Deep time understanding is why Finland now sits atop a network of nuclear bunkers that can house most of the population. It is why media savvy elite Russians can talk in a liberal discourse and be supporters of what to outsiders is violent Russian nationalism at the same time. It is everything that you pretend does not matter when claim to be a ‘citizen of the world’. It is the culturally transmitted tacit knowledge that there are long, dark, currents in human affairs, that are disguised by momentary phases of peace and quiet. That is lost in the bloodless year zero thinking that characterises the liberal utopia exemplified by the EU, whose proponents think we can be citizens of an abstraction, that trade will always lead to cooperation and normalisation (on the EU’s terms of course).

Talking with my good friend and awesome colleague M (not using her full handle as we are working together and this post is let’s face it, a bit mad) recently about different medical cultures and circuits of care in Eastern and Western Europe got us thinking about the connection between geopolitics, clinical cultures and addiction, and the deep understanding that comes from having a particular historical deep time sensibility. The spark was M’s insight into what is called ‘white fever’ in Russia and zapoj in Poland. It is a culturally recognised pattern through the post-Soviet sphere where a person disappears for several days under the influence of alcohol. It was not a ‘blackout’ in the Western sense, it was just something you did.

What got us discussing it was why it was so recognisable yet did not fit within the addiction schemes of Western medicine. Easterners shared a deep cultural understanding of it and we hypothesised (or I ranted, possibly) that it was linked to an understanding of the natural state of order or disorder. For those in the East, disorder is the norm. The unreal ‘dream state’ is that of the peaceful life in the EU. The real is that of conflict, oppression, and the need to live in two worlds simultaneously. The two worlds might be the unreal world of Soviet bureaucracy, and the real one the day to day struggle of life in a socialist society. For those in the comfortable, liberal West, order is the norm and disorder is the exception. Addiction is an exceptional state for the self-governed self. There is less need to live in two worlds in that sense.

Basically: the way the EU’s rule governed utopia is spoken about by liberal commentators and philosophers like Jurgen Habermas, as if it is an end of history towards which all societies will come to eventually. The pro-EU side present a fundamentally teleological vision of reasoned, law governed order, in which power does not matter in politics. History is treated as if it began in May 1945 and as if the EU’s ideal is the real state, and the work of Brexit and the war in Ukraine is somehow unnatural, exceptional and unimaginable. But maybe the reverse is true.  That is why it was no surprise to Poles, Balts and others when Putin began his war. There is an element of ‘see?’ in their response. To the Habermasian, German-led segment of the EU, Putin was a rational actor who could be integrated in the European order. Therefore it was a shock when he ‘turned’. To those who have lived with massive historical trauma, it was not the least surprising. The only surprising element was the epic naivete of the core EU states who never look into their own heart of darkness.

The EMCCDA and others (Duke, 2019; European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2019) have highlighted the rise of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) and one dimension of this upsurge in new drugs, previously little known drugs, and drugs previously largely restricted to medicinal use, is the rise of artificial opioids, fentanyl and its derivatives and benzodiazepines (‘benzos’). These drugs are frequently highly potent, and though sometimes are claimed and marketed as mimicking the effects of established drugs are often not analogous to them. Many are initially unknown in drug using cultures and must be adapted to shared cultural norms and understandings. That process puts them on a trajectory which can begin with initial interest and novelty, and later recognising the drug’s harms and side effects, redefining it as a dangerous drug of abuse (Bilgrei, 2016).

NPSs are defined as a public health threat in various ways, as a regulatory problem (Duke, 2019), and a contaminant in existing drug use cultures (Measham, 2020).  We should not automatically accept that it does it exist as a coherent category (Potter and Chatwin, 2017) and in fact consist of several distinct types which combine into different effects. There are performance and image enhancing drugs, recreational NPSs, and opioids and their derivatives. I separate these out as ‘power categories’ because they involve different demographics of users, different forms and pharmacokinetics of the drugs, and different modes of distribution and consumption contexts. Opioids and fentanyl are similarly new and not new. What is novel is the way they exist as a new power category, which locks down the multivarious ways opium functions into a narrow set of effects (Breger Bush, 2020). Ultimately the impact of opioids and fentanyl is to separate this new category from its supposed origin, the opium poppy. Though opioids mimic some of the analgesic qualities of opium, and operate on the same brain receptors, they have become a distinct ontological category marked by concerns about potency and addiction. Historically we can see the category come into being with the emergence of pain medicine during the 1970s. This was a concerted shift in the focus of medicine and of medical science which came to treat pain as an object which could be worked on and managed as part of medical practice (Bonica, 1991). New journals were founded, new directions for medical science and education were proposed, and new ideas of what pain was were proposed. A whole system of pain management emerged as medical practice and system of governance (Sherman, 2017).

