Of different subcultures. There are an infinite number of subcultures on the net. The bizarre and the strange and one of the most incredible things about the internet is the way in which it allows otherwise impossibly foreign subcultures to come together to create something of a community. What i was the most interested in was trying to understand broadly speaking the effect of anonymity on line on peoples behavior. If theres a single theme running through it there doesnt need to be anonymity protected by mott the layers of comput hated encryptions such as the technical document which is encrypt the network site. It could be i am using a fake name on facebook. Its not the real meat but that digital avatar that im acting out to sow the reason i didnt want to just focus on the technical encryption stuff is for a lot of people it doesnt really matter. What matters is you think your behavior of your digital version is somehow separated from the real version of you and worry that can lead you. Where that can breed them up action and behavior can take you. One of the case studies that you use his silk road and the silk road has been in the miss a lot and its been kind of you know this kind of like tale about anonymity on mine and a the founder was just sentenced to life in prison. I was curious, i have a kind of personal attachment to that because i was the first one to report on it and actually from the beginning kind of saw that this was how is going to end in the spectacular implosion. But i was curious what you think about the end result of the silk road is when you wrote about it i think it was still going. It had just about collapsed and i wrote about silk road two which was its replacement which subsequently collapsed as well but there were several other markets that followed the same path as silk road. His conviction which i think was just last weekend was like imprisonment without parole, and absolutely astonishing, as astonishingly draconian sentencing and i think one of the reasons etc. And draconian is the threat that something of the silk road or poses. The ideas of the silk road it is possible with modern systems of encryption using a browser location using bitcoin to obscure transactions between people and using testbased encryptions to send your address to somebody especially meant that you could come in and in the 90s this was a dream of california and libertarians create a perfect weight uncensored uncensored full andre delayed a bull market for anything that was utterly beyond the reach of the law. Tactically that is actually quite close to being possible and in a man many cents have been a different industry other than illegal michaud x. It would be considered a business genius for having created a marketplace that for two years was able in the most hostile conditions possible to create a functioning in effect the market that would characterize the competition and choice. The amazing thing i found out about the silk road was it almost reinvigorated my faith in Market Forces as a way of allowing simmers to determine the terms of trade. I didnt expect that. The thing about silk road where everybody is slightly wrong as they imagined its all about the clever encryption and the bitcoin and masking things in that technical background is vital for making this site work but over the course of two years, 150,000 users totaling well over a billion dollars in this reason there was so much of it was because it was such an incredibly good marketplace per user. It was characterized by incredibly Good Customer Service we are talking about very responsive vendors who are desperate to keep the customers happy because they have mine hundreds or 1000 other vendors from which they could buy their drugs. Every product is by the users once they bought it given written feedback, how good was the product, did it arrive on time was the vendor responsible enough to question and because of that enforced the vendors to start acting in the interest of the consumer. So you would have vendors that were offering buy one get one free. You had vendors are offering loyalty systems. You had vendors that were offering moneyback if you arent satisfied with their product just like you would in any other market and the result of that, what happened was the purity and quality of the drugs sold there was much higher and the price was much more competitive. Completely right that he was convicted and sentenced. It was a harsh sentence because he was openly and flagrantly operating outside of the law and breaking the law, but it creates something of a moral dilemma for people who are interested in the way the wind drugs going. 20 or so sites that are in operation made more Product Available to more people more easily and thats a bad name. But if you are going to i think they are safer for the users because they are less likely to be cut with a mixing agent. Its more predictable in terms of the purity of the drug and are a miss a lot of the streetbased crime for the drug market. So how do you make a judgment about whether this is a good or bad thing . Of course its a bad thing operating outside the law but its offer something into a glimpse as i mentioned beginning of glimpse of an alternative. Wouldnt be in on the good market. It showed how a regulated or marketplace system could actually work. Actually theres one thing i wanted to ask you. Do you know who that creator aquinas . I have absolutely no idea. Did you look into that at all . I knew a lot of this true big one and wear it can from and in terms of the leather clad deals of it because of course it was always sort of a libertarian hope that we could created digital cash that was not controlled by central banks. Central banks to control the money supply for political purposes, these libertarians could not stand that so they tried to invent perfectly and cash with a set number of units. I cant remember in total but it wouldnt be controlled by government and they also hoped by making it government currency i. E. Transactions on individuals or identifiable individuals the government couldnt tax you and the government taxi they cant control you. Many people hope that bitcoin is that the nsa doing that . Many of the people that were behind the original kurianzi and to still work on it to see a political vision that can lead to the collapse of government to