University of Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania

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Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

2018

Internet Markets: Exchange Relations On Craigslist, Ebay, And Silk Internet Markets: Exchange Relations On Craigslist, Ebay, And Silk

Road Road

Jonathan Pace University of Pennsylvania, jonathan.pace@asc.upenn.edu

Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations

Part of the Communication Commons, and the Databases and Information Systems Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Pace, Jonathan, "Internet Markets: Exchange Relations On Craigslist, Ebay, And Silk Road" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3050. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3050

This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3050 For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.

Internet Markets: Exchange Relations On Craigslist, Ebay, And Silk Road Internet Markets: Exchange Relations On Craigslist, Ebay, And Silk Road

Abstract Abstract Cyberlibertarianism is a dominant ideology in the technology industry. Internet markets represent cyberlibertarianism ideals put into practice. According to cyberlibertarianism, internet markets should be self-regulating, but problems of fraud nevertheless emerge. On internet markets, fraud occurs through the manipulation of platform protocols that are designed to replace regulations. Actors take various steps to mitigate concerns of fraud and control the commercial process. These steps rely on website infrastructure, platform culture, and state, commercial, and domestic institutions — factors that are supposed to be external to electronic commerce. Users develop social customs that rely on website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions. Vendors perform practices that are also connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions, but in ways that reflect their goal of selling goods. State, commercial, and domestic institutions figure centrally in the circulation of market objects, which often enter digital exchange in places where institutional control falls short. Far from being a story of self-regulation, exchange on internet markets is a story of regulatory endeavors, as individual and institutional actors aim (and sometimes fail) to control the process of electronic commerce. This tells us that cyberlibertarianism overlooks the role of regulations and institutions on the internet. As venues that embody cyberlibertarian principles, internet markets are among the most productive case studies of the digital ideology. By meeting the radical conditions demanded by cyberlibertarianism, internet markets are experiments in the digital ideology that decisively disprove its hypotheses. If the predictions of cyberlibertarianism cannot be realized in the free digital market, then they likely cannot be realized anywhere. Moving forward, they may serve as a counterpoint to the claim that an internet equilibrium is just one regulatory removal away.

Degree Type Degree Type Dissertation

Degree Name Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Graduate Group Graduate Group Communication

First Advisor First Advisor Sharrona Pearl

Keywords Keywords Cyberlibertarianism, Digital media, Electronic commerce, Exchange, Internet markets, Peer to peer

Subject Categories Subject Categories Communication | Databases and Information Systems

This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3050

INTERNET MARKETS:

EXCHANGE RELATIONS ON CRAIGSLIST, EBAY, AND SILK ROAD

Jonathan Pace

A DISSERTATION

in

Communication

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania

in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2018

Supervisor of Dissertation

——————————

Dr. Sharrona Pearl

Assistant Professor of Communication

Graduate Group Chairperson

——————————

Dr. Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication

Dr. Victor Pickard, Associate Professor of Communication

Dr. Jessa Lingel, Assistant Professor of Communication

ii

ABSTRACT

INTERNET MARKETS:

EXCHANGE RELATIONS ON CRAIGSLIST, EBAY, AND SILK ROAD

Jonathan Pace

Dr. Sharrona Pearl

Cyberlibertarianism is a dominant ideology in the technology industry. Internet markets

represent cyberlibertarianism ideals put into practice. According to cyberlibertarianism,

internet markets should be self-regulating, but problems of fraud nevertheless emerge. On

internet markets, fraud occurs through the manipulation of platform protocols that are

designed to replace regulations. Actors take various steps to mitigate concerns of fraud

and control the commercial process. These steps rely on website infrastructure, platform

culture, and state, commercial, and domestic institutions — factors that are supposed to

be external to electronic commerce. Users develop social customs that rely on website

infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions. Vendors perform practices that are

also connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions, but in

ways that reflect their goal of selling goods. State, commercial, and domestic institutions

figure centrally in the circulation of market objects, which often enter digital exchange in

places where institutional control falls short. Far from being a story of self-regulation,

exchange on internet markets is a story of regulatory endeavors, as individual and

institutional actors aim (and sometimes fail) to control the process of electronic

commerce. This tells us that cyberlibertarianism overlooks the role of regulations and

institutions on the internet. As venues that embody cyberlibertarian principles, internet

iii

markets are among the most productive case studies of the digital ideology. By meeting

the radical conditions demanded by cyberlibertarianism, internet markets are experiments

in the digital ideology that decisively disprove its hypotheses. If the predictions of

cyberlibertarianism cannot be realized in the free digital market, then they likely cannot

be realized anywhere. Moving forward, they may serve as a counterpoint to the claim that

an internet equilibrium is just one regulatory removal away.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... ii

INTRODUCTION: CYBERLIBERTARIANISM AS DIGITAL IDEOLOGY ................ 1

CHAPTER 1: HOW TO GET AWAY WITH INTERNET FRAUD .............................. 25

CHAPTER 2: ROADS TO COMMERCE ..................................................................... 64

CHAPTER 3: MONEY ON THE SIDE ........................................................................ 93

CHAPTER 4: THINGS FOR SALE ON THE INTERNET ......................................... 120

CONCLUSION: BEYOND CYBERLIBERTARIANISM .......................................... 144

APPENDICES ............................................................................................................ 155

REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 203

1

INTRODUCTION

CYBERLIBERTARIANISM AS DIGITAL IDEOLOGY

Overture: Why Exchange?

Internet markets are major centers of online activity. Exchange platforms, such as

Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road are exceptionally popular, with consistently high levels of

internet traffic,1 exceptionally innovative, with roots in the early days of their respective

webs,2 and exceptionally profitable, with hundreds of millions of dollars passing through

these powerhouses of the digital economy each year.3 One in five Americans sells

something on the internet every year, making these exceptional cases also quite ordinary.4

Exchange platforms are new media with traces of the old, replicating and transforming

the local market, the antique market, and the black market. As electronic spheres of

commercial and interpersonal exchange, they are host to a vibrant interplay of economic,

social, and technological dynamics.

1 "How Popular is Craigslist?" Alexa, published 2017, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ craigslist.org. "How Popular Is eBay?" Alexa, published 2017, http://www.alexa.com/ siteinfo/ebay.com. Nichols Christin, "Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace,” International World Wide Web Conference Committee Proceedings (May 2013): no pagination, ACM 978-1-4503-2035-1/13/05. 2 See the discussion of Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road histories later in this introduction. 3 "eBay's Annual Net Revenue in the United States from 2013 to 2016,” Statista, published 2016, https://www.statista.com/statistics/221854/ebays-annual-net-revenue-in-the-united-states/ "Leading Shopping and Classified websites in the United States, based on market share of visits,” Statista, published 2014, https://www.statista.com/statistics/266203/us-market-share-of-leading-shopping-classifieds-websites. Nichols Christin, ""Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace.” 4 Aaron Smith, "Gig Work, Online Selling, and Home Sharing,” Pew Research Center, published November 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing.

