(credit: !Mediengruppe Bitnik)
Last we heard from the “Random Darknet Shopper” over six months ago, it was returned to the Swiss art collective that made it after local authorities seized the laptop being used to purchase ecstasy online.
Now, the Shopper is back and soon to be on display in London. It's even shopping again: this week it purchased a knockoff $35 Lacoste polo shirt from Thailand.
At its core, Random Darknet Shopper is a live art project that consists of a laptop running a program designed to do nothing else but randomly buy items off illicit Tor-enabled websites. !Mediengruppe Bitnik, the Swiss art collective behind the project, designed the bot-based art installation to have a budget of $100 in bitcoins each week. From there, the bot randomly chooses an item on Alpha Bay, currently the largest such dark market. (Previously it used Agora, which has since been shuttered.) Ultimately, the purchased item is shipped to the art gallery where the laptop itself is on display and added to the installation.
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