be replaced by some kind of randy and space with utopia which i think is misguided. There is it political ideal behind the current sea but i dont know who. There was a political idea behind silk road, this idea of the market outside of any state or grounding in real life. I wouldnt have been able to write a chapter without your help and the reason is because when you first wrote about silk road not many many people that had heard of it and then when he wrote the book about silk road about the fact that all these amazing drugs with a click of a button of course the next day traffic exploded and everyone wanted to take a look. And i think a lot of people i first went there with curiosity. There was an underlying come including the stuff that on the site that we are not to be controlled by government. We are not to be told what we can again consume. Silk road was a political and of course it was convenient that he was making 10,000 a day running this site and in my judgment the money came first in a political philosophy came second and the argument that helped drug use became a distant third but all three of them were part of the silk road. There was actually a remarkable community. Im sure you remember, people who would have these forums and silk road where users would go and try to help each other including one doctor. I wrote about that. One doctor dr. Added he called himself was a trained doctor and drug addiction who spend a few hours a day every day trying to give people advice about how to manage their drug addiction and i interviewed him yesterday and he said drug use dont go to doctors. Their shame. Get them in an on line form and they are telling what is really wearing them. To find drug attics to try to help them is another part of that moral ambiguity that church arises not only silk road but a lot of the darker bits that i tried to explore. I think the idea of anonymity in providing this saves space for people to talk about their habits and about other suppliers is interesting but the flipside is you have these cases of people getting these drugs, teenage or something that they would have never been able to access and, or if they had it would have been made stepwise process of working their way up to harder and harder drugs were now it is has this intense thing sought anonymity can cut both ways by creating community on line but also detaching you from a more meaningful community. Yes, absolutely and that sort of theme which cuts both ways is something of course i noticed an almost every subculture that i try to visit and probably more than any other the suicide site which i found easily the most difficult to write about and to study. So you have thousands of these sites dedicated, take anorexia thousands of these sites which are not on the network paid these are normal web sites that anybody can find. They are unbelievably easy to find and they are dedicated to helping usually young girls between 13 and maybe 18 with extreme and dangerous weight problems, extreme dieting. Anorexia is one of the most, probably most serious of all mentalhealth conditions with the highest mortality rate. What happens at these sites i expected the prosites to be places filled by evil people encouraging them and destructive behaviors and it was almost the opposite of that. These were very friendly helpful welcoming committees. These were places run by anorexics themselves who were offering support. We are here to listen to you. We are here to help you. We are community of people. We are your friends and when you are 13 or 14 years old there are stories of this progression search for dieting tips on line find one of these web sites and see oh my god there are people like me who are also worried about their weight and they are friendly and supportive so its a natural place for me to go. What happens is these girls become brought into a social group where they are all friends looking out for each other and they are always there. I had a similar thing. When i hurt my knee that went straight to an on line or on. I ended up getting brought into these communities that had were people at the same knee injury. Its very easy to do and what happens of course it is they all encouraging each other on this distorted behavior. They present being skinny as the most admirable goal. They put lots of glamorous photos of thin supermodels and they give you tips and advice of how you get there. That is not your stomach rumbling, its a plotting over and over again. Very quickly when i was on their you become very immune to it. It becomes quite natural and normal because everyone is saying the same thing area to. , they buy tshirts and it becomes a onedimensional version of yourself with in this one Little Community and all of your other friends and do things you enjoy doing are all gone and they are replaced by these dangerous single dimensions as her character. Do you think that Something Like this, which seems like a reoccurring issue on every single social network as soon as something new comes out that you can expect the report that they are using snap chat or instagram or whatever, having met with these people and talk to them, did you meet them . You know, i think that sometimes it might be that that one aspect becomes more visible and it is something that you are kind of engaged in, posting this content about, when it comes to it this is just what you do at night, as your hobby or something. Do you think that this is an accurate representation of who these people are . Well, the number of people in the uk and the u. S. Suffering from anorexia has not actually increased dramatically in the last 20 years. What has happened is a changing way that it has expressed, including an Online Community of people that are talking about a weather than those suffering without anyone to talk to about this. But they get to the younger girls as well. Them . What these people need our medical help. Its. Its difficult to break into these communities. Until Health Professional start going in there to try to offer Something Else and something better, the problem is just going to remain and not go anywhere. I think that kinda gets at what the role of these communities have in the lives of people who are doing things and are engaged in them. The question that that hangs over every single one of these cases is, is the darknet causing