The future has arrived, said William Gibson. It just has not happened to you yet. Count yourself lucky. Participating in discussions on the future of policing gives me a chance to think about the role of futurology in social science. Futurology often shows up in a way that gives it a bad name. It is always wrong, except for my go at it, which you should definitely listen to. Breathless predictions of the coming of network societies, freedom from the bonds of the real, and unlikely tech innovations merge together in a techno-libertarian monster. They flounder in the face of humanity’s limitless ability to screw it all up. There are some obvious flaws in these visions which I still need to point out: they assume change is driven by technology as an independent force, rather than human interests. It is a damn sight easier to change the past than the future. They read from ideal world relations to real world uses. The lol-worthy elements of this should not detain us for long. Instead let us look at what predictions have already come about, using our first trick – the old is the new thing:

We already have driverless cars. They are called ‘metros’ and ‘railways’.

We already have nuclear fusion. It is called the sun. And also ‘global thermonuclear war’.

England had a social network operating since 1516, called ‘The Royal Mail’. And since the late 19th century, ‘Have you called your mother recently?’.

We definitely already have killer robots operating in the battlefield.

I am dipping into futurology because I am examining the future of digital drug markets.

The second trick is to predict the past. Let us start from the past, usually a good, predictable place. 10-15 years ago most people buying drugs would do it from a known contact, arranged by telephone, handing over cash in person. Now a deal typically is arranged by social media, sometimes through the open web or darknet, dropped by delivery and paid for electronically, including by cryptocurrency. The drugs being bought would often be the big 6, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, amphetamines and cannabis. Now the classic illegal drugs mix with pharmaceuticals, enhancement and lifestyle drugs, and a vast array of novel psychoactives. 

Let us draw some generalisable conclusions:

• There is no direct correlation between economic development and digitisation of the drug market. The darknet is much more prevalent in Russia than the West for example. 
• Over time, illicit labour organisation and distribution of wealth have become more like licit models
• The digital has become embedded in everyday life so there no segment untouched by it
• Increasingly digital operating criminals are innovative rather than reactive

Final trick, it is safe to assume some trends will gather steam. Other have inbuilt limits which we already know:

• Some of these trends will continue, particularly innovation. The digital world is fracturing politically and nationally, for example, as alt-right alternatives to social media are launched. Criminal groups are likely to take the lead or take advantage of the development of infrastructures that are independent of the tech economy mainstream.
• Early trends we can see now will expand, particularly localisation and compartmentalisation. Drug businesses will be sold as an integrated package, including hosting, services and delivery.
• We will see the replacement of the core/distributor model of drug business operation with one where the most successful will be ‘meta criminals’ who can license others to act on their behalf. 
• The cryptocurrency moment is probably over as Bitcoin collapses under its own weight and blockchain analysis makes deanonymisation much more likely. Instead we will see payments through other non-cash systems.

Futurology tends towards the untestable and it is reasonable that social scientists do not like it very much.  Our role is often to burst the bubble at the Ted-talk party. However we have a number of jobs we have to do in order to serve our societies and communities. We need to be able to confidently predict the threat horizon. We should sketch out different possible developments and show how likely it is we will get there from here. We should be able to feedback and to pull the alarm about where these developments lead. We need to prepare people for future shocks and enhance societal resilience. 

Find out more at the Institute for the Future 

Okay, someone writing a crime script analysis should probably not be saying this but here we go.

One of the lightulb moments in teaching sociology is when you introduce Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It tells on us. In a compelling way it shows what we are like when we act in front of an imagined audience. It shows the pose of normality and agreeableness demanded by modern social life. It is immediately tangible because it feels like everyone does it – poses while waiting to meet someone in public, gives off ‘I’m not suspicous’ signals when talking out of a shop past the eletronic detector. It’s why everyone around the Queen tries to sound posher than her.

