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The purpose of the exercise is to help you work out your ontological positioning. The reason I have done it this way is to provokes reflection which is easier when faced with a distinct proposition.
Say if you agree/disagree with the following statements, and why. Show what the implications of adopting one stance or its opposite would be.
Human beings possess measurable, stable, persistent, consequential personality traits that are largely independent of upbringing or other contextual factors.
People can act against their own interests.
There is a fundamental difference between mathematical calculations performed by the human mind and those done by an electronic computer.
It is possible to label certain cultural forms ‘maladaptive’.
The fundamental characteristics of entities are best explained by examining their environment
When I was putting these exercises together I changed the wording a lot, away from wording that implied ethical and political consequences and to wording that implied possibilities. Ontology in my writing became about the possibilities of things rather than their meaning or what would be done with them. Ontological positions open and close off possibilities. For instance rejecting number 4 means you cannot then entertain ideas of toxic masculinity, or of white racial resentment. If you do accept ideas like toxic masculinity you cannot then reject outright positions like the culture of poverty thesis. You can still criticise it, you just cannot rule it out of bounds as such. Each decision excludes some positions. Recognising that takes discipline and means rejecting easy-outs like ‘strategic essentialism’ used by some post-colonial theories, which means ‘I only reject essentialisms I happen not to like’. You cannot have it all.
The researcher stance should be one of polite but informed puzzlement and a willingness to learn from the world.
A few of the posts I have been writing are about different ways to spark your curiosity. It is that willingness to push beyond face value answers and assumptions that is the fuel for a fun research career. Great questions to ask are simple ones. ‘And then … and then …’ or ‘You mentioned x?’ They invite research subjects to elaborate and give themselves voice. Curiosity should also be ethical. We hope to gain a complete picture of the lifeworld and experience of the topic: enough and no more. Finding out what it is means discovering what matters, and the latter is what everyone really wants and will benefit from knowing. Discover lives as lived, not as described.
One angle on that is repeated injunctions about what it is you really are studying. Just discussing the cryptomarkets recently and the question came up of why we talk about them as a unitary phenomenon. If you were talking about the illicit drug street market the first question would be, ‘well which one do you mean’? There are millons of drug exchanges every day in pubs, parks, streets, workplaces, homes, underpasses. To throw that all together as ‘the street market’ or ‘the face to face market’ or ‘the digital market’ is letting the phrase do a lot of work. So far, so typical of my inherent research laziness.
Likewise recent research into the cryptomarkets shows how we should not treat it as all one thing. Even the term ‘market’ flattens our analysis in ways that might be limiting. I would presume a market has several features such as commodification, standardisation rationalisation and so on but these appear very differently in different market spaces. One drug market I study resists commodification due to the cultural commitment that market participants have to the product, psychedelics. I prefer the term community of exchange for that one since it does not seek to explicitly conform to typical market precepts. You still have operators who make the market identity part of their approach and seek to defend it but it is not predominant within that particular place.
You can gain a lot in the attempt to answer that question: well, what is it? What is it not? Howard Becker (1993) has a lovely illustration of his attempts to understand with medical students what made a patient a ‘crock’. A crock was a patient they did not like to deal with. The puzzle was what put a patient into that category. At first it seemed someone who had vague and ill defined psychosomatic symptoms. That was only half the story though. Becker sought to understand the issue theoretically: why did a ‘crock’ patient violate the medical students’ interests? The medical students had a good sense of what a crock was but found it hard to articulate as a category. You just know them when you see them.
Through repeated discussion with the students, they came to understand that a crock was a patient whom the students could learn nothing from. Dealing with many such patients did not add to their sum of knowledge about human pathology. A crock would also be worthless in the informal economy of experience working at medical school. If I have several patients with ovarian cysts and you have several with an ectopic pregnancy, it benefits us both to ‘trade’ so we can each learn about a class of pathology we have no experience with. A crock was worthless to trade with. The crock also illustrated a crucial element of medical status operating at the time: true medicine is powerful and dangerous, where you can kill or cure. With no physical pathology, there is no opportunity to act out the doctor as god role. The main lesson from this is to use and elaborate your bafflement. When you ask a question and the people around you scoff at your ignorance, it means you are onto something. Don’t be embarrassed to be ignorant and hold onto your polite puzzlement like drunk ex clings onto their self-pity.
Becker, Howard S. “How I learned what a crock was.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22.1 (1993): 28-35.
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.
This month was mainly spent reviewing references for a paper on darknet markets and illicit drug diffusion. It’s a fine thing to see the academic discussion developing alongside the maturing practices of this illicit market segment.
Informative recent paper on where things have been and where it looks like they are headed: Horton-Eddison, Martin, Patrick Shortis, Judith Aldridge, and Fernando Caudevilla. 2021. Drug Cryptomarkets in the 2020s: Policy, Enforcement, Harm, and Resilience. Swansea: Global Drug Policy Observatory.
