Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
… it just happens to be one where everyone is silently watching, and judging 👍
To the introvert an academic conference is like being at a party where there is just one person you feel comfortable talking to. Your mission is to work out who they are without interacting with anyone else, and then have a cheery convo with them while avoiding attracting anybody else’s attention. Now we’re doing all our conferences on Zoom, the hour of the introvert has come at last. As a professional introvert this makes me happy. But not too happy, that wouldn’t be very introvert-y and might end up with me engaging in persistent eye contact, wanting to know stuff about the other person, not reviewing every interaction a thousand times over the next month to check if I was embarrassing, and dancing on the stage at nightclubs. Slippery slope.
First steps to understand how to approach the academic conference is to grasp what it is for. A conference is several different events happening at the same time. A conference is: An academic news aggregator and sorter of ‘what everyone should be caring about right now’. A site of several rites of passage, into, through and out of the academic career. A consensus creator and problem former. A place of renewal and crisis management where the institutional health of the discipline is reviewed. A sometimes commercial entity. The place where people talk at other people for 15 minutes without saying anything related to the title they submitted 6 months ago. That disco. You may have noticed some of these are not going to be replaced by an online conference.
For the PhD researcher or early career researcher there are some graspable functions served by it: socialisation, joining a peer culture, starting to take measurable risks with your ideas, getting quick feedback, seeing frenemies and scouting out places you might like to work. I like conferences because they push people together, and at their best create a collective effervescence of ideas and people. At their worst … well, there’s a lot been written about that, alienating professional jousting and such. Generally we’ve got a bit better at limiting the irritating stuff and deliberately creating space for the good stuff. There’s also a lot going on in relation to access around the conference that isn’t acknowledged such as fees, immigration led constraints on attendees’ travel, the medium used for an online conference, and when it is being held (thanks to comments from two super smart students for putting that at the front of my mind). See Craig Lundy, Free the academic conference
Some links to get you started in working the conference:
The field of crime and public policy is at a critical turning point. There are new threats such as the rise and commodification of disinformation in the public square, the emergence of distributed criminal infrastructures and organisations that drive cybercrime, and new technologies and platforms that facilitate criminal activity. New modes of surveillance and policing have emerged such as the focus on smart policing tools. The challenge is to address crime as a globally connected, locally encountered phenomenon and recognise the political, pragmatic, and ethical challenges it brings. There are new opportunities for research in the form of open access data sources, and the design of agile, hybrid research methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. Dangers are getting swamped by big data, deferring to platform governance and becoming wholly reactive.
There are interlocking challenges: to identify and tackle emerging challenges in crime and crime governance: the rise of crime as a service, the commodification of cybercrime technologies, the use of cryptocurrencies and other cashing out services, the intersection of gig economy labour organisation and illicit labour supply, emerging challenges in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, the use of encrypted apps for communication between criminal actors, analysis of harm and community support, and the redistribution of harm to the Global South.
Some priorities that will be guiding me, should I ever get round to them:
To extend existing cross disciplinary working on global illicit markets and organised crime challenges stemming from changes in the global economy and the digital society.
To trace new developments in platform abuse and take advantage of opportunities to support vulnerable communities within established and emerging digital platforms
Adapt theoretical innovations in the areas of new materialism and digital trace analysis to the subject of crime and public policy
Challenge the prevailing public and policy view that cybercrime happens ‘out there’ in non-Western territories rather than being a domestic phenomenon, and understanding its impact on global development
Identify emerging challenges in studying digital crime and hybrid on/offline crime networks and develop measures for assessing the resilience of illicit market ecosystems
Contribute to the development of public AI tools focused on communities and crime, particularly those that can be used to support illicit drug harm reduction and support user voices
Develop theories and practices of resilience and security that aren’t deficit based
Promote open scientific practices in the research community through code and data sharing practices.
Enhance research impact through promoting the creation of policy communities around specific topics such as disinformation, the emergence of new psychoactive substances and exchange crime
This is my sense of what would be useful priorities for the user community, coming to it as a bit of a noob. There are going to be plenty of others for sure. What I haven’t done yet is fully survey the fantastic work being done in these areas across the board.
Thinking about Apple’s travails running its iCloud service in China. As a condition of operating in China the Chinese government insists on physical control over the iCloud servers, meaning users have little protection against state intrusion and Apple are reduced to being a remote manager of the service.