The language of drama, scripting and front/backstage is very compelling. It is a bit harder to sustain as an exciting revelation when this is not a revelation at all but an explicit feature of the technology of life. I picture a billion Insta users saying ‘well, duh! Filters!’. As with all good sociological ideas it has been generalised to within an inch of its life. There is a tendency to code everything as performance – data, sex, nations, emotions, it is all a performance. There is a constant presence of explicit impression management tools in our social media and validation of impression management in British culture. Be yourself! but the better self, with the nicer complexion y’know. That beguiles us into thinking that these practices are typical and fundamental to social life.

What do contemporary writers mean by performance? They make several implied claims that are not the same and do not in face validate each other. These are:

1. People act into their socially defined role, beyond what is necessary to fulfil its functions.
2. A lot of work is put into a kind of ‘demonstration of the self as suitable to this function’
3. There is a fundamental dramaturgical structure to social life, for example, gender is only ever a performance with no ground floor in biological sex. Yes I know Judith Butler says gender is a performative in the speech-act sense but we all know they do not really mean that.
4. Meaning that the world is a text.

Here is an example of one way performance appears a lot of the time. I have taken this from Holt and Lee’s (2021) crime script analysis of purveyors of forged documents. They do not make claims about performance, this is just a good bit of data for me. In it a vendor of counterfeit documents says: ‘After we receive your message, our support team will get in touch with you directly with all the necessary follow up and complimentary details for the transaction.’ I noticed a lot of text used in online crime transactions of this type are used to give the impression of a honed, complex professional operation at work. It is an open question how incidental these elements are to the crime script.

Whether in the case quoted by Holt and Lee that is true we do not know. Criminal operations adopt the customer care language of the service economy. In part this is grease on the wheels, which is intended to make the transaction more trustworthy in the eyes of the buyer. In part, it becomes a part of the culture: you just talk in that way because that is how it is done. As a previous generation of criminals would be adapt in the language of intimidation so the new generation of service criminals are adept at the global language of human resource management. But at its heart they still need to know how to inveigle, deceive, manipulate and sometimes bring violence to bear on a target. The right performance might help them do that, and it might have evolved as the way of doing things in that context. But it does not make sense to say that the essence of what we are looking at is a performance.

Jan 24, 2022

The end of European empires contributed to the rise of methodological nationalism. That is the set of infrastructures and habits of mind that treats each nation-state a single coherent container of a population. Global datasets like that held by the United Nations are typically aggregates of national ones so preserve this principle that the nation is a singular research unit. That has problems: it assumes internal homogeneity and coherence over external influence and cross-national dynamics. There is a danger of seeking like a state in analysis rather than seeing in terms of material relations that can span borders and might have more in common with each other than the ‘home’ state. This approach will challenge us in many ways. In sociology the standard model is pretty much one of exploitation, the powerful centre imposing homogenisation on the periphery. The standard model is out of date and misses how the periphery is itself productive, or is not even especially peripheral. I am using the concept of the matrix to capture the different arrays of forces that work to distribute commodities, people and cultures across borders.

There is a hidden history of drug trades that contributed to or were part of the rise of globalisation and the pre-eminence of Western Europe. “Psychoactive commerce” provided intoxicants in huge quantities. Drugs became commodified.  Their production ceased being for local use and became for sale, usually to another part of the globe.  Began from the colonial age onwards, when European countries began colonising other parts of the globe. This went for wine, spirits, tea, coffee, tobacco, opium and later cocaine and cannabis. Were these developments specific to narcotic globalisation or just globalisation that happened and caused narcotic trade to be globalised with it?  Historian David Courtwright’s argument is that one of the forces driving globalisation was the developing demand in modern European countries for stimulants and narcotics.  In vaguely historical order: tea, tobacco, coffee, opium, cocaine.  Narcotics were of decreasing historical importance though.  The last in this list, cocaine, relied on globalisation to come into being as a mass drug, but the demand for it in no way drove globalisation, unlike the others mentioned.