Great to see some studies of Telegram dealing coming out: Blankers, Matthijs, Daan van der Gouwe, Lavinia Stegemann, and Laura Smit-Rigter. 2021. ‘Changes in Online Psychoactive Substance Trade via Telegram during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. European Addiction Research 1–6. doi: 10.1159/000516853.
Services like Televend indicate a developing use of automation in illicit digital dealings which is going to be an interesting intersection of technology and market governance. With the greater focus on at-home automation by vendors like Apple, Google and others we may be seeing more integration there. Hopefully my Roomba won’t turn against me anytime soon.
Looking for research on cryptomarket governance turned up a comprehensive take by Meropi Tzanetakis, taking in resistance and internal governance. Tzanetakis, Meropi. 2019. ‘Informal Governance on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs’. Pp. 343–61 in Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal, edited by A. Polese, A. Russo, and F. Strazzari. Springer.
She makes the point that drug market gentrification appears mainly to benefit users in the Global North and within that the segment with high levels of economic and social capital. That has been borne out by the differential impact of COVID restrictions on users. We don’t really know enough about how users and dealers outside the West engage with these systems.
When reading one interesting work you are immediately punished by then finding a lot of others which you must read too, and other chapters in the same book demand a follow up:
Gyurko, Fanni. 2019. ‘“Stealing from the State Is Not Stealing Really, It Is a National Sport”: A Study of Informal Economic Practices and Low-Level Corruption in Hungary’. Pp. 209–26 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Levenets, Olena, Tetiana Stepurko, Milena Pavlova, and Wim Groot. 2019. ‘Coping Mechanisms of Ukrainian Patients: Bribes, Gifts, Donations, and Connections’. Pp. 125–43 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Markovska, Anna, and Yuliya Zabyelina. 2019. ‘Negotiated Prohibition: The Social Organisation of Illegal Gambling in Ukraine’. Pp. 105–23 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
Raineri, Luca. 2019. ‘Cross-Border Smuggling in North Niger: The Morality of the Informal and the Construction of a Hybrid Order’. Pp. 227–45 in Governance Beyond the Law. Springer.
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.
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… 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.
Markets embed a specific kind of illicit drug culture
I wanted to think through how the specific configuration of digital illicit markets shape subjectivity.
The purpose is to outline how a specific type of online drug focused marketplace produces drug dealer and user subjectivities. Typically, illicit drug distribution can be characterised as taking place between three different distribution modes. In one corner is social supply with principles of mutuality, reciprocity and a flat network distributing arrangement (Coomber and Turnbull, 2007). In another is distribution through market exchange which prioritises the cash nexus, profit/value incentives and relationships mediated by consumption (Felstead, 2018). Finally there is a third mode, that of ideologically driven, altruistic supply that emphasise the drug and use as in a political, ideological or spiritual relationship (Tupper, 2008). That broad brush typology disguises many nuances and subtleties in practice (Hammersvik et al., 2012). The distribution modes may involve varying degrees of exploitation and obligation, they may promote practices of care or generate harm, they may expand drug distribution or keep it within a tightly bound social and cultural context (Belackova and Vaccaro, 2013; Coomber and Moyle, 2014). Different distribution modes and self presentation may occupy the same technical infrastructure and market space (Bakken, 2020; Demant et al., 2018).
The generalisation of markets as a mode for illicit distribution and organisation has had wide ranging effects on how drug users obtain and consume drugs. As has happened more broadly in capitalist societies we have seen an expansion in the conscious use of market forms for identity formation, self-creation and expression (Dijck et al., 2018). Market principles value certain qualities in both products and users: professionalism, the capacity to make objective judgements, to act as self directed, accountable agents, and invite drug users to express themselves as instrumental, reflexively hedonistic consumers (Turner, 2018). Digital technologies are both disruptive and confirmatory. They transform opportunities for illicit drug exchange, the formation of cultural collectivties of drug users and the capacity for self creation. They also confirm and reproduce some existing hierarchies, especially those between self identified recreational and dependent users. They create new spaces for trade and discussion, define new attributes, and foreground the experimental and the competitive (Martin et al., 2019). That has implications for we understand normalisation as happening through markets. The drug distribution mode affects the parameters of normalisation for example with social supply contributing to normalising particular use patterns (Coomber et al., 2015). We can welcome self organising digital markets as promoting and embedding norms of destigmatisation and harm reduction but also be aware of where its foregrounding of a market focused engagement with drug distribution can lead us. It may concentrate market power, promotes bulk purchase, create supply chain risks and ultimately increase dealer power.
