By Serlin Quah, ZERO1

In our brave new digital world, nothing goes unseen, but what happens in the dark? DARKNETbeta challenges the audience to walk the line between public and private self, examining security and anonymity in the digital age. Using audience cell phones and techniques currently employed by retailers to track consumers, we will explore the gulf between online identity and walking identity through a series of experiments which reveal the wake of data we leave online, and how it actively shapes our behavior. Through comedic monologues about ancient AOL screen names, and new science about online disinhibition and the psychology of trolling, we will ask if anonymity on the web is a step towards democratization or criminality. DARKNETbeta will walk you through the mechanics of onion routing, and give you a glimpse of what’s found on the deep web, letting you decide: can technology advance with our privacy intact, or does our future online in fact depend on our anonymity?

Cara Rose DeFabio is an interdisciplinary creative who believes her community is her greatest asset. She enjoys collaborating across fields and is comfortably wired to the local queer performance scene, ace journalists and twitterati and in her native San Francisco. Her original theater work, After the Tone, awarded ‘Best of Fringe’ at the SF Fringe Festival in 2014, employs texting tricks and audience interaction to investigate digital afterlife and mourning in the age of internet. Lately she has enjoyed being the Internet’s most sought after emoji translator and is currently seeking deep web sherpas for her new project on web anonymity.