2

Despite their popularity and novelty, internet markets are neglected objects of

inquiry in digital media studies. Contemporary literature on electronic commerce largely

foregrounds the trading of informational objects rather than material ones. This is the

case in studies of platforms and studies of networks. In studies of platforms, the

reproducibility of information becomes a point of departure for digital gift economies and

their concomitant systems of reciprocity and status.5 Trade is here understood in broad

terms: every online contribution is a discrete economic transaction, leading some to

jettison the very distinction between the social and the economic within digital culture.6

In studies of networks, the management of information becomes a competitive business

5 Dave Elder-Vass, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Julia Velkova, "Open Cultural Production and the Online Gift Economy: The Case of Blender,” First Monday 21, no. 10 (2016): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6944. Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, Virtual Economies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). Etienne Pelaprat and Barry Brown, "Reciprocity: Understanding Online Social Relations,” First Monday 17, no. 10 (2012): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3324. Erika Pearson, "Digital Gifts: Participation and Gift Exchange in LiveJournal Communities,” First Monday 12, no. 5 (2007): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1835/1719. Matei Ripeanu et al., "Gifting Technologies: A BitTorrent Case Study,” First Monday 11, no. 11 (2006): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1412/1330. Kevin McGee and Jörgen Skågeby, "Gifting Technologies,” First Monday 9, no. 12 (2004): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1192/1112. Kylie Veale, "Internet Gifting Economies: Voluntary Payment Schemes as Tangible Reciprocity,” First Monday 8, no. 12 (2003): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1101/1021. Hillary Bays and Miranda Mowbray, "Cookies, Gifting, and the Internet,” First Monday 4, no. 11 (1999): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/700/610. Richard Barbrook, "The Hi-tech Gift Economy,” First Monday 3, no. 12 (1998): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552. 6 Kylie Jarrett and D.E. Wittkower, "Economies of the Internet,” First Monday 21, no. 10 (2016): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6939/5624. Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33-58. Göran Bolin, Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2011).

3

advantage, to be leveraged through financial instruments or logistical apparatuses.7 Trade

is again understood in broad terms: every piece of information becomes a commodity,

leading some to jettison the distinction between informational and material regulation.8

Even studies of internet retailers and craft sites, such as Amazon and Etsy, display a

preference for informational systems of status and recommendation over material systems

of goods and payment.9 Research is still catching up with Facebook Marketplace, an

exchange platform that was launched in October 2016 as an internal part of the social

media giant.10

The neglect of exchange is symptomatic of broader trends within digital media

studies. In the context of digital media, political economy tends to focus on production

7 Christopher Westland et al., Global Electronic Commerce (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey, eds. The Reputation Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). Eric Brousseau and Nicolas Curien, eds., Internet and Digital Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken: Wiley & Blackwell, 2000). 8 Hassan Masum an Mark Tovey, eds. The Reputation Society. 9 Dave Elder-Vass, "Lifeworld and Systems in the Digital Economy,” European Journal of Social Theory 21, no. 2 (2018): 227-244, doi: 10.1177/1368431017709703. Regina Connolly, "Trust in Commercial and Personal Transactions in the Digital Age,” in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. William H. Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 165-192. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press). Michelle White, Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 2015). Brian J. Hracs and Doreen Jakob, "Selling the Stage: Exploring the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Interactive Cultural Experiences,” in Spatial Dynamics in the Experience Economy, eds. Anne Lorentzen et al. (New York: Routledge, 2015): 71-87. Tara Liss-Marino, "Sell (It) Yourself: Marketing Pleasure in Digital DIY" (doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014). Susan Luckman, Craft and the Creative Economy (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2015). 10 Facebook, "Introducing Marketplace,” published October 2016, http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-marketplace-buy-and-sell-with-your-local-community. Stanislav Mamonov and Raquel Benbunan-Fich, "Exploring Factors Affecting Social E-Commerce Service Adoption: The Case of Facebook Gifts,” International Journal of Information Management 37, no. 6 (December 2017): 590-600.

4

and ownership, and cultural studies tends to focus on consumption and signification.11

Hence, many political-economic studies of social media sites center on the commercial

valorization of user data.12 Meanwhile, many cultural studies of these same sites focus on

the signification of identity and the transformation of language.13 For instance, digital

studies of eBay situate the platform within political-economic configurations of new

media labor14 and cultural formations of online community15. In this respect, the

11 This is not to reduce political economy or cultural studies to production and consumption, respectively, but to highlight a general tendency in order to understand the lacuna of exchange. To be sure, even when political economy and cultural studies fit these tendencies, they incorporate a variety of additional factors into analysis. 12 Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2017). Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Sebastian Sevignani, Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2016). Ganaele Langlois et al., Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data (New York: Bloomsury Academic, 2015). Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle, eds., The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2014). Christian Fuchs et al., Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2012). Daniel Trottier, Social Media as Surveillance (New York: Routledge, 2012). Nicole Cohen, "The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook,” Democratic Communiqué 22, no. 1 (2008): 5-22. 13 John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data (New York: NYU Press, 2017). Patrick Davison "The Language of Internet Memes," in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York: New York University Press, 2012): 120-135. Christopher Pullen and Margaret Cooper, eds., LGBT Identity and Online New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010). David Crystal et al., Language and the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). danah boyd, "Friends, Friendsters, and Myspace Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites," First Monday 11 (2006): no pagination. 14 Janice Denegri-Knott and Detlev Zwick. Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay: Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization,” American Behavioral Scientist 56, no. 4 (2012): 439-459, doi: 10.1177/0002764211429360. Mary Calkins, "My Reputation Always Had More Fun Than Me: The Failure of eBay's Feedback Model to Effectively Prevent Online Auction Fraud,” Richmond Journal of Law and Technology (Spring 2001). 15 Michelle White, Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Josh Boyd, "In Community We Trust: Online Security Communication at eBay,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7, no. 3 (2002): no pagination, 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2002.tb00147.x.

5

methodological dichotomy reflects the critical-theoretical division of the social totality

into an economic base and a cultural superstructure.16 Exchange occupies an awkward

position within this theoretical edifice: the circulation of commodities exceeds the hidden

abode of production, proper to political economy, but precedes the conspicuous realm of

consumption, proper to cultural studies.

Given the neglect of internet markets in digital media studies, this research project

examines three exchange platforms — Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road — in order to

understand exchange on internet markets. My argument runs as follows.

Cyberlibertarianism is a dominant ideology in the technology industry (introduction).

Internet markets represent cyberlibertarianism ideals put into practice. According to

cyberlibertarianism, internet markets should be self-regulating, but problems of fraud

nevertheless emerge. On internet markets, fraud occurs through the manipulation of

platform protocols. This matters, because protocols are supposed to replace regulations

on internet markets (chapter 1). Actors take various steps to mitigate concerns of fraud

and control the commercial process. These steps rely on website infrastructure, platform

16 Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review 1, no. 82 (November 1973), https://newleftreview.org/article/1568. Janice Peck, "Why We Shouldn't Be Bored with the Political Economy versus Cultural Studies Debate,” Cultural Critique 64 (2006): 92-126, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489259. Larry Grossberg, "Cultural Studies versus Political Economy: Is Anyone Else Bored with this Debate?,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 12, no. 1 (1995): 72-81. Larry Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies: The Discipline of Communication and the Reception of Cultural Studies in the United States,” in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, eds. Cary Nelson and Dikip Parameshwar Goankar (New York: Routledge, 1996): 131-147. Timothy Havens et al., "Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 2 (2009): 234-253. Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies," in Culture, Society, and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch et al. (New York: Routledge 1982): 52-86.