Part of that history was the rise of pharmacological solutions, promoted fiercely by drug companies like Purdue (Quinones, 2016). Oxycontin came to be a default solution to pain – both physical and psychic – and the trigger for a new wave of addiction and drug related death that swept through North America (Hansen and Skinner, 2012). The drug came to be a part of white working class life and trauma, and once again changed its status as a political object. It was bound up with a number of existential threats – economic, social, and racial – which fundamentally altered the meaning and trajectory of white working class life in North America. As with other drug related panics this new regime misses out or diminishes the experiences of users who do not fit this discourse, who belong to other ethnic groups and/or are suburban or urban based (King, 2014).

In a literal sense they are a power category, as in, one which is especially potent in the mind and body of the user, and one which emphasises potency in discourse and use (Kennedy and Coelho, 2020). Potency has a double meaning: both positively powerful and because of that risky and dangerous. The ability of a drug to inscribe its history on the users’ body is a signal of its long term potency (Dennis, 2019). I argue that as opioids have come into the illicit drug market they have brought this meaning with them, and have shifted focus from users’ intoxicant experience with the drug to an emphasis on the drug as powerful and challenging. The drugs’ potency introduces new challenges: it becomes unstable, and is hard to titrate into a predictable dose (Broadhurst et al., 2020). The language around it reflects that: it is estimated to be orders of magnitude stronger that heroin or morphine, and has a high fatality risk.

Digital drug distribution has a number of effects that are not just about the market working more efficiently through digital devices, but which are reshaping how drug sellers and buyers interact and adapt their psychoactive repertoires and habitus to drug distribution and use. Illicit drug supply has become more globally integrated and technology driven in multiple ways. One of the most striking is the development of digitally located specialised drug markets, or cryptomarkets (Martin, 2014). More generally drug dealing takes place in the penumbra of digital life and the digital economy. There is also a growing acknowledgment of the disruptive potential of technologies – notably the digital – to transform illicit drug markets and future use patterns. That has consequences for what is sold, how, where and by whom. For a long time, researchers, policymakers and law enforcement have referred to ‘the drug market’ as a generic term for aggregated global drug production, trafficking and distribution systems. This approach is useful as it allows us to understand how disparate individuals and places are connected without an organised or cartel arrangement at work. It cannot be left at that though as markets create and normalise effects that are specific to them. They change the ‘market habitus’, the dispositions dealers and buyers have towards the drug exchange process, their expectations of value and quality, and their fears of exploitation and predation (Aldridge, 1998).

In a straightforward sense we should not be surprised at the infiltration of technology and drug markets. All markets involve technologies, and in another sense, are technologies. An accounting spreadsheet is a technology. Even if these technologies are not tangible, they exist and have effects: adding and subtracting mentally is a technology, amortising debt is a technology. Technologies channel, reproduce and extend human capacities. In another sense, markets conduct specific technological functions, epistemological and ontological. Illicit markets are somewhat distinct in that they are the products of other platforms.

Digital drug markets are techno-social hybrids. They are novel combinations of existing technologies that create a new interactional dynamic and which expands the reach and availability of illicit drugs. They are force multipliers in the illicit drug field. Any finished – though seldom ‘complete’ – technological interface or device is a combination of other systems, however the uniqueness of drug market hybrids is their frequent non-intentional evolution. Over time, purpose built darknet cryptomarkets have adapted into new forms combining on and offline activity, often in response to changed consumer demand, market reorganisation and competition or law enforcement successes (Childs, Coomber, Bull, et al., 2020). They might retain the same interface and technological infrastructure while being fundamentally different sites of social encounter and organisation. Illicit digital hybridity then is a process that reaches across ontological boundaries, between on and offline, face to face and remote, virtual and material.