Cryptomarkets are one such and form the focus of this chapter, are hidden, anonymous marketplaces which mostly deal in illicit drugs along with some other illicit goods and services. They are hosted on the Tor (‘The Onion Router’) darknet. Tor is developed and operated by a network supported by The Tor Project foundation. It emphasises the benefits of privacy and security. The system uses encryption and signal routing to hide participants’ digital identities. The markets are hosted by administrators who connect their servers to the Tor system. This is called ‘onion hosting’. Along with the use of a distributed cryptocurrency, typically bitcoin, it allows transactions to take place in relative anonymity. Drugs are bought and sold, and delivered to the buyer using couriers, the postal system, or dead drops. Mostly they handle the ‘last mile’ of the drug trafficking system with sellers, buyers and market hosters mostly based in more affluent countries, and within that representing a more connected and affluent fraction of users (Dittus et al., 2017). Users are a specific demographic – not necessarily more affluent but adept at this kind of market. Cryptomarkets function as a drug distribution ecosystem and forums for drug users and sellers to meet virtually and examine the drugs being sold, the reliability of sellers and the desirability of particular drug effects. They also provides sites of contestation of the illegality and stigmatising of illicit drugs (Barratt et al., 2016; Hübschle, 2017).
I am focusing on market modes of distribution and the effect they have as it provides an opportunity to examine how the process of drug distribution shapes intoxication subjectivities and the drug as a specific type of object with tangible characteristics. Market based drug distribution embeds some basic principles about drugs as objects: that they are commodities, they are interchangeable. It also frames drug users as specific types of subjects: they are consumers, they are focused on product qualities and reward customer service by dealers. It emphasises competition between drug dealers and between consumers. Just to pause here: not every market really does that in practice, and as we will see, apparently open and consumer led markets can in fact concentrate power among a small number of providers who can set the terms of trade. In this way the illicit drug markets function much like capitalism everywhere. An apparently open, free and voluntary relationship really depends on the consumer adapting themselves to the terms of trade offered. It narrows the drug users’ self perception to that of a drug consumer focused on calculated, planned hedonism, meaning an expectation of pleasure along with with a risk reflexive subjectivity (Bilgrei, 2019). That is a powerful ideological effect of a market society and culture. The focus of this chapter will be a specific element of that, how drug buyers in cryptomarkets construct, assess and reward potency as a tangible quality of the drugs they are buying and using.
In capitalist societies markets are often presented as naturally occurring creations, places where people with something to sell and and others with a need to fulfil meet in mutual exchange. This is a powerful view in understanding some qualities of illicit markets, and moving away from pathologizing the actions of drug dealers and users within them. Markets are places of competitive exchange and the come into being to address problems of stability, predictability and reliable valuation (Beckert and Wehinger, 2012). Markets are also inventions, social constructs which institutionalise, design in and reward specific ways of being. Players in illegal markets face various problems. They have to succeed in making their activities work together despite being disparate, remote, fleetingly interacting. It is a problem of ordering interaction in ways that will lead to the expected outcome. Market actors want to exchange but they want to do it at a price that suits them. That can be tricky to agree, hence formal pricing mechanisms are handy. Every participant is risking something, and this is more the case in illicit markets. Therefore participants use proxies to reduce that risk – platform loyalty, brand loyalty, vendor loyalty, and markers of quality and reliability which of course may not be that reliable. It is an oddly precarious thing. Markets can only solve these problems if they are culturally, socially and institutionally supported (Beckert, 2009). Drug markets are institutionalsed whether in the street (Coomber and Maher, 2006), social media (Moyle et al., 2019) or the darknet (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016).
Digital illicit markets and cryptocurrencies promise greater transparency, democracy and accountability but this is not necessarily borne out in reality (Bratspies, 2018; van der Gouwe et al., 2017). To the extent to which these qualities do come about they are due to the efforts of participants and sometimes involve circumventing or resisting the centralising, profit driven logic of the markets themselves. I argue that the cryptomarkets discipline users towards a specific set of stances, and they adopt a tendency to reify, quantify, and engage in cost benefit analysis and rational use discourse about their drug consumption.
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Surveillance has been the big idea of criminology for some time. It appears to be a ubiquitous fact of life in modern societies and an organising principle present in most walks of life. It is present in the lives of call centre workers and bus passengers. It is the go to for any attempt at civilising a location.
Critically, surveillance assemblages modify post-hoc rationalities as well as they produce targeting and risk prediction matrixes. They shift the mode of surveillance from the human to the non-human and automated, and from the organisational to the intimate. People are rewarded for participation in an implicit social credit system. The system makes profiling ordinary (e.g. Muslims in Japan are risk profiled by the police). That changes how we understand forensic data for example, it’s no longer post but is no pre- event (Mantello, 2016). In some ways this is old school surveillance with many data layers but the main innovation is its capacity to produce target selection. Doing so collapses key distinctions eg. between present and future culpability, hence the ‘pre crime’ label.