6

culture, and state, commercial, and domestic institutions. This matters, because internet

markets are supposed to be self-contained, yet digital exchange implicates factors that are

external to electronic commerce, especially the state institutions that cyberlibertarianism

claims to obviate. For instance, users develop social customs that rely on website

infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions (chapter 2). Vendors perform

practices that are also connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state

institutions, but in ways that reflect their goal of selling goods (chapter 3). State,

commercial, and domestic institutions figure centrally in the circulation of market

objects, which often enter digital exchange in places where institutional control falls short

(chapter 4). Far from being a story of self-regulation, exchange on internet markets is a

story of regulatory endeavors, as users, vendors, and institutions aim (and sometimes fail)

to control the process of electronic commerce. This tells us that cyberlibertarianism

overlooks the role of regulations and institutions on the internet. In turn, this suggests that

actors outside of the technology industry should insist on the reality of regulations and

institutions in order to create a fair and cooperative internet (conclusion).

As venues that embody cyberlibertarian principles, internet markets are among

the most productive case studies of the digital ideology. By meeting the radical

conditions demanded by cyberlibertarianism, internet markets are experiments in the

digital ideology that decisively disprove its hypotheses. If the predictions of

cyberlibertarianism cannot be realized in the free digital market, then they likely cannot

be realized anywhere. Internet markets are valuable objects of research, because they

uniquely actualize the tenets of cyberlibertarianism and, in so doing, demonstrate

7

significant flaws in the dominant paradigm. Moving forward, they may serve as a

counterpoint to the claim that an internet equilibrium is just one regulatory removal away.

Cyberlibertarianism

Cyberlibertarianism is a particular way of thinking about digital technology and a

dominant ideology in Silicon Valley. It is important to understand cyberlibertarianism,

because the paradigm informs the principles of industry leaders, the practices of major

firms, and the sensibilities of high-technology workers. This has consequences beyond

the Valley, insofar as these figures and firms are the ones who invent and design popular

digital technologies, influence governmental policies related to the internet, and play an

outsized role in public debates surrounding technology and society. Further, as I argue in

the body of this project, cyberlibertarianism shares key assumptions with other paradigms

for understanding digital media: electronic reputation studies, free labor theory, accounts

of the digital economy and digital labor, and internet commodity studies. This means that

even scholars can operate under the assumptions of cyberlibertarianism.

Conceptually, cyberlibertarianism combines the market theory of libertarianism

with the system theory of cybernetics. For libertarianism and cybernetics, economic and

technological systems tend toward equilibrium through the independent decisions of their

constituent actors. Both discourses construe regulation as unnecessary, even

counterproductive. The key thinkers of libertarianism and cybernetics — Friedrich Hayek

and Norbert Weiner — follow remarkably similar logic in their respective arguments.17

17 Friedrich von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, ed. William Warren Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948).

8

For Hayek, regulation undermines the spontaneous order of the economic market. For

Weiner, regulation hinders the self-regulating capacity of the technological system. Both

discourses cast institutional intervention as impractical, even hazardous. For Hayek, the

state should never attempt to manage economic markets; for Weiner, the state should

never attempt to police technological systems. Both discourses position cooperation as

the foundation of social life, upon which economic markets and technological systems

are built. Libertarianism and cybernetics have been subject to widespread criticism in the

economic and social sciences throughout the twentieth century.18 As it turns out,

regulations can be productive, institutions can be equitable, and conflict can be inevitable

in economic and technological systems. Yet libertarianism and cybernetics make a stealth

comeback in the way that Silicon Valley understands the technologies that it produces.

According to cyberlibertarianism, the internet is a self-regulating system that is

incompatible with external regulations. Cyberlibertarianism can operate on the level of

internet firms (don't regulate the technology industry), internet networks (don't regulate

cable traffic), and internet platforms (don't regulate website content). In this line of

thought, external regulations, including state regulations, are not only unnecessary but

actually detrimental to the internet as a self-contained system. At the heart of

cyberlibertarianism is the vision of an internet in perpetual equilibrium. As in

libertarianism, every attempt to manipulate the system ultimately backfires: the

regulation of internet activity ends up undermining the vitality of online exchange. As in

18 Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Economic Role of the State (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964): 159-192. See the discussion of libertarianism and cyberneticism in the introduction.

9

cybernetics, every flaw in the system is ultimately incorporated into its superlative

functioning: the system ends up neutralizing and integrating errors, dysfunctions, and

interruptions. I follow several others in referring to this conceptual framework as

cyberlibertarianism.19 To be sure, not everyone in Silicon Valley is a cyberlibertarian,

and not every cyberlibertarian believes in the paradigm whole. However,

cyberlibertarianism is an influential way of thinking about technology in the place where

many technologies are created. In order to demonstrate the existence of

cyberlibertarianism as a dominant ideology in Silicon Valley, I highlight traces of the

paradigm in the beliefs of industry leaders; the practices of technology firms; and the

books, magazines, manifestos, conferences, and think tanks that populate the Valley.

In the early 1990s, many technology workers began to think of the economy as a

self-regulating system. In his 1990 book Bionomics, Michael Rothschild put forward an

elegantly simple thesis that affirmed the self-regulating nature of the market: "the

economy is a rainforest".20 So compelling was this notion in Silicon Valley that an annual

Bionomics conference was established — organized by die-hard libertarians from 1993 to

1996 and then by the Cato Institute from 1997 to 1999 — and attended by technology

19 Langdon Winner, "Technology Today: Utopia or Dystopia?" Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 989-1017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971195. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, "The California Ideology," Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44-72, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09505439609526455. The concept of cyberlibertarianism has a tangled genealogy. Langdon Winner coined the term in 1997, but Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron established its conceptual foundations in a famous essay on "the California ideology" the previous year. For Winner, Barbrook, and Cameron, cyberlibertarianism positions individual freedom at the core of digital technology. I accept this core premise, even as I develop my own definition of the term. 20 Michael L. Rothschild, Bionomics (New York: H. Holt, 1990).