One of the themes of digital capitalism has been that customers no longer control the product they own. Software and network lock in means your ability to repair, retask or otherwise mess around with the product is limited. In some cases the product may stop working entirely unless it continues to be supported by the company that produced it. The business model is that the hardware is a vehicle for the customer to be sold services: books (which you effectively license), music, video streaming and the like.
In the case of China we’ve seen how this puts the company in the same position in relation to the state that its customers have in relation to it. Apple does not own or control its iCloud service in China. It is effectively a licensee, given permission to operate the service on conditions set by the government.
The case and many others like it show how the theory of neoliberalism is parochial and now dated. Critics have argued for a long time that neoliberalism is the general shift in global capitalism towards market dominance through society. Politics emphasises deregulation and a reduction in social welfare, reducing the state to the role of ring holder. The rise of the BRIC countries has shown that neoliberalism is a largely Western phenomenon and is being superseded by an integrated, state led capitalism in China and Russia. This form of capitalism can quite easily adapt and make use of the tools and models developed by Silicon Valley to move fast and break them.
This paper theorises drug markets through the concept of digital territory. I hypothesis that territorialisation is a critical process involving onshoring and binding the market as a virtual, bounded place.
Figure 1, Cannazon cannabis market
The availability of controlled substances is mediated through two broad and interrelated distribution types. Social supply between friends and acquaintances relies on a moral economy of sharing and reciprocity (Coomber et al., 2016). Transactional commercial supply on the other hand emphasises profit and market mediate relationships, and sometimes validates predation and exploitation (Ancrum and Treadwell, 2017). New modes of drug distribution reshape both these distribution forms. One has been the emergence of online cryptomarkets. These are specialised markets hosted anonymously using the Tor network (Barratt and Aldridge, 2016). They present as shopfronts where vendors sell an array of drugs. Buyers pay using a cryptocurrency, typically Bitcoin, and the drug is delivered to them through the postal or courier system. Buyers are encouraged to leave reviews of the product and the vendor. Lively discussion forums discuss the quality of the drugs sold and the professionalism of vendors among other topics.
Figure 1 shows a listing from a market specialising in Cannabis. The listing typifies the way in which drugs are presented for sale. The vendor ships from Spain and offers shipping within the EU, and adds charges for express shipping. Discounts are provided for larger orders. Prices on this market vary in relation to the offline market. It is impossible to verify the content independently, however taken at face value some appear to be cheaper but many are higher priced, reflecting the ability of vendors to command more lucrative prices due to claimed higher quality (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2019). Higher prices may also reflect a premium for perceived safety of the buying process and quality of the product, demanding a comfort premium in addition to the normal risk premium paid for in illicit drug sales (Rhumorbarbe et al., 2016). Therefore we can see immediately that cryptomarkets promote particular kinds of market relationship between buyer and seller: a focus on quality, safety for both parties, greater choice and a tendency towards promoting high value, bulk buys (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014). Cryptomarkets are also the focus of methodological innovation. Due to their open design the cryptomarkets have facilitated the emergence of new digital trace methods to track changes in the drug markets such as the DATACRYPTO crawler (Décary-Hétu and Aldridge, 2013). These innovations allow for early notification of market changes such as the emergence of fentanyl and other novel synthetic opioids (Lamy et al., 2020).
The emergence and reach of cryptomarkets
Cryptomarkets emerged in 2011 with the launch of Silk Road on the Tor network. Its openness and anonymity signalled the arrival of a new type of drug diffusion (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016). After Silk Road was shut down in a law enforcement operation many other markets proliferated, sparking rounds of innovation and disruption between market administrators and law enforcement (Afilipoaie and Shortis, 2018). Disruption tended to demonstrate the resilience of the illicit drug market ecosystem (Décary-Hétu and Giommoni, 2017). Recent estimates put the cryptomarkets as a substantial but definite minority of the drug market overall, around €750000 Euro per day for sites serving European locations (Christin and Thomas, 2019). The Global Drug Survey records steady growth in use among its respondents, from 4.7% in 2014 to 15% in 2020 obtaining at least some of their drugs from darknet sites in the previous 12 months (Winstock, n.d.). Products sold range widely, with an emphasis on cocaine, cannabis, novel psychoactive substances, sedatives and stimulants. Most illicit drugs are available in some form but the product balance tends towards the ‘psychonaut’ user profile (Cunliffe et al., 2019). Alongside that there are many self-identified dependent and addicted users who find the predictability, professionalism and stability of supply a significant benefit (Bancroft, 2019).
