An Artist Collective Is Holding A Deep Web Bake Sale To Raise Money For Drugs, But Not The Kind You Think

Not everything on the deep Web is so bad. There's guns and drugs and hackers, sure, but there's also a bake sale where visitors can help young women buy medicine by buying cookies.

It's all part of a plan put together by cybertwee, a collective advocating “femininity, sweetness, cuteness and technology” run by three artists: Gabriella Hileman, May Weaver and Violet Forest. The group just finished a Kickstarter meant to raise money for ingredients and shipping supplies to send out the cookies, which they told Vice Motherboard they'll use to purchase gynecological medicine for women.

They predicted it will also have the effect of teaching more people about the deep Web, the section of the Internet only reachable with Tor encryption software and not traditional search engines such as Google or Bing.

“A lot of what we are trying to do as a group is learn more about technology,” Hileman told Motherboard Sunday. “We aren't all that familiar with the deep Web, so our incentive for this is to educate ourselves, and in doing that educate others and make it a group effort. We want to make things like this accessible to more people so we can all benefit from tools like encryption.

The deep Web has risen to prominence thanks to a flurry of news coverage surrounding the Silk Road online drug marketplace and other sites that have employed the Amazon or eBay models to sell illicit products around the world. But, as the deep Web is only accessible with encryption software, it's also spurred the growth of rape counseling forums, drug recovery discussion threads and other sensitive topics.

“We are interested in what happens when something cute and innocent happens on the deep Web – and how opening that avenue of thought can open other ideas on the deep Web that are not malicious,” Forest told Motherboard.