Markets are very effective hybridising systems that connect, automate, flatten and rationalise; and also reorganise, reshape their participants’ habitus, create hierarchies, and reputations. Classical economics seeks to treat the market as an abstract, unifying, disembedding whole, while sociology looks at how it is encountered as a material, cultural entity. Both perspectives capture a reality of how markets operate and the impact they have. In this paper I take material culture perspective which examines how technologies are taken up and used in different market cultures. I treat digital drug markets as places with their own localised cultures which promote varying market habituses.

There are also different markets overlaying each other which drug users and sellers encounter in different senses. There is the abstract market as a set of operating concepts, promoting types of rationality and self-directed action (Childs, Coomber and Bull, 2020; Hall et al., 2013). There is the material market as the connected set of different exchanges which may not be directly in touch with each other. Finally there is the material implementation of specific market contexts, whether a street market, or a darknet cryptomarket.

Mirroring developments in capitalist societies, I recently observed the emergence of what might be called conscious markets, where drug dealers and buyers have a distinct understanding of themselves as operating within and according to market principles. In these spaces they see themselves as and expected to behave as service providers and consumers. That has implications for drug normalisation, access, pricing, quality, product diversity and availability.

Drug markets then work as both sorting and identification systems and as epistemological devices. They define what drug quality means, assign value to labour and risk. They assemble knowledge from different sources and also destroy or fragment some kinds of knowledge. From example, those that conduct drug testing and in so doing make only those qualities of the drug ‘speakable’. They define some use types and users as rational consumption, and others as deviant ‘rubbish’ consumers.

Market participation is also about positioning. For example, many sellers use strategic pricing, as became clear during the COVID pandemic. Some kept prices stable in order to maintain their client base or market position. Price therefore is entity which does not necessarily signify the harmony of supply and demand, but also includes other needs like the status and trajectory of the buyer and seller. Pricing can be used methodologically as both a signal telling on the general health of the drug market, and a positioning move made by drug sellers.

As well as normalising a market habitus, digital drug selling shapes how drugs are normalised. The growing availability of a range of drugs through online sources at the same source promotes a psychoactive repertoire. That is where users incorporate a range of substances for specific context based effects. These elements come together in relation to opioid and fentanyl distribution and consumption.

Contemporary social movements in the West either forget past achievements made in their name or hold them in outright contempt. That is damaging to their ability to identify and work towards concrete goals. It leads to the maximalist trend in current debate where no solution is satisfactory and potential allies are discarded because of a lack of purity. In recent years policing and prison reform have been replaced in the imaginary with defunding the police and abolishing prisons. The scrubbing of history covers over that fact that we have had several prison abolition movements over the years. Prisons were effectively abolished in the 19th century and replaced with something else, reformatories. Another problem with the current progressive stance is it ignores backsliding. Because the current situation is so unreformable, it does not recognise that things can get worse. For example, prisons were partly de-abolished in the early 21st century, with the development of a network of CIA-run torture sites and the effective suspension of habeus corpus.

There is a serious argument about prison design, what gets defined as a crime, and why some people end up in prison and not others which current social movements can contribute to. There is no answer to the question though about what to do with people who refuse restorative justice, or transformative justice. You either coerce or ostracise. Which is sort of like… prison.

Recent years have seen two linked movements or policy positions come to the fore: defund the police, and prison abolition/anti-carceral politics. Both gained prominence as an arm of Black Lives Matter though they go much further back. Both also had a tendency not to mean what they said. Many ‘defund the police’ arguments ended up saying that of course they did not want to defund the police as such, just direct funding to better, less coercive solutions where possible. Many prison abolition arguments said that yes, we still need prisons (or something that looks like them) but we need to lock fewer people up and make more use of alternative routes. As in, we need to reform it.

These motte and bailey arguments are difficult to get to grips with because it becomes unclear what people actually want to happen. The argument type consists of making a strong, all encompassing, hard to defend statement (the bailey) but when challenged retreat to an easier to defend but largely bland and common sense statement (the motte). A fewer number of voices were prepared to stick to the bailey and argue that yes, society would be much better if we just got rid of both tomorrow. A criticism of the motte and bailey critique is that these are just clarifications. If so, political movements work best when they have defined aims, because then you know when you have got there, and they speak for themselves – and to the reality of people’s lives.