10

heavyweights, such Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit.21 The

Cato Institute is a longstanding libertarian think tank that received a major influx of

funding by conservative industry leaders, such as the Koch brothers, in the 1980s; and its

interest in Silicon Valley attests to the region's libertarian sensibility early on.22 Outside

of conferences, Wired magazine began to speak the language of cyberlibertarianism,

starting with its founding in 1993, when it ran the headline "Big Brother Wants To Look

Inside Your Bank Account (Anytime It Pleases)"23. Along with the suspicion of state

power came a distaste for state regulations. A 1994 Wired piece proclaimed, "Regulation

was the last concern of the highway builders."24 Paulina Borsook, who worked at the

magazine in the 1990s, observed, "The magazine almost never ran anything that was

anything that was other than laudatory of technology or other than libertarian in

outlook."25 In 1994, a Berkeley professor observed that Silicon Valley engineers

"[assumed] that the dynamism of free markets would be self-perpetuating and self-

governing" and therefore "saw no need to attend to the institutional foundations of their

vitality."26

21 Paul Krugnman, "The Power of Biobabble", Slate, October 24, 1997, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/10/the_power_of_biobabble. 22 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 2017). 23 Wired Staff, "Big Brother Wants To Look Inside Your Bank Account (Anytime It Pleases)", Wired, December 1993. 24 Wired Staff, "There Will Be No Information Superhighway," Wired, February 1994. 25 Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish, (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 128. 26 Anna Lee Saxenian, Regional Advantage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

11

Two years later, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, referred to the PC as an "organic

phenomenon" that should not be manipulated by the state.27 Around this time, as the Cato

Institute took a greater interest in the emergent technology industry, T.J. Rogers, Cato's

west coast emissary, created a petition to decrease corporate taxes by ending corporate

subsidies; the document was signed by a collection of technology CEOs and venture

capital firms in Silicon Valley.28 By the end of the decade, many were speaking about

technology in ecological and anti-statist terms. Richard Dawkins, with his social-

evolutionary approach to intelligence and innovation, graced the cover of Wired in

1998.29 In her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel followed Hayek

and cast technological society as a conflict between the forces of dynamism, marked by

free exploration, and the forces of statism, marked by state planning.30 Libertarianism

was plainly in the Bay Area ether at this time, as a San Francisco Recorder headline read,

"California's Tech Elite Remains Stubbornly Libertarian".31

The 2000s witnessed the increasing popularity and profitability of the internet, as

well as the instrumentalization of cyberlibertarianism by major technology figures and

their firms. These figures, in the words Noam Cohen, "propose a society in which

personal freedoms are near absolute and government regulations wither away, where bold

entrepreneurs amass billions of dollars from their innovations and the rest of us struggle

in a hypercompetitive market without unions, governmental regulations, or social-welfare

27 Daniel Gross, "Greatest Businessmen of All Time," Forbes, October 1996. 28 T. J. Rogers, "Silicon Valley versus Corporate Welfare," Cato Institute Briefing Paper no. 37, April 27, 1998. 29 Wired Staff, "Bad Boy Evolutionist," Wired, May 1998. 30 Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: Touchstone, 1998). 31 George Craw, " California's Tech Elite Remains Stubbornly Libertarian" San Francisco Recorder, June 1998.

12

to protect us"32. Their actions also highlight a paradox of cyberlibertarianism: a

simultaneous rejection of the state and courtship of the state. These figures draw less on

the ecological language of cybernetics and more on the self-regulating language of

libertarianism. Peter Thiel, a founder of Paypal turned venture capitalist, is the likely

most outspoken libertarian in the Valley, claiming he built Paypal "because he wanted to

create a currency that could circumvent government control"33. Thiel funds the

Seasteading Institute, which aims to create a free libertarian society on a manufactured

island, beyond the jurisdiction of governments; and he famously paid twenty-four

students to not attend college, which he considers an outdated institution.34 At the same

time, Thiel's data mining company, Palantir, relied on the CIA as an early investor,

contradicting his principled opposition to the state.35 Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of

Amazon, is also ambivalent toward state power. On the one hand, Bezos is comfortable

pushing the limits of occupational safety regulations: following a New York Times story

on the poor working conditions of Amazon fulfillment centers, Bezos insisted that the

labor market was self-regulating, such that any of his workers could leave if they

pleased.36 “I strongly believe," he wrote in a letter to employees, "that anyone working in

32 Noam Cohen, The Know It Alls (New York: The New Press, 2017), 4. 33 George Packer, "No Death, No Taxes," The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxes. 34 China Mievelle, "Floating Utopias," In These Times, September 28, 2007, http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias. Ben Wieder, "Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 To Not Attend College," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2011, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622. 35 Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2017). 36 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfield, "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace," The New York Times, August 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html.

13

a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay."37 On

the other hand, Bezos directly lobbied for the Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998, which

prevents governmental bodies from imposing internet-specific taxes; and he persuaded

the US Justice Department to sue Apple's Tiny eBookstore for anti-trust violations.38 For

Bezos, the state is only legitimate when conveniently so.

Likewise, Google is formally opposed to state regulations, as when it opposed the

Stop Online Piracy Act of 2012, a bill crafted to stop copyright infringement on search

engines like Google.39 Yet the company relies on the state to protect itself against foreign

regulations: it is likely that Google's $15 million lobbying efforts led members of

Congress to defend Google against EU regulatory bodies.40 There is also evidence of a

"revolving door" between Google and the United States government, as workers regularly

move from one to the other, suggesting a certain level of regulatory capture, or an

instance when regulators are controlled by the industries they are designed to regulate.41

Here, governmental regulations are problematic, unless they are crafted by industry

actors themselves. Similarly, as founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

oversees his company's extensive lobbying efforts. Along with Amazon and Google,

37 John Cook, "Jeff Bezos Responds to New York Times Story," Geek Wire, August 16, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/full-memo-jeff-bezos-responds-to-cutting-nyt-expose-says-tolerance-for-lack-of-empathy-needs-to-be-zero. 38 Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. 39 Washington Post Staff, "SOPA Bill Shelved After Global Protests from Google, Wikipedia and Others," The Washington Post, January 20, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/sopa-bill-shelved-after-global-protests-from-google-wikipedia-and-others/2012/01/20/gIQAN5JdEQ_story.html. 40 Jonathan Taplin, "Why is Google Spending Record Sums on Lobbying Washington?" The Guardian, July 30, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/google-silicon-valley-corporate-lobbying-washington-dc-politics. 41 Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things.

14

Facebook used its lobbying power to influence the crafting of an anti-human-trafficking

bill that, in an early version, would have increased the legal liability of platform

companies.42 Zuckerberg is staunchly opposed to such governmental regulation and

positions users and engineers as superlative regulators. In 2010, when asked if Facebook

should be regulated like other utilities, he replied, "I mean, in terms of regulation, we get

regulated by users, right?"43 During his appearance in front of Congress in 2018,

Zuckerberg insisted that automated technologies would be better regulators than

governmental bodies. When Congressman David McKinley asked about Facebook's

accountability for preventing misinformation, Zuckerberg replied, "What we need to do is

build more A.I. tools that can proactively find that content."44 Here, the decisions of users

and the designs of engineers are the only regulations necessary for the social media giant.

Where these industry leaders are concerned with the regulation of internet firms and

internet platforms, internet service providers (ISPs) are concerned with the regulation of

internet networks. In 2018, Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC, framed net neutrality

provisions — state mandates that ensure that all internet network traffic is treated the

same by ISPs — as "heavy-handed" regulations by an overbearing state.45 He even

42 Tony Romm, "Tech Companies Fear Repercussions from a New Bill in the U.S. Congress to Combat Human Trafficking," Recode, August 1, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/8/1/16074808/facebook-google-amazon-sex-human-trafficking-congress-section-230. 43 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect 44 "Transcript of Zuckerberg’s Appearance Before House Committee," The Washington Post, April 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/transcript-of-zuckerbergs-appearance-before-house-committee. 45 Laurel Wamsley, "FCC's Pai: 'Heavy-Handed' Net Neutrality Rules Are Stifling The Internet," NPR, November 22, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/22/565962178/fccs-pai-heavy-handed-net-neutrality-rules-are-stifling-the-internet.