Objects have the power of embodying all kinds of relationships and dispositions, of pleasure, pathology and recovery. They can delimit, though not dictate, the terms of their use. Intoxicants mediate such issues as social class (wine), gender (sugar) and savoir-faire (absinthe). In the rhetoric of intoxication, each quality is constructed in relationship to others such that the sweetness of sugar only exists in relation to the bitterness, acidity, saltiness, sourness and umami of other substances. Material culture reproduces and affirms these social relationships which become, in part, relationships between objects. The complex back-and-forth between the drug, its cultural signification and material matrix of production and consumption constantly regenerates the materiality of intoxication within an algorithmic culture.

We now see Opium closely bound up with geopolitics. However there are many myths to the opium wars. One is that the population was addicted. However opium was commonly used in England, India and China at the time and ill effects were limited – other than some people smoking away in languor (Dikotter, Zhou and Laamann, 2006). Opium use was mostly moderate. A more subtle picture emerges than the drug being forced on China. China had a well developed intoxication culture. The 1895 Royal Commission on Opium in India also viewed opium as beneficial, a cash crop, medicine and recreational intoxicant. The standard Opium War narrative treats the world outside the West as passive and victimised.

Let us take an intoxicant focused view. In this the capacity for intoxication was enhanced by capitalism. Capitalist trade is a route for intoxication. Continuing this theme of the global transition of methamphetamine. Meth is cheaper to produce and is produced in greater volumes than ever. The market has shifted from Mexico/Northern America and the Golden Triangle to Europe, South Asian and Africa. The Asia-Pacific market estimates at $61billion. In many African countries it has displaced cannabis. As in  North America, meth occupies left-behind communities, takes the space of those marginalised by economic development.  The meth market in Africa is highly centralised and controlled, with strong cross region integration and stable pricing. The South African meth market is well established, with production moving to cheaper spots such as Nigeria/West Africa. Meth is also being smuggle from Afghanistan via Pakistan, displacing the old heroin route.

Years ago we would never have thought that buying MDMA would involve a distributed accounting ledger which is now one of the world’s major consumer of electricity and microchips. Bitcoin and the darknet cryptomarkets is one part of the emergence of a global integrated system of addicting, treating, and intoxicating selves. It goes well beyond that to agricultural innovation in the Rif, laboratory production in Afghanistan, rapid testing of new psychoactive substances in China, and the world empire of pharmaceuticals. We used to call Colombia and Afghanistan narco states: nations where the illicit economy had taken over swathes of government and policing such as to replace formal governance with shadow government by cartels. Now the narco state is a global material matrix of licit and illicit, pharma and tech companies, organised crime and criminal entrepreneurs. The material culture of intoxication is created within global flows, technoscapes and the residue of past efforts. There is no natural, herbal high here, untroubled by cultural norms, political economies and human meddling. 

Eligh, Jason. 2021. A Synthetic Age The Evolution of Methamphetamine Markets in Eastern and Southern Africa. Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Nov 21, 2021

There’s been much referencing to techno-social hybrids and as with anything else the term can lose its specificity as it becomes used to refer to any novel combination or arrangement of technologies. Almost any technology we encounter is a combination of other systems so if we are not to just use the term to identify novelty we need to understand hybridity as a process that reaches across ontological boundaries. Markets are very effective hybridising systems that connect, automate, flatten and rationalise. Classical economics seeks to treat the market as an abstract whole, while sociology looks at how it is encountered as a material, cultural entity. There are different markets overlaying each other. There is the abstract market as a set of operating concepts. 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.

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 being at work. It cannot be left at that though as markets create and normalise effects that are specific to them. 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 – seeing themselves as and expected to behave as service providers and consumers. That has implications for drug normalisation, access, pricing, quality, product diversity and availability. There is also a growing acknowledgment of the disruptive potential of technologies – notably the digital – to transform illicit drug markets and future use patterns.