The cryptomarkets are part of an ecosystem of messaging apps, webpages, discussion servers and social media platforms that service the drug market, mainly based in Europe, North America and Australasia (Moyle et al., 2019). They serve the end point of the global trafficking network, supplementing and sometimes replacing the trafficker to supplier/user stage (Dittus et al., 2017) and mostly supplying to consumer countries (Demant et al., 2017). Though sometimes depersonalised they are evolving and also provide the basis of dealer to buyer direct dealing (Childs et al., 2020). The cryptomarkets are best seen as one part of a larger flexible social and technological structure which facilitates rapid arrangement of deals between parties and expands the range of drugs sold. Drug sellers and buyers move around within it depending on the changing landscape and their specific requirements. This system generates an informal feedback loop allowing dealers to make more rapid decisions about what segments of the market to service.
Cryptomarkets are a focus for the gentrification hypothesis which suggests that a combination of long established social, economic and technical conditions is serving to reduce the importance of violence and predation in drug distribution. Drug delivery has displaced street or house based exchange in some circumstances, drug markets have become segmented by class and race, and the opportunities for combining drug dealing with other vice exploitation crimes has declined (Curtis et al., 2002). Cryptomarkets extend some of these developments, seeking to emphasise conflict resolution, cooperation and professionalism and punish predation (Martin, 2017; Norbutas et al., 2020), attractive to buyers and dealers (Martin et al., 2020). That may serve to reduce some of the harms of the illicit drug market (Aldridge et al., 2017) while at the same time concentrating risk and systemic violence among an already marginalised segment of the drug user population who have little access to drug delivery methods. While the cryptomarkets do put gentrification to the fore they also shift power in the marketplace and create new opportunities for vendors to develop exploitative or coercive strategies and techniques (Moeller et al., 2017).
Effect on purchase and drug diffusion
Cryptomarkets are designed in order to expose specific attributes of the drug being sold. Depending on the valued characteristics of the substance these might be the intoxication effect, texture, smell, appearance, potency, ease of titration, activity in combination with other substances, and pharmacokinetic behaviour. Generically these are referred to as quality, which means many different things to different users (Bancroft and Scott Reid, 2016). Whether and in what way the specific drug being sold is effective is the subject of extensive discussion on each market’s associated forums. The informational context is supplemented by the use of independent drug checking services by vendors and buyers. This can mislead and give users a false sense of security but on the other hand it normalises drug checking as an expected part of drug sale and consumption cycle (DoctorX, n.d.)
The impact is to foreground each drug being sold as a specific branded consumer product with pharmacological attributes that can be closely assayed. It draws on and brings together users’ cumulative experiential and subcultural knowledge, in common with other online drug user forums which examine not just the quality of each drug but what the drug is as a categorical object (Bilgrei, 2016). Behaviour is changed also. Easier availability may reduce temptation to hoard (Barratt, Lenton, et al., 2016) but the tendency towards vendors selling only in larger quantities may counteract that. The benefits of making large purchases means that purchases are often made with the intent of social supply (Demant et al., 2018).
Most users of the cryptomarkets are not novices and already have established experience in the face to face market. In the main they are attracted by predictable supply, choice and reduced risk. Users are predominantly male and young (Barratt, Ferris, et al., 2016). Some events such as COVID driven lockdowns have drawn large numbers of new users into the darknet (Barratt and Aldridge, 2020). Many new entrants just as quickly leave when they find the cryptomarkets do not suit their needs. Successful users need to learn and socialise themselves into the system to make it work to good effect.
Conclusion: The shifting territory of the digital drug market
The cryptomarket distribution system is a critical part of the move to drug distribution by delivery, whether through the postal system or tailored distribution services. They may be being supersded in technical prowess by well crafted custom build systems that use messaging apps (Power, 2020a, 2020b). As a whole set these systems bypass the face to face market and therefore are not immediately open to the kind of incidental interventions that harm reduction services may make. Having said that users often will be consuming at places where services may be present, such as raves and festivals but the rise of at-home delivery means that both distribution patterns and locations of consumption are changing. Consumption may take place much more at home, especially with the impact of COVID globally (Matheson et al., 2020). COVID has affirmed and extended existing inequalities (Chang et al., 2020) and the digital market has contributed to that. More affluent, better connected users have used their digital nous to continue drug consumption with little interruption. Those who do not have access to these distribution modes have been thrown back on a shifting and sometimes predatory street market. The impact of the darknet has to be seen in this context, as one component of an evolving social-technical infrastructure for drug distribution and consumption.