this phenomenon and what answer have you come to . Its a strange thing you would expect me to have an answer for that because that is the question i was trying to answer. To what what extent is the internet changing our behavior . Or is it simply a reflection of the behavior that was are ready taken place offline and it simply in a new environment. I still dont know. I think certainly it depends on the individual. Certainly for some people, take the case of viewing illegal pornography. There are certainly some people that with out the internet and without barriers, they felt they could watch illegal pornography without being caught, they did it and they would not have done it had it not been so readily available. Then. Then you might say the internet hasnt caused it but it has facilitated it or enabled it and maybe even encouraged it but didnt cause it to happen, in my my opinion. There are other times when i think its just the different expression of very similar behavior. Take internet trolling. Another technical definition. I go into detail about who is and who isnt an internet troll. Its very technical. Its a misused term misused term and people want to argue about it. Me included. For many people who are selfdescribed trolls, along culture, its arctic artistic, creative. Its a way of upsetting and insulting people to make a point about hypocrisy and free speech and it is funny as well. I love internet trolls and i think theyre quite funny. They did see a very interesting way of making a point. I think there are a lot of people that are assaultive and abusive to people online. What they wouldve done ten years ago is shout at the television. You stupid this and the other, but now instead of showering on the television, they just just go online and write it. It still more visible. Its still the same amount of bile but now its visible and everybody can record it and see it and measure it and talk about it. It seems like its grown so much but i think actually its just been identified and it is now measurable in a way that wasnt before. Every single time the question is posed to what extent the internet has changed xy or z, i think it really depends on the individual. I think for some people it is just merely an expression of what they were doing before on a new platform and for the majority of people, it hasnt changed anything at all. One thing we were talking about before is this idea of an increase in this kind of anonymity. Post Edward Snowden there has been a big push among some people to encrypt everything to make sure everybody can be anonymous on the internet essentially from the government. Im just curious what you think about this idea. On the one hand you have activists thing we need to encrypt things and increase privacy. On on the other hand you have government and Law Enforcement who say this is making it harder to catch terrorists and child pornographers and im curious where you fall on that debate. Theyre both right because exactly the same encryption system and technology to increase privacy online is used by the good guys and the bad guys. Its used in a very similar way and you cant undermined the system. For example, the browser browser or textbased encryption without undermining the ability of the good guys to stay hidden as well. Now i think post Edward Snowden there have been a dramatic increase, not only in the number of people increasing their privacy setting on facebook, just Little Things like that. Little changes. A growing number of people using a secure browser, not necessarily to get on the darknet but because they dont like the idea that they are being watched or could be being collected. I think the biggest changes a classic low back problem. It happened in the 90s as well well when they thought the government was overreaching and trying to monitor it too much. You have an explosion of privacy activists, civil activists building software, making it open source that would allow people to stay hidden online. They can remain anonymous and count the censorship. I think youre seeing the same thing again. More and more easily available tools to keep your privacy intact. That will be a very good thing for freedom and democracy around the world, i hope, although sometimes im too optimistic about what can happen there. Its also going to be a very good thing if you are a child pornographers are or a terrace or an organized criminal because its going to get harder for your activity, not impossible, but harder but harder for your activity to me monitored to be traced. Im afraid that i think we are just gonna to get used to that. I think we should open it up to some questions now. Does anybody have any questions . Mark. High hello, i dont wish to switch the attention away from the interviewee to the interviewer but i want to pick up on adrians piece in the New York Times yesterday. I want to ask, given the weaponization of anonymity that is covered in russia and it was also put out a call on twitter yesterday or today to ask whether anybody knew of the same thing happening in the United States or in any other country. Im wondering whether, during your research into the darknet, did you ever have a similar situation in which you found yourself questioning the truth facts or whether the people you are speaking to really were the people they were especially because of the anonymity in the way they operated. I think you are quite qualified as i am and it really is an excellent piece of journalism. Yes, of course i did. One of the most of cook difficult things, whenever you are doing internet based journalism and you are interviewing people you have not met and you cannot verify the story, is the extent to what you they say at face value. There are ways to get around that to interview other people and see if their stories add up. Sometimes you sort of make a best guess judgment on that and you try to caveat it. Sometimes youre using a story to to illustrate a wider point. For example in the chapter i wrote about illegal photography, that individual who told me the story about how we got into it and why he did, basically his argument was he had incrementally watched worse and worse pornography over a two or three year. Because every step didnt seem like a big jump. He almost felt like each time it wasnt getting that worse. I thought of course, youre just saying th