15

causally connected the vitality of the internet to the absence of regulatory controls; as he

explained in an interview, "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google

become global powerhouses, precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to

this internet."46 In all of these cases, the internet is a self-contained system, beyond the

messy realities of regulations and institutions.

This brief account of cyberlibertarianism highlights the paradoxical and flexible

nature of the digital ideology. In cyberlibertarianism, external regulations are detrimental

to the internet — unless those regulations benefit technology firms. The formal agenda of

regulatory resistance includes an exception when regulatory capture is necessary. In

addition to being paradoxical, cyberlibertarianism is highly flexible. It can operate on the

level of industry, as when technology firms resist regulation in the form of taxation and

oversight by the state. It can operate on the level of websites, as when platform

companies resist regulation in the form of legal liability over content. It can operate on

the level of networks, as when internet service providers resist regulation in the form of

net neutrality provisions. Each of these components of the internet may be positioned as

an ecological system that risks damage by artificial institutions, unless those institutions

can offer strategic leverage.

Needless to say, the role of the state in creating and maintaining the internet goes

unrecognized in this framework, and cyberlibertarianism neatly lines up with the

economic interests of technology firms — regulations are only legitimate when

strategically valuable. However partial and motivated, cyberlibertarianism is an

46 Ajit Pai, "FCC Chairman Defends Repeal of Net Neutrality,” interview with Rachel Martin, Morning Edition, NPR, November 22, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/11/22/.../fcc-chairman-defends-repeal-of-net-neutrality.

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influential way of thinking about technology, and it informs the beliefs of industry

figures, the practices of major firms, and the sensibilities of high-technology workers. It

is the dominant narrative against which alternative accounts are positioned. In the

following chapters, I show that internet markets offer an alternative account of

technology, one that recognizes the role of regulation in electronic commerce. First, I

review the research methods employed in this study and provide an overview of the case

studies in question.

Method

Given the state of electronic commerce research, I began with the following

question: what is the nature of exchange relations on internet markets? I understand

internet markets as internet sites where a significant volume of exchange occurs between

individual peers, and where peers generally do not manufacture the goods that they sell.

By contrast, internet retailers are internet sites where a significant volume of exchange

occurs between users and firms. In terms of digital architecture, internet markets are peer-

to-peer or distributed platforms where users primarily encounter one another, while

internet retailers are hierarchical or centralized platforms where users primarily encounter

business organizations. Further, internet retail sales have an implied warranty, or a legal

assurance that product claims are accurate.47 By contrast, internet markets need not

guarantee the accuracy of user claims, enjoying an exemption from implied warranty

47 Avery W. Katz, "Economic Foundations of Contract Law,” in Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law, eds. Gregory Klass et al. (Oxford University Press, 2014): 171-192. Stephen A. Smith, "Remedies for Breach of Contract: One Principle or Two," in Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law, eds. Gregory Klass et al. (Oxford University Press, 2014): 341-361.

17

under telecommunications law.48 Moreover, internet markets are distinct from online

craft markets, where individuals themselves manufacture the goods that they sell, and

where production and circulation are consequently interwoven. Internet markets are

oriented around exchange, even as exchange carries within itself a collection of other

phenomena.

Having set the boundaries and the framework of the study, I selected three cases

on conceptual and methodological grounds.49 Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road fit the

definition of internet market outlined above. Their central function is peer-to-peer

exchange — without the implied warranties of internet retail markets, without the micro-

production of craft markets, and, as we'll see, without the regulations of conventional

local, antique, and black markets. Absent such processes that mediate commerce, these

internet markets isolate exchange as a conceptual object. As comparative case studies,

Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road are similar enough to demonstrate trends but different

enough to illuminate nuances. That is, comparison helps distinguish between general

features (shared by internet markets) and particular features (unique to each platform).

Following the definitions laid out by Jeasik Cho and Allen Trent, I employed a paradigm

of constructivist transactional validity,50 This means I was seeking accurate claims about

internet markets that are grounded in evidence and that reflect an empirical reality.

48 Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (1996). 49 Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994). 50 Jeasik Cho and Allen Trent, "Validity in Qualitative Research Revisited,” Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (2006), 320, 10.1177/1468794106065006.

18

Consequently, I worked to confirm my research findings as accurate through

triangulation, a process of verifying facts through multiple data sources.51

Web crawls of six discussion boards constitute the first major source of research

data (see Appendix I). These discussion boards offered a breadth of data related to

patterns in user activity. Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road each feature an internal

discussion board on their respective web domains, as well as auxiliary discussion boards

on the Reddit web domain. In order to identify trends in user activity on internet markets,

I ran a total of eighteen web crawls — three on each of the six discussion boards. I used

an iterative criterion sample to guide my data collection during the web crawls. 52 That is,

I sampled discussion board data based on a criterion (the inclusion of certain keywords)

and ran multiple iterations of web crawls based on the findings of the preceding crawl(s).

After developing a corpus of posts, I pattern-coded the parsed data with themes that

emerged progressively during the initial review.53 Following collection, I employed a

critical, interpretive approach to these case samples. Drawing on textual analysis, I

sought to identify patterns in user activity, understood as a triplex of user experience, user

practice, and user attitude.54

Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with internet merchants constitute the

second major source of research data (see Appendix II). I followed IRB protocol at each

stage of interview research, from contacting participants to storing data, and I received

51 Cho and Trent, "Validity in Qualitative Research Revisited,” 322. 52 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 53 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 54 Fürsich, "In Defense of Textual Analysis."

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IRB approval from the University of Pennsylvania.55 Where the discussion boards offered

a breadth of data related to user activity, the interviews offered a depth of data related to

user activity. I selected interview participants first through a theoretical sample and then

through a sequentially-driven conceptual sample.56 In the theoretical sample, I sought out

experienced users of internet markets, understood as users who had been on Craigslist or

eBay for over seven years. In the sequentially-driven conceptual sample, I sought

interview participants who would reflect a variety of perspectives in terms of experience,

age, and gender.57. Following recruitment, I conducted text-only internet interviews that

occurred in private chat rooms over Cyph, a peer-to-peer online messaging system.58 In

creating an interview template, I followed Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin in thinking of

interviews as "structured conversations"59 designed to cover research problems, which the

interviewer develops beforehand, and to explore organic themes, which arise during the

course of the interview. In analyzing the interviews, I pattern-coded the data with themes

that emerged progressively during review. Following coding, I employed a critical,

interpretive approach to the interview data.

Legal and governmental records constitute my third source of research data (see

Appendix III). These records offered a breadth of data related to patterns in institutional

activity. My goal in looking at these records was to understand the legal and

governmental systems within which internet markets operate. In analyzing the data, I

55 "Online Interviews with Craigslist and eBay Users,” approved by the Institutional Review Board, University of Pennsylvania. 56 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 57 Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012). 58 "About Cyph,” Cyph, retrieved July 22, 2017, https://www.cyph.com/about. 59 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 129.

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pattern coded the material according to themes that emerged during review. In

interpreting the documents, I continued to employ a critical, interpretive approach,

drawing on textual analysis to identify patterns in the systems surrounding internet

markets. Here, however, I foregrounded the institutional context of their production. In

addition to drawing on textual analysis, I drew on political-economic analysis in seeing

states as actors with material and symbolic resources, as well as strong incentives to

protect and maintain those resources.