Bibliography
Afilipoaie A and Shortis P (2018) Crypto-Market Enforcement – New Strategy and Tactics. Swansea: Global Drug Policy Observatory.
Aldridge J and Décary-Hétu D (2014) Not an “e-Bay for Drugs”: The Cryptomarket “Silk Road” as a Paradigm Shifting Criminal Innovation. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
Aldridge J and Décary-Hétu D (2016) Hidden Wholesale: The drug diffusing capacity of online drug cryptomarkets. International Journal of Drug Policy 35: 7–15. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.020.
Aldridge J, Stevens A and Barratt MJ (2017) Will growth in cryptomarket drug buying increase the harms of illicit drugs? Addiction early online. DOI: 10.1111/add.13899.
Ancrum C and Treadwell J (2017) Beyond ghosts, gangs and good sorts: Commercial cannabis cultivation and illicit enterprise in England’s disadvantaged inner cities. Crime, Media, Culture 13(1): 69–84. DOI: 10.1177/1741659016646414.
Bancroft A (2019) The Darknet and Smarter Crime: Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy. Springer Nature.
Bancroft A and Scott Reid P (2016) Concepts of illicit drug quality among darknet market users: Purity, embodied experience, craft and chemical knowledge. International Journal of Drug Policy 35: 42–49. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2015.11.008.
Barratt MJ and Aldridge J (2016) Everything you always wanted to know about drug cryptomarkets* (*but were afraid to ask). International Journal of Drug Policy 35: 1–6. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.07.005.
Barratt MJ and Aldridge J (2020) No magic pocket: Buying and selling on drug cryptomarkets in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and social restrictions. International Journal of Drug Policy: 102894. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102894.
Barratt MJ, Ferris JA and Winstock AR (2016) Safer scoring? Cryptomarkets, social supply and drug market violence. International Journal of Drug Policy 35: 24–31. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.019.
Barratt MJ, Lenton S, Maddox A, et al. (2016) ‘What if you live on top of a bakery and you like cakes?’–Drug use and harm trajectories before, during and after the emergence of Silk Road. International Journal of Drug Policy 35: 50–57. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.006.
Bilgrei OR (2016) From “herbal highs” to the “heroin of cannabis”: Exploring the evolving discourse on synthetic cannabinoid use in a Norwegian Internet drug forum. International Journal of Drug Policy 29: 1–8. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.01.011.
Chang J, Agliata J and Guarinieri M (2020) COVID-19 – Enacting a ‘new normal’ for people who use drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy: 102832. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102832.
Childs A, Coomber R, Bull M, et al. (2020) Evolving and Diversifying Selling Practices on Drug Cryptomarkets: An Exploration of Off-Platform “Direct Dealing.” Journal of Drug Issues: 0022042619897425. DOI: 10.1177/0022042619897425.
Christin N and Thomas J (2019) Analysis of the Supply of Drugs and New Psychoactive Substances by Europe-Based Vendors via Darknet Markets in 2017-18. Available at: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Analysis%20of%20the%20supply%20of%20drugs%20and%20new%20psychoactive%20substances%20by%20Europe-based%20vendors%20via%20darknet%20markets%20in%202017%E2%80%9318&author=N.%20Christin&publication_year=2019 (accessed 10 May 2021).
Coomber PR, Moyle DL and South PN (2016) Reflections on three decades of research on ‘social supply’ in the UK. In: Werse B and Bernard C (eds.) Friendly Business. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, pp. 13–28. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-658-10329-3_2.
Cunliffe J, Décary-Hêtu D and Pollak TA (2019) Nonmedical prescription psychiatric drug use and the darknet: A cryptomarket analysis. International Journal of Drug Policy. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.01.016.
Curtis R, Wendel T and Spunt B (2002) We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side: (530122006-001). American Psychological Association. DOI: 10.1037/e530122006-001.
Décary-Hétu D and Aldridge J (2013) DATACRYPTO: The dark net crawler and scraper. Software program.
Décary-Hétu D and Giommoni L (2017) Do police crackdowns disrupt drug cryptomarkets? A longitudinal analysis of the effects of Operation Onymous. Crime, Law and Social Change 67(1): 55–75. DOI: 10.1007/s10611-016-9644-4.
Demant J, Munksgaard R, Décary-Hétu D, et al. (2017) Going local on a global platform. A critical analysis of the transformative potential of cryptomarkets for organized illicit drug crime. In: International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, Aarhus, 2017.