A problem underlies that tendency. It is the systematic forgetting that it promotes. A frustrating feature of several current social movements is their constant forgetting, rejection or devaluing of their own history. Occupy exemplified this and the situation has become more damaging since. These year zero type statements reflect the need to be the first ones to do this or that, and also to avoid any solutions that might have to be fought for and applied in the messy real world. It often involves setting fire to one’s predecessors, and often explicitly denigrating past feminist, civil rights and labour movement generations. It also minimises past achievements. The aims of many of these movements would be easier to achieve if they were linked into those traditions. So: ‘antiwork’ is just updated trade unionism. ‘Decarceral’ politics is just good old prison reform. ‘Defund’ the police is just police democratisation. These are venerable traditions stretching back tens and hundreds of years, but you would not know it to listen to their proponents. That matters when it comes to institutionalising their achievements and not backsliding from them.

One of the strangest defences of defund the police policy was to say that it was ‘just a slogan’. This was followed by someone saying that you were an idiot to think that defund the police meant defund the police. Actually we were told defund the police means a rallying point to argue for reform, better training for officers, funding of mental health services so that the police aren’t dealing with what are essentially psychiatric or welfare problems. Things are very hard to argue with and very reasonable. Likewise prison abolition for some people putting the slogan forward actually just means prison reform. This type of argument has been well criticised and it is kind of frustrating. When people campaign against the poll tax we wanted to abolish the tax so our slogan was ‘axe the tax’.

What I’m saying in this post is a bit different it is the active and has a tendency to shift the goalposts to ensure that their actual aim is never achieved. For example some environmental campaigners now it looks like the UK has a decent chance of achieving that zero switching to say ‘well you can’t have environmental justice without jutsice for Gaza’. Justice for Gaza might be a nice thing but it isn’t anything to do with co2 emissions.  There is a tendency for activist to deliberately make their own demands unattainable. If you never know what defund the police really means you can buy different definition never really say that you’ve obtained the objective.

It also draws on a harmful tendency in social theory. The worst thing to happen to the prison reform movement was the popularisation of a basic version of Foucault’s claim that all reform is really the opposite of reform. Every improvement in prison organisation, or the establishment of a welfare state or any kind of positive political change is, he argued, just another thread in the web of power that we are stuck to. No it is not. The radical chic rhetoric of these movements stops actual reform happening. They fail to recognise change that has happened and refuse to learn from the experience of others. They also have nothing to say when society degrades, when rights are lost, because to them progress itself means nothing. Being rendered, being held without any due process, are identifiable harms which should have been prevented. You cannot campaign against that or prison privatisation if you also think that reform is just another move in the carceral power game.

An insight of the sociology of consumer society from Veblen onwards is the way modern societies turn free time into a zone of performance, status and economic activity. Digital platforms put rockets on that. Our eyeballs become commodities. That might be part of the explanation for the current political polarisation and tendency to flay moral transgressors alive. Destroying people for a misplaced tweet is not incidental to our core status activity. For those who see status as coming from demonstrating their virtue online, it is a key activity. We should stop treating these processes as a secondary issue to the real deal of economic production. Public shaming is as much a part of politics as who gets what.

The economic context is central to this. There was since the 1980s a coherent effort to shift the UK economy to one focused around leisure consumption. That involved the development of large scale integrated leisure companies. Established breweries and their tied pubs were bought out and refashioned. New alcohol products were launched, focused on the female market and on at-home consumption. Something similar happened to football. Football clubs became the entertainment centrepiece for new television channels which increasingly treated the match and the players as a product to be sold and re-sold – sometimes to those same pubcos that were reshaping drinking time. Intoxication changes as a result. It is pulled  out of a localised, tangible context where norms help regulate both consumption levels and behaviour.

There is a symbiosis between the development of integrated alcohol corporations which have reworked traditional pub culture into high consumption leisure spaces, involving high levels of at-home alcohol consumption; and the same process in football which has commodified it and also changed the context of supporter cultures, making it more of a leisure industry. Despite that, localised working class cultures still matter to the game, just as traditional pub culture persists and has echoes in contemporary British alcohol culture.  There is also another tradition, of self developed autonomous intoxication cultures, around the 1980s rave scene, and later autonomous festivals and psychedelic contexts. Currently the same risk is apparent as psychedelics approach something like mainstream recognition and attract the interest of venture capital. We may see another round of commodification and its logics: standardisation and regulation, in which localised tangible cultures are turned into abstracted products.

‘For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living‘ Mark, 12: 44, KJV.

It’s not about the money, but then again, it really, really is.