Platform documents produced by internet markets constitute my fourth major

source of research (see Appendix IV). These offered a depth of data related to patterns in

platform activity. This allowed me to hone in on the proximate context and deliberate

decisions of platforms, as they relate to institutional and user activity. These included

user agreements, terms of use, user guidelines, market policies, and promotional

materials. I pattern-coded this data with themes that emerged progressively through

review, and some of these overlapped with themes that developed from other research

sources. In interpreting these documents, I drew on textual analysis to identify patterns in

platform activity. More notably, I drew on political-economic analysis to consider how

the material interests of platforms inform their user documentation. This includes, for

instance, how user agreements enable platform companies to control economic resources

or evade legal liabilities. Finally, a variety of journalistic reports constitute the final

source of my research (see Appendix V). These were selected on the grounds of

relevance, mostly direct but sometimes direct, to the case studies.

Case Studies

21

A brief word on the case studies (see Appendix VI for a full primer). It should be

noted at the outset that each of these platforms is an unstable conceptual object:

architectures, protocols, functionalities, interfaces, and policies change over time. This

means that accounts of platform activity are chronologically situated, and they should be

taken as snapshots of fluid sites rather than as conclusive accounts.

Craigslist is a local internet market with over seven hundred internet domains (or

addresses) serving seventy countries.60 Each month, Craigslist users post over eighty

million classified advertisements, directed at physically proximate individuals within

their neighborhood, city, region, state, or country.61 This is the reason for the plurality of

internet domains: Craigslist addresses are location-based, meaning users in different

geographical regions navigate to different website domains in order to conduct local

commerce. In this respect, Craigslist is something of an umbrella term for the variety of

local Craigslist domains, as there is no centralized market designed to reach the

geographically distributed userbase in one fell swoop. This userbase is expansive:

Craigslist is the fifteenth most visited website in the United States.62 These market

participants post advertisements in a broad range of section categories: goods for sale and

goods wanted, rentals and real estate, job opportunities and services for hire, community

events and announcements, and a variety of discussion boards. There was previously a

personals sections, which went through several incarnations before being removed

entirely in 2018, following the passage of internet legislation that reduced platform

60 In this project, I use Craigslist (capitalized) rather than the stylized craigslist (lower case). "About,” Craigslist, retrieved March 2017, https://www.craigslist.org/about. 61 "About,” Craigslist. 62 "craigslist Traffic Statistics,” Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org.

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immunity from criminal liability.63 Merchants meet one another in person to conduct the

final transaction. In recent years, Craigslist has generated upwards of $700 million in

revenue.64 With a small staff of forty people and minimal operating costs,65 plus a

userbase of millions, the company enjoys a profit margin of 80%, making it the most

profitable classified advertising site in the world.66 Despite increasing competition from

similar (if not copycat) sites, such as Offer Up, Internet Yard Sale, and (as of 2016)

Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist continues to dominate the field of peer-to-peer markets.

eBay is an online auction market with an expansive global presence.67 There are

over 150 million active eBay users68 and 25 million active eBay sellers69 around the

world, and the platform is ranked in the top ten for internet traffic in the United States

and the top hundred in China, Japan, Canada, and Russia.70 In contrast to Craigslist users

who are balkanized in local jurisdictions, eBay users meet in a common market, where

they exchange upwards of a hundred billion dollars in merchandise each year.71 Given the

size of the market, eBay is neatly (if not compulsively) divided into sections and

63 See the discussion of the Craigslist personals section in chapter 4. 64 AIM Group, Global Classified Advertising Annual, published online November 2016, http://www.aimgroup.com/reports. 65 Ryan Mac, "Craig Newmark Founded Craigslist To Give Back, Now He's A Billionaire,” Forbes, May 3, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-craigslist-make-money. 66 AIM Group, "Craigslist Revenue Soars Again,” published online November 2016, http://www.aimgroup.com/2016/11/29/craigslist-revenue-soars-again. 67 "How Popular Is eBay?,” Alexa. 68 "eBay Statistics and Facts,” Statista, published online 2018, https://www.statista.com/ topics/2181/ebay. 69 "Our New Logo,” eBay, published online 2016, https://pages.ebay.com/np/en-us/announcements/new/index.html?article. 70 "How Popular Is eBay?,” Alexa. 71 "eBay Inc. Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Results,” eBay Inc., January 31, 2018, https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-inc-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2017-results.

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subsections: collectibles, fashion, electronics, cars, home and garden, sporting goods, and

others. These sections are Russian dolls with multiple nested subsections. Collectibles,

for example, divides into antiques, coins, and comics, which may then be filtered

according to era, brand, and condition. eBay began as an online antique market, and, after

going public in 1998, expanded its product selection and acquired dozens of electronic

commerce sites in the wake of the Web 2.0 boom.72 Significantly, in 2004, eBay took a

28% stake in Craigslist when it bought out a disgruntled shareholder, but the relationship

ended in 2008, when eBay sued Craigslist for diluting its stake in the company to 24%

and thereby removing its board seat; Craigslist ultimately bought back to the minority

stake.73

Silk Road was one of the first dark web markets74 and among the most active

during its run from 2011 to 201375. The site dealt predominately in drugs, firearms, fake

IDs, hacking manuals, criminal guidebooks, bootlegged software, and money laundering

services. Although buyers hailed from over a hundred countries worldwide, sellers tended

to be based in the Western world, especially North America and Europe.76 Over the

72 Crunchbase Staff, "eBay Acquisitions," last updated February 2018, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ebay/acquisitions/acquisitions_list#section-acquisitions. 73 Ryan Mac, "eBay Ends Ties With Craigslist, Sells Minority Stake Back To Craigslist," Forbes, June 19, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/06/19/ebay-ends-ties-with-craigslist-sells-minority-stake-back-to-craigslist. 74 Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net, (London: William Heinemann of Random House, 2014). 75 Digital Citizens Alliance, "Busted, But Not Broken: The State of Silk Road and the Darknet Marketplaces,” published online 2014, http://digitalcitizensalliance.org. 76 These trends, gleaned from the evidence in United States v. Ulbricht roughly reflect the worldwide distribution of Tor users, as outlined by the Oxford Internet Institute. Of course, Tor activity and dark web activity should not be equated, insofar as Tor serves a variety of purposes outside of dark web access, including identity protection for political dissidents and victims of domestic abuse. These trends also reflect Jamie Bartlett's claim that Silk Road vendors tend to be based in the United States, the UK, and Australia.

24

course of its tenure, Silk Road generated over two hundred million dollars in sales, and

its owner, Ross William Ulbricht, collected over eighteen million dollars in commission

therefrom.77 The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down the site in 2013

following a two-year investigation into its operation and ownership, leading a federal

judge to sentence Ulbricht to life in prison without parole during a 2014 trial.78

United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y., 2014), Goverment Exhibit 703b. Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata, "The Anonymous Internet,” Oxford Internet Institute, published online 2014, http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk. Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net. 77 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Government Sentencing Submission. 78 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Sentencing Decision.

