Exchange relations on the dark web

ABSTRACT

This article examines exchange relations on Silk Road, an anonymous online black market formerly located in a concealed portion of the Internet, the dark web. The federal court case of Ross William Ulbricht, Silk Road’s architect and executive operator, constitutes the core of my source material, along with Ulbricht’s online statements. I argue that Silk Road represented an aggressively capitalist mode of exchange, marked by an absence of state economic regulation, a lack of status codes, an ineffective reputation system, and a resulting deluge of blackmail, scam, coercion, and monopoly. Contrary to its founder’s vision of a libertarian utopia, the digital free market in contraband was plagued with fraudulent economic practices, underwritten by a market logic that exploited the site’s unique infrastructure. The salient principle of economic relationality on Silk Road was not cooperation and freedom but deception and intimidation.

KEYWORDS:

• Electronic commerce
• digital media
• dark web
• Silk Road
• capitalism

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Pace is a PhD candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

1 Marx (1894/1991) defines capitalism as a historical mode of production in his notes on merchant capital (p. 440–455).

2 This is not to say that the Marxist tradition has neglected questions of capitalist exchange. Marx himself wrote extensively on circulation, not only in Grundrisse but also in Capital, Volume II. Yet the literature on exchange remains minor in comparison to the abundance of work on production, labor, and surplus-value. Mandel (1992) has gone so far as to refer to Capital, Volume II as "the forgotten book" (p. 12) of Marx's trilogy. For an excellent exception to this rule, see Arthur and Reuten's (1998) edited volume on circulation in Marx.

3 Typically, a domain name is translated into a corresponding IP addresses through the Domain Name System (DNS). Once the address has been located, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) enables a connection between two hosts, who are then able to exchange information. TCP/IP refers to this suite of standard communication protocol. Instead of having a standard top-level domain (such as .com) and a corresponding IP address that can be translated by DNS, dark web sites employ a non-standard top-level domain (.onion) that can only be accessed through private overlay networks, such as The Onion Router (Tor) and Invisible Internet Project (I2P) (Christins, 2013). Moreover, rather than connect through the conventional Internet port, dark web sites use alternative ports, of which there are over 60,000 on any computer (Everett, 2009, p. 11). Between the non-standard IP address, the absence of DNS entry, and the unusual port configuration, dark web users are highly difficult to trace.

4 When computers connect to the Internet, they each are assigned a unique IP address. A computer's IP address corresponds to its Internet Service Provider, IP host name, and geospatial location. IP addresses consequently permit the tracking of Internet-connected computers. In order to prevent tracking, private overlay networks (such as Tor) relay users through a series of servers before connection, so their IP addresses correspond to a node in another part of the world. This is made possible through a network of 6,000 volunteer computers, which function as intermediary nodes. In the case of Tor, these computers range from private desktops to institutional networks, including governmental and university networks, as Tor was originally established to protect political whistleblowers and victims of domestic abuse (Digital Citizens Alliance, 2014, p. 4). Further, the relay system allows users to publish sites without revealing the site's server location (p. 3). Hence, in addition to being navigationally inaccessible through the TCP/IP protocol (see endnote #3), dark web sites are grounded in servers that are difficult to physically locate.

5 These trends, gleaned from the evidence in United States v. Ulbricht (2014, Goverment Exhibit 703b), roughly reflect the worldwide distribution of Tor users, as outlined by the Oxford Internet Institute (Graham & De Sabbata, 2014). Of course, Tor activity and dark web activity should not be equated, insofar as Tor serves a variety of purposes outside of dark web access, including identity protection for political dissidents and victims of domestic abuse. These trends also reflect Bartlett's (2014) claim that Silk Road "vendors tend to be based in the United States (33 percent), the UK (10 percent), and Australia (10 percent)" (p. 148).

6 On this last point, see Galloway's (2014) critique of the reticular fallacy, or the "notion that rhizomatic structures are corrosive of power and sovereignty."