There are plenty of private sector examples to draw from. One, the Hitachi visualisation suite, gives some good instances of how this might work. It overlays social media analytics, dispatch info, gunshot sensors, CCTV with info about weather and traffic. As the sensing infrastructure becomes more developed this will only be added to. Picture a live feed from every Ring video doorbell with AI analytics. We shouldn’t be too tech led in assuming the whole concept of the disciplinary society needs to be remade.
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How accurately can you describe the point of view opposing yours on an issue that is core to your sense of who you are? I’m not talking about a nice debating position but for example if you think that Scottish Independence or Unionism is fundamental to your sense of self, how far are you able to accurately describe the reasons the other side have? When it’s something that makes you angry or baffled. The answer to this question tells you about the extent of the epistemic divide in your society. This isn’t a call to all just get along because that is part of the problem: we aren’t grasping the power of vertical integration of self, context and information spheres.
Lecturing recently about the commodification and marketisation of disinformation I drew a lot on the work of Thomas Rid (2020) who has written an accessible history and theoretical study of information operations. As he shows overall disinformation operations are about the intent, rather than the form, of the operation. For that reason tactical moves like disclosing a campaign’s existence can be effective if the aim is to generate uncertainty. According to Rid (2020) what they do is attack the liberal epistemic order. This order has some features: that facts have their own life, independent of values and interests: that expertise should be independent of immediate political and strategic interest. That institutions should be built around those principles – a relatively impartial media, quiescent trade unions, universities, even churches and other private institutions, are part of the epistemic matrix undergirding liberalism.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this order has been eroded from multiple angles over the past decades by processes that have nothing to do with information operations. Independent media institutions like established newspapers have become uneconomic and replaced with a click-driven, rage fuelled, tribalist media. Increasingly the old institutions mimic the new. So the Independent newspaper evolved from a staid, slightly dull, irritatingly liberal, paper to a outrage driven, highly partial, publication reliant on a high throughput of offence driven eyeballs. The independence universities and the professions has been similarly eroded by the imposition of market driven governance on higher education, the NHS, and other bodies.
It also doesn’t take a genius to note that the liberal epistemic order was always less than it was cracked up to be, as studied in the work of the Glasgow University Media Group among others. If we look at the history of trade union politics in France and Italy we see a fractured information order without a public square consensus. The erosion of this may be overplayed – for example, most UK citizens still get their news from the BBC. However survey data notes that there is a definite loss of trust among supporters of specific political viewpoints (Brexit, Scottish Nationalism being two). The liberal epistemic order was therefore neither as robust nor as liberal as it proclaimed itself to be and may have been contingent on a specific configuration of post-World War Two Bretton Woods governance. My view is that there’s something there that matters (in terms of the erosion of the public square and the deliberate use of IO to interfere with public life) but also that what is being attacked had already systematically weakened itself or been weakened.
The focus on fake news can mislead from the extent of informational control in digital capitalism. We can point to some specific developments more recently: the financialisation and datafication of disinformation markets, and the vertical integration of political power with distributed media which makes use of of a distributed labour infrastructure which is agile and available. This uses some of the same infrastructure of doubt and uncertainty which is employed by spam and ransomware operations. The same creation of a supply chain and use of financialisation processes such as auctions for services. These methods underpin a doubt infrastructure that can be deployed expose the information economy and polity to attempts to manipulate information for strategic ends as well as everyday annoyances. They deploy semiotic tools. Rather than generating propaganda, these methods generate confusion. The recent history of disinformation strikes at a number of question at the intersection of information science, sociology of markets, sociology of technology and the philosophy of knowledge: how can disinformation be defined, recognised and how can systems be made resilient against it. There are several thorny ontological and epistemological questions e.g. between the politics of knowledge, preference falsification, technical and social verification. We don’t easily know what disinformation is when we see it so we need agreement that we are in fact talking about the same thing.
One way of doing that is to reframe the issue. It cannot be about pure information (no such thing) or uncontested knowledge (undesirable) but creating local, critical spaces where communities can decide on the informational priorities that matter to them. Returning to my starting point, we need to understand an epistemic contradiction: the most liberal viewpoints demand the most closure when they attempt to grasp the motives of others. People who voted for Britain leaving the EU have a much more accurate understanding of the Remain side’s motives than Remainers do of theirs. My hypothesis is that epistemic gap is due to the Remain side having a much more socially integrated multi layered knowledge structure which operates through everyday spaces (work, university, neighbourhood) in ways that the Leave side does not. The reason the EU vote was a surprise to many was that this conceptual integration around Leave is more fragmented, less socially/culturally powerful, but still there.
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