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CHAPTER 1

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH INTERNET FRAUD

EXPLOITING DIGITAL PROTOCOLS

Internet markets represent cyberlibertarian ideals put into practice. As free digital

markets, they embody the laissez faire principles championed by cyberlibertarianism.

Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road each draw on cyberlibertarianism to characterize their

platforms as self-regulating. By these accounts, internet markets should be perfect. Yet

problems of fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion emerge on these platforms, and

institutions make sporadic appearances in economic conflicts. In such cases, users pursue

their economic self-interest through the manipulation of platform protocols. This is

significant, because protocols are designed to replace regulations in the context of digital

exchange. Not only are internet markets far from self-regulating, but the digital protocols

that are supposed to make regulations obsolete end up being the very tools by which

internet actors defraud and deceive one another. So much for digital equilibrium.

Platform Cyberlibertarianism

In the introduction, I noted that cyberlibertarianism operates on the level of firms,

networks, and platforms. Internet markets fall under the aegis of platform

cyberlibertarianism, according to which internet websites are self-regulating. Several

authors describe how the discourse of cyberlibertarianism operates on the level of

platforms, although they use different terms to characterize that discourse. Tarleton

Gillespie considers how platform companies draw on cyberlibertarianism to position their

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websites as neutral venues of exchange.79 Gillespie argues that the very term "platform"

connotes an impartial foundation upon which free association rests. A platform is not an

active participant on the internet but a "mere facilitator, supporter, host" whose central

function is "the neutral provision of content".80 As neutral venues of internet exchange,

platforms are not responsible for the actions of users, and they need not institute

regulations to control user behavior. Similarly, for Trevor Scholz, the term "Web 2.0"

implies that internet platforms are beyond regulation, governed by peer-to-peer

agreement rather than hierarchical authority.81 José Van Dijck and David Nieborg

relatedly observe that electronic commerce manifestos position user activity as

fundamentally cooperative.82 Here, platform regulations are unnecessary, because

voluntary participation is at the center of internet exchange.

Silk Road, eBay, and Craigslist each draw on cyberlibertarianism to characterize

their platforms as self-regulating and to justify their laissez faire regulatory regimes. This

is evident in their public presentation, legal strategy, and platform policy — even as it is

sometimes contradicted by their cooperation with state institutions. As a black market set

in opposition to state power, Silk Road most dramatically embodies cyberlibertarian

ideals. Ross William Ulbricht, Silk Road's architect and executive operator, saw Silk

Road as a principled libertarian sphere of exchange. His logic ran as follows: trade is

79 Tarleton Gillespie, "The Politics of 'Platforms',” New Media & Society 12, no. 3. (2010): 347-364, doi: 10.1177/1461444809342738. 80 Gillespie, "The Politics of 'Platforms',” 353. 81 Trevor Sholz, "Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0,” First Monday 13, no. 3. (2008): no pagination, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2138/1945. 82 José van Dijk and David Nieborg, "Wikinomics and Its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos,” New Media & Society 11, no. 5 (2009): 855-874. doi: 10.1177/1461444809105356.

27

inherently cooperative; the state is inherently coercive; when the state ceases to regulate

trade, actors will come together to form mutually beneficial economic relationships. In

his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht directly contrasted economic cooperation and political

compulsion:

I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and

agression [sic] amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most

everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person

over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force

is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The

best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed,

however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-

hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic

use of force.83

For Ulbricht, Silk Road was an "economic simulation" of a libertarian society, in which

the invisible hand of the free market underwrote economic cooperation. Absent state

economic regulation, nonviolent agreement among self-interested actors would become

the salient principle of economic relationality.

Further, Ulbricht saw economic cooperation on Silk Road as a means of eroding

state power. In a discussion board post on the Silk Road forums from September 2012, he

positioned the popular agora of Silk Road in opposition to the coercive apparatus of the

state: "Every single transaction that takes places outside the nexus of state control is a

83 Ross William Ulbricht, "Ross William Ulbricht,” LinkedIn, accessed February 1, 2015. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossulbricht.

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victory for those individuals taking part in the transaction. So there are thousands of

victories here each week and each one makes a difference, strengthens the agora, and

weakens the state."84 Here, Ulbricht subscribed to a market-centric version of

libertarianism (agorism) and a repressive theory of state power, in which governments

"limit people's access" to commodities that would otherwise circulate freely in the

market. He saw each transaction on Silk Road as a countervailing actualization of

negative liberty, specifically the freedom to trade "outside the nexus of state control". As

economic freedom in civil society expanded, he reasoned, political authority in state

structures would diminish. Exchange relations — cooperative, consensual, and egalitarian

— would make obsolete centralized state power and a fortiori state economic regulation.

After his arrest in October 2013, Ulbricht continued to defend his actions on

principled libertarian grounds. In his pre-sentencing submission to the court, Ulbricht

wrote, "I believed at the time [of creating Silk Road] that people should have the right to

buy and sell whatever they wanted to long as they weren't hurting anyone else... Silk

Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to

pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit."85 Even the popular press

branded Ulbricht has a kind of entrepreneurial cyberpirate. The Economist, a flagship of

economic liberalism, noted that product quality on Silk Road was higher than in the street

84 Gwern Branwen et al., "Dark Net Market Archives, 2011-2015,” Gwern, accessed December 10, 2014, https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives. Dread Pirate Roberts, "Silk Road discussion / Re: chat,” Silk Road Forums, archived September 23, 2012. http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion. In the federal case against Ross Ulbricht, the prosecution convinced the jury that Dread Pirate Roberts was Ulbricht's username. See the disucssion of United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht in the introduction. 85 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y., 2014). Sentencing Submission.

29

trade, a fact that ostensibly demonstrated the self-regulating capacity of the free market.86

Forbes highlighted the political nature of Ulbricht's black market experiment, likening

him to "Julian Assange with a hypodermic needle".87 The libertarian celebration of the

site was not limited to the fiscally conservative press, however. When Gawker published

the first major exposé of Silk Road in June 2011, a staff writer declared that Silk Road

made "buying and selling drugs as easy as buying used electronics" and embodied a

"dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, where money flows across

borders as free as bits".88

Where Ulbricht positioned Silk Road as a extrastate market utopia, eBay positions

itself as a cooperative consumer arcade. As a publicly traded company, eBay is less

dramatically cyberlibertarian than Silk Road, but it nevertheless draws on the discourse

of self-regulation in several arenas. In their promotional materials, eBay is "the perfect

store": the platform circulates superlative commodities among a collaborative group of

users, scattered around the country and the world.89 Customers purchase goods at low

prices, and vendors sell them at high prices — an evidently contradictory claim that is

meant to attract buyers and sellers alike, both of whom are said to contribute to a thriving

86 The Economist Staff, "Amazons of the Dark Net,” The Economist, November 1, 2013. https://www.economist.com/news/international/21629417-business-thriving-anonymous-internet-despite-efforts-law-enforcers. 87 Andy Greenberg, "Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road,” Forbes, August 14, 2013. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road. 88 Adrian Chen, "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” Gawker, June 1, 2011. http://gawker.com/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imag-30818160. 89 Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002).

