as Susanna Paasonen’s Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (2011) and the launch of the academic journal Porn Studies in 2014 attest to the former, cat videos have been addressed from sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic frameworks, and even made it to museums and film festivals. In 2015, for instance, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) hosted the exhibition How Cats Took Over The Internet, entirely dedicated to the cat video medium, featuring famous Internet cats like Grumpy Cat, Maru or Lil Bub.[28] [Figure 12] The fact that cats have effectively become the “unofficial mascot of the Internet”[29] has led journalists to joke that “viral cat videos are warming the planet,”[30] our appetite for online cuteness being powered by massive, energy-intensive server farms occupying millions and millions of square meters from the United States to China, from Wales to India. [Figure 13] Indeed, if, as media theorist Jussi Parikka suggests, humanity (or, at least, a significant part of it) is becoming “less-high tech,” and more “defined by obsolescence and depletion,”[31] perhaps cuteness in the Anthropocene is filthified or filthiness is cutified—the “low” or “easy” humor and “natural” softness of cute objects and subjects dirtying the metaphorical cutting edge of high technologies.

Within the broader category of cute aesthetics, the kawaii has gained a special place in the universe of Internet cuteness. Leah Shafer, one of the few scholars to examine cat videos from the viewpoint of aesthetic criticism—arguing that cat videos are an updated version of the early twentieth-century cinema of attractions—even establishes a link between cat videos and the aesthetics of Superflat art informed by Japanese cuteness.[32] Another example is Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin’s pinpointing of the kawaii as a critical element of what they call the “teen-girl Tumblr aesthetic.” In their article for the online magazine Hyperallergic, Eler and Durbin characterize the “teen-girl Tumblr aesthetic” as an outlet for “vulnerability and telling one’s own narrative (as opposed to the projection of an idyllic youth onto an ‘other’),”[33] circulating in microblogging platforms like Tumblr. They begin their text on girl angst by addressing the death of Elisa Lam, a young Asian-Canadian woman struggling with mental illness, whose body was recovered from the water tank of a Los Angeles hotel after guests complained about the water supply.[34] Lam, and the friends that witnessed her tragedy, were avid Tumblr users, pouring their hearts out into their blogs about depression, anxiety, and pain, between pretty fashion photos, cute animals and illustrations, and GIFs.

Eler and Durbin’s use of Elisa’s death was not without controversy, with the article’s comment section flooding with accusations that they were exploiting her for attention. Nevertheless, their article conveyed how, on the Internet, angst, shock, and disgust often interlace with the girly and the cute. For instance, it is not rare to find, in visual-driven social media like Tumblr or Instagram, “aesthetic” posts by users showing off their bruises, accompanied by cute band-aids, temporary tattoos, frilly dresses, or emoticons. [Figure 14] “Like the Tumblr teen-girl aesthetic that is currently making its way through the veins and channels of culture, Lam is everywhere, seeping into the pores of the Internet’s most hidden corners,” Eler and Durbin write. “The media sensation that her death became, along with the teen-girl online social universe she embodied, has metastasized.”[35] Accompanying Eler and Durbin’s article is a repertoire of visual references, ranging from a GIF of Frida Kahlo with sparkling eyebrows to it-girls like Elle Fanning and Sasha Grey or artworks by Rineke Dijkstra and Tracey Emin. Durbin’s Tumblr project, “Women as Objects,” which curated user-generated content from 2011 to 2013, also reflects this aesthetic of the teenage girl as “A position in which one wields one’s own objecthood playfully, glitteringly, and problematically.”[36]

Cybertwee, like the teen-girl Tumblr aesthetic, tackles with feminine aesthetics such as the cute and the pretty (a kind of “demoted” beautiful, lacking the latter’s grandiose connotations to “high art”), which have received little attention within art history, but now dominate the high technological realms from which their practitioners, such as women, communities of color, queers, and amateurs, are traditionally excluded. In Eler and Durbin’s words, Internet cuteness has “metastasized.” The word is appropriate, capturing cuteness’s tendency to spread and multiply yet remain, to some extent, abject: in Internet slang, a “cancer” is something which degrades the quality of contents and conversations. For sure, not everyone was happy with or receptive to Cybertwee’s cutification of the dark web. “There have been a couple of guys saying, ‘You’ve ruined the dark web,’” Cybertwee’s Hileman tells the website Motherboard. “People want this to be counter culture in a way, and feel threatened we are infiltrating their clique or something.”[37] By “simply” asking, “what happens when something cute and innocent takes place on the deep web?”[38] Cybertwee’s Dark Web Bake Sale demonstrates how cuteness can help individuals configure their encounters with (or even, participate in a culture of) dark digitality.

For better or for worse, as Emily Wilson points out, “When you spend years scrolling through listings for stolen tax documents, porn accounts, fake bank statements, and hacking guides, ‘unusual’ takes on a new meaning.”[39] Or, in the recesses of the dark web, wholesomeness is the rare event, the odd one out. Indeed, whereas the earlier cyberfeminist waves of the 1990s envisioned the information superhighway as a post-patriarchal frontier—see, for instance, the representations of posthuman female strength in the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, [Figure 15] an artwork presented 1991 by Australian media art collective VNS Matrix—for artists like Cybertwee, cookies, rainbows, and kitties are valuable tools to “hack the codes of patriarchy,” as writer Izabella Scott phrases it in her short history of cyberfeminism.[40] The emancipatory extent of these encounters where “bad” technological matters in cyberspace and the Internet meet the twee, i.e., the sugary overload of that which is overly quaint, cute or nice, depends on the context of each experience. Regardless, the singularity is dearer than ever, as the sweetness of the cute infiltrates even our shadiest, cultural and technological black holes.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – (Betamale), Pastel Turn & Poppy.

See in PORTFOLIO – Loot Box.

REFERENCES in Dark Web Bake Sale.

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions or depictions of excessive or gratuitous violence and pornography.