At my old church the tradition was to pass the wooden collection plate around. You drop coins or pound notes in (this was the 1980s), or gave your donation in an envelope. Everything you did was public, and humans being people, they made judgements. And when I say judgements, they appeared not to have heard the parable of the widow’s mite, or more likely they had and thought: what a tightwad, go Scribes and Pharisees! Who gave the most cold hard cash, and why were they doing it were the two questions that detained the congregation while we mused on whether you could get drunk on communion wine.

A rough set of rules emerged. Children were less keenly judged, but rich kids got to give more. For adults, giving a lot might indicate holiness, but also guilt, so a lot depended on how robust your prior reputation was. The envelope givers usually came out on top since they look generous, pious and modest. Money causes a lot of problems when it comes to the gift relationship. It is often a serious breach of etiquette to ask for money as a gift. Unless you live among saints, giving money sparks a massive agonising problem of how much you give as your gift is immediately measurable next to others. The gift relationship depends on maintaining a degree of ambiguity and separation from the cash economy.

Gifts are weighted with these various relationships, and so is the rest of the economy. Cash transactions are especially sensitive to the meaning given to money beyond its face value and purchasing power. In the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US Dollar came to be acknowledged as what it had been for many years under communism, the one reliable transferable value. During that time public discourse acknowledged the dollar as being ‘worthy’ of this role. What better suited a superpower than to use the cash of the other superpower. That helped Russians cope with the cognitive dissonance of being in a society ruled by chaos and anomie, with a currency that felt like it was actively their enemy (Lemon, 1998).

Focusing on the meaning of money does not let us end up saying that is all there is about it which is where rational choice theory could be refreshed. ‘Rational’ is often drawn narrowly in terms of interests and should include the person’s identification of their own moral positioning in relation to the activity, their motivation. That appears in some accounts of criminal dealings, how and who they deal with, while others emphasis pure instrumental calculation. Even that is itself referring to a set of shared cultural expectations, a market habitus: a deeply embedded sense of what money means, and how it will behave in a given set of circumstances.

Crimetech is a catch all for the technology developed by criminal enterprises to further their aims. It is the set of botnets, hacking tools,  bulletproof hosting and interfaces that join up criminal intent with their victims. (There is a company selling various bits kit for forensics called ‘CrimeTech’. They are the go to if you need tape with ‘Evidence’ on it, or that thick chalk you draw round a body.) Crimetech is specific in its purpose. There is wider melange of technology used by criminals which is not crimetech – Tor, cryptocurrency and such are independent of it but we should be aware of how some technology articulates and gives affordance to hostile actors.

The prevailing framework is of technology and crime is of tech as a quality that enables or disables crime or security. Crime exists on a scale from cyber-enabled to cyber-dependent. A little less encryption here, a little more there. As technology is now so embedded and provided as a service to criminals we have to move past that and think of tech as part of the material matrix. So rather than this gradient from ‘lo tech’ to ‘full on tech’ we could see intersections between different kinds of technology and the material operation of crime, in some instances surrounding a hard core of dedicated, tech dominant crimetech operations. Really we are talking about the old classics: what is the division of labour, where are the command and control processes, how are criminal enterprises able to combine different data types and where are the critical points where harm happens. 

Consider a phone scam that’s highly centralised, which combines basic and simple technological platforms and user scripts, and a social engineering attack which used tested AI driven communication forms to ensare victims. The first is heavy on human labour, and can be undermined by time wasting tactics on the other end. The latter is less contact driven, more passive, highly failure tolerant and generates more data. A zero day exploit is of a different quality as it is likely to be valued in itself, traded and used by a range of individuals and enterprises, including state agencies.

As well as the organisation/complexity axis we should also consider hwo crimetech scales. Many crimes are low severity individually and hence tend to be unreported, but have an impact at scale which is what makes them hard to prosecute. This focus on a scalar threat is a recurring one in many documents now such as the Mills, Skodbo and Blyth (2013) which explicitly tackles it. To me we are facing two challenges: first, tools and exploitation modes are designed to scale up and down depending on opportunity. Second, distributed delivery means interventions tend to end up punching fog. In each case, my interest comes back to how crimetech reorganises and revalues criminal labour, just as other platforms do the same. The same problem can occur in both cases. In the world of venture capital the relentless focus on devaluing human labour means we miss how much labour goes into algorithmic control. In the world of crimetech the extensive labour behind scalar threats is also hidden.