In a straightforward sense all markets involve technologies. An accounting book is a technology. Even if these 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.

Markets work as as epistemological devices. They construct drug quality, assign value to labour and risk. They assemble knowledge from different sources and also destroy or fragment some kinds of knowledge. Epistemology shades into ontology. They define illicit drug quality in specific terms that can be measured, and as they can be measured, that becomes the definition of the object. They distributed drug testing techniques and in so doing make only those qualities ‘speakable’.

They also work as ontological devices. The growing availability of a range of drugs at the same source promotes a psychoactive repertoire. That is where users incorporate a range of substances for specific context based effects. They define some use types and users as rational consumption, and others as deviant ‘rubbish’ consumers. Defining and using debt according to these principles is a technology. Strategic pricing is another approach used by many dealers. Some maintain high prices in order to show their product as a Veblen good – reassuringly expensive. Others keep prices stable in order to maintain their client base or market position. Price therefore is another ontological entity which does not necessarily signify the harmony of supply and demand. The hybrid therefore is a system that combines different logics to create new ontological configurations. Pricing as as a data surveillance technique is a hybrid, combining market intelligence and surveillance/disciplinary logics.

Nov 15, 2021

‘I just got out of prison and asked my sister how much it would cost to start a business. She said $500. I got a grand from my husband, I bought two ounces of cooked up crack. Opened this place at one of my sister’s friend’s house … I had a little crew. About eight of us: seven women.’ Denise, in Sommers, Baskin and Fagan, 2000.

We often focus on big old scams like Bernie Madoff ‘s ponzi scheme and Enron which are clearly fraudulent, big bucks ripoffs. However it is less common to encounter major league criminality of this kind in everyday life. Normal scams are more likely to form part of the social fabric. These might be the near-pyramid scheme structures of multi level marketing businesses which promise the opportunity to integrate entrepreneurship and wealth generation into people’s day to day lives. MLMs are based on a seductive proposition: use your spare time to sell a product that virtually sells itself. Nutrition supplements, leggings, whatever they may be. MLMs target people who might be not doing too well financially but have some free time and a reasonably good family and friendship network they can sell to. As part of the sales pitch they present people who have made enormous amounts from selling the product. The MLM requires the would be agent to pay a chunk of money to buy product, which they are then required to sell. In addition – the vital ‘multi-level’ bit – they recruit people under them to also sell. They receive a cut of the sales of these ‘downline’ distributors. MLMs pre-date the gig economy by a long time though they have some elements in common in terms of the promise and the hidden costs. Their economics depend on their agents providing time and infrastructure that is costed at zero – storage and sales space, or in the case of ride hailing companies, the cost of the car.

In Sommers, Baskin and Fagan’s ethnography, Denise describes some of the elements of her business. It starts with investment capital borrowed from elsewhere, and success requires recruiting a sales team to provide a downline. Like an MLM drug dealing has some elements of the same normal scam. The myth of affluence keeps people in – the bling, the cars, the easily obtained riches. An attraction of gang membership is sometimes that gang leaders are the only people who are publicly affluent. These riches are out of reach, but tangible to foot soldiers. Even the wealthier members find that once they deduct outgoings profits are smaller than expected. For the vast majority profits are only workable by costing critical inputs at zero, such as their own time, and also discounting risk. At least selling leggings will not usually end up putting you in jail.

We live in a society which places self-reliance and self-creation at the heart of its conception of the self. The economy is meant to be defined by agility and flexibility. However these economic outcomes can only be achieved at significant hidden cost. Degradation of fixed capital, costing critical inputs at zero, and creating a radically pyramidal financial structure are deeply pathological and burn through vast resources. The normal scam is a normalised part of the structure of economic life and is at the heart of platform capitalism. It almost passes without comment that business risks are socialised or pushed onto the bottom of the pyramid, and that the labour and resources of the majority are expected to be valued at zero.

Nov 8, 2021