On September 1, 2018, the United States Department of State banned Defense Distributed, a company in Texas, from the distributing files for the first 3D printed gun. These files immediately re-appeared on the dark web, on private download sites, attached as messages sent on phones, on peer-to-peer networks, and other networks all over the world. Since then, schematics for additional weapons have circulated, including AR-15, AK-47, Glock 17, and accessories such as large capacity magazines and bump fire gadgets. On the day of the ban, we started using our own computers to collect data on users sharing gun files, sampling peer-to-peer traffic hourly to construct a sixteen-month history of activity. The sampling effort continues into the present.

For this edition of the Bienal Sur, we present a selection of Internet maps with three layers: the locations of people that share gun files on the internet (black circles), the infrastructure of high speed optical fiber cables (yellow lines), and exit nodes on the Tor network that link the internet to the dark web (red rays). The sampled data, the infrastructure data, and the dark web data are then rendered on the globe.