Demant J, Munksgaard R and Houborg E (2018) Personal use, social supply or redistribution? cryptomarket demand on Silk Road 2 and Agora. Trends in Organized Crime 21(1): 42–61. DOI: 10.1007/s12117-016-9281-4.
Dittus M, Wright J and Graham M (2017) Platform Criminalism: The “Last-Mile” Geography of the Darknet Market Supply Chain. arXiv:1712.10068 [cs]. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.10068.
DoctorX (n.d.) Use and abuse of Drug Checking by cryptomarkets vendors | International Energy Control. In: Energy Control International. Available at: https://energycontrol-international.org/use-and-abuse-of-drug-checking-by-cryptomarkets-vendors/ (accessed 17 April 2019).
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, (2019) EU Drug Markets Report 2019.
Lamy FR, Daniulaityte R, Barratt MJ, et al. (2020) Listed for sale: analyzing data on fentanyl, fentanyl analogs and other novel synthetic opioids on one cryptomarket. Drug and Alcohol Dependence: 108115. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2020.108115.
Martin J (2017) Cryptomarkets, systemic violence and the ‘gentrification hypothesis.’ Addiction 113: 797–804.
Martin J, Munksgaard R, Coomber R, et al. (2020) Selling Drugs on Darkweb Cryptomarkets: Differentiated Pathways, Risks and Rewards. The British Journal of Criminology 60(3): 559–578. DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azz075.
Matheson C, Parkes T, Schofield J, et al. (2020) Understanding the Health Impacts of the Covid-19 Response on People Who Use Drugs in Scotland. Scottish Government.
Moeller K, Munksgaard R and Demant J (2017) Flow My FE the Vendor Said: Exploring Violent and Fraudulent Resource Exchanges on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs. American Behavioral Scientist early online(v). DOI: 10.1177/0002764217734269.
Moyle L, Childs A, Coomber R, et al. (2019) #Drugsforsale: An exploration of the use of social media and encrypted messaging apps to supply and access drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy 63: 101–110. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.08.005.
Norbutas L, Ruiter S and Corten R (2020) Reputation transferability across contexts: Maintaining cooperation among anonymous cryptomarket actors when moving between markets. International Journal of Drug Policy76: 102635. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102635.
Power M (2020a) A New Robot Dealer Service Makes Buying Drugs Easier Than Ever. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxypy/televend-robot-drug-dealer-telegram (accessed 22 October 2020).
Power M (2020b) Online Drug Markets Are Entering a “Golden Age.” Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyz3v7/online-drug-markets-are-entering-a-golden-age (accessed 22 October 2020).
Rhumorbarbe D, Staehli L, Broséus J, et al. (2016) Buying drugs on a Darknet market: a better deal? Studying the online illicit drug market through the analysis of digital, physical and chemical data. Forensic Science International 267: 173–182.
Winstock PAR (n.d.) Global Drug Survey 2020 Key Findings.: 11.
… and unlike 99% of press releases these actually tell you something and are worth reading
DarkSide is a Russian based ransomware group which on May 7th 2021 shut down the East Coast US fuel pipeline network owned by Colonial Pipeline. The group’s ransomware was used to lock up the pipeline network with damaging consequences for economic activity in serval US states. DarkSide are the classic crime as a service (CaaS) outfit, renting their capacity to clients and offering service support to victims to make paying the ransom easier. CaaS is a business model where the crime group provides the tools to engage in ransomware attacks, such as the hacking and encryption system and cashing out services. Its clients take the risk and the group take a cut of the profit.
The attack was the culmination in a growing series of infrastructure attacks. They issued a statement clarifying that it is not involved with the Russian government. They were very keen to say they were motivated by money rather than politics:
’We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives.
Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.
From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences for the future’. 10/5/2021
The group seems keen to start at least appearing like it is limiting its operators to less ethically and politically charged targets. The Bleeping Computer article linked below shows the extent to which an international CaaS operator has to operate in a tricky geopolitcal climate. It attempted to shift its hosting operations to Iran in 2020. However that create a problem for it. The companies who would pay the ransom and the outfits that negotiate payments such as Coveware would then be guilty of violating US led sanctions against Iran. No profit! That may explain why they are so keen to distance themselves from the Russian government and to assert that they will limit their operations. The latter statement just reasserts a claim they made in 2020 however so there may be more chaff than anything else here. The outfit does have an interest in targeting organisations who can pay and so this seems like a fairly rational response to embarrassment caused by misbehaving clients and an attempt to protect its business model.