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and idiosyncratic online marketplace. eBay's origin story features an emblematic mix of

merchant cooperation and market serendipity. As related by eBay's public relations

manager in 1997, the story runs as follows. Pierre Omidyar, eBay's founder, created the

site to help his fiancée locate a rare Pez dispenser. As antique dealers began to populate

the platform, Omidyar spoke with knowledgeable merchants, learned about the

collectibles trade, and followed scattered leads until he found the treasured piece of

plastic. The tale is a colorful combination of market acumen, digital crowdsourcing, free

association, commodity culture, and romantic tropes, all in one fell swoop. It is also a lie:

as Adam Cohen revealed several years later, the story was entirely fabricated by eBay's

public relations manager to create a compelling narrative for the press.90 Despite being

factually incorrect, the origin story captures the cooperative ethos of the company's

public presentation, an ethos that lives on in its colorful television commercials and print

advertisements. eBay's 2017 Fill Your Cart With Color commercial features a

concatenation of eccentric figures, each exhilarated by a recent purchase, and asks,

"When did shopping get so beige?"91

In its legal claims, eBay affirms a wide-ranging immunity from state regulations.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as the 4th circuit ruling

in Zeran v. American Online, Inc., internet platforms are largely immune from liability as

speakers, publishers, or distributors of third-party content.92 That is, they cannot be held

legally responsible for the behavior of users on their platform. eBay asserts and extends

90 Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store. 91 eBay Inc., "Fill Your Cart With Color,” television advertisement, directed by Bridget Savage Cole, Josh Nussbaum, and Director X. 92 John Larkin, "Criminal and Civil Liability For User Generated Content: Craigslist, A Case Study,” Journal of Technology, Law and Policy 15 (2010): 85-112.

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its legal immunity in its terms of use. The agreement exempts the platform from damages

in a variety of commercial circumstances: "eBay has no control over and does not

guarantee the existence, quality, safety or legality of items advertised; the truth or

accuracy of users' content or listings; the ability of sellers to sell items; the ability of

buyers to pay for items; or that a buyer or seller will actually complete a transaction or

return an item."93 Users cannot hold the platform responsible for "loss of money,

goodwill or reputation, profits, other intangible losses, or any special, indirect,

consequential damages"94, even in cases of property destruction or malicious software

infection.

eBay's team of litigators has relied on these legal protections to thwart damage

claims in a number of contested cases. In 2004, an eBay user, Roger Grace, sued the

company after another user posted negative feedback on his page.95 Claiming that the

negative feedback constituted defamation and injured his commercial reputation, Grace

sought damages from eBay in California court. The court ruled in eBay's favor, citing

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and eBay's terms of use in determining

that the platform was not responsible for the user's loss of commercial reputation. In

2008, eBay took on a bigger fish: Tiffany & Co., a publicly traded luxury jewelry

business. Tiffany & Co. sued eBay for false advertising, trademark infringement, and

trademark dilution, pointing to the sale of counterfeit Tiffany & Co. items on the platform

93 "User Agreement,” eBay, last modified April 3, 2018. https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/ member-behaviour-policies/user-agreement?id=4259. 94 User Agreement." 95 Grace v. eBay, Inc, 16 Cal.Rptr.3d 192 (California Ct. App. 2004).

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and the presence of the company logo in eBay's promotional materials.96 The court again

ruled in eBay's favor, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the

principle of nominative fair use. As a host of third-party content, eBay was not

responsible for the sale of counterfeit goods on the site.

At the same time, the Tiffany & Co. lawsuit demonstrates that eBay is willing to

cooperate with state institutions. During the case, eBay revealed that companies who find

counterfeit versions of their products in the auction market may request the takedown of

those items through a copyright violation functionality. Hence, even as eBay resists state

regulation, it follows state directives over copyright law, incorporating those directives

into platform infrastructure. The cyberlibertarian paradox of the state is evident here, as

eBay moves between regulatory evasion and regulatory abidance. eBay's status as a

publicly traded company figures largely into this picture: the platform wants to minimize

the economic costs associated with platform regulation, as well as the political costs that

would accompany state violations.

Craigslist draws on cyberlibertarianism to present itself as a local neighborhood

market governed by countercultural reciprocity. As a venue that regularly cooperates with

the state, Craigslist is the least dramatic case of cyberlibertarianism, but it draws on the

discourse in multiple contexts. Despite being a multimillion-dollar company, Craigslist

regularly presents itself with minimal fanfare, ostensibly the embodiment of a laid-back

and user-friendly digital platform. Though rarely advertised, the platform enjoys a word-

of-mouth popularity, having leveraged its early web presence and sheer utility to become

an emblem of straightforward internet exchange. Its famously unassuming interface has

96 Tiffany (NJ) Inc. v. eBay, Inc, 576 F.Supp.2d 463 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).

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remained virtually unaltered since the late 1990s, becoming a point of cheeky

contestation between minimalist users and their aesthete counterparts. (In a

characteristically ambivalent headline, Wired describes the interface as "ugly, janky, old-

school... and unbeatable".97) Its logo, also unchanged since the late 1990s, is the company

name, stylized in all lowercase, in purple, Times New Roman font, sometimes preceded

by a small peace sign. CEO Jim Buckmaster designates himself as "anti-establishment"

and "a socialist anarchist".98 At the 2013 Open Source Convention, the company's booth

consisted of a plain white backdrop and small, round table, draped in a tie dye cloth.99

Like eBay, Craigslist employs a team of litigators to defend its lax regulatory

regime. In 2008, after someone posted a racially discriminatory housing advertisement on

the site's Chicago portal, a group of civil rights lawyers sued the platform for violating

nondiscrimination statutes.100 The court ruled that Craigslist was not accountable for

discriminatory posts, relying on Section 230 to justify the platform's hands-off regulatory

regime. When the Sheriff of Cook County sued Craigslist for facilitating prostitution in

its (now deleted) Erotic Services section, the court ruled in favor of Craigslist on similar

grounds, noting in its verdict, "Craigslist does not 'provide' the [illegal] information, its

97 Justin Peters, "Craigslist is Ugly, Janky, Old School... and Unbeatable,” Wired, February 14, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/craigslist-is-ugly-janky-old-schooland-unbeatable. 98 "Jim Buckmaster,” About, Craigslist, accessed May 9, 2018, https://www.craigslist.org/ about/jim_buckmaster. 99 Jim Buckmaster, "CL at OSCON," craigslist blog, last modified July 13, 2013, http://blog.craigslist.org/2013/07/23/cl-at-oscon. 100 Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law v. craigslist, Inc., 519 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2008).

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users do."101 In addition to its legal efforts, Craigslist encodes its combination of

executive authority and regulatory neutrality in its terms of use. There, the platform

affirms its exclusive discretion over platform moderation and its laissez-faire policies on

market regulation: "[W]e make no promise as to CL, its completeness, accuracy,

availability, timeliness, propriety, security, or reliability."102 Hence, in 2010, when the

internet company Naturemarket developed software to automatically post advertisements

on Craigslist, Craigslist won a permanent injunction suit against them.103 Here, the

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act underwrote the court's decision that the violation of

Craigslist's terms of use constituted a contract violation. This case, in turn, served as a

precedent for three subsequent cases, in which Craigslist successfully sued groups and

individuals who posted content on behalf of third parties,104 developed similar auto-post

software,105 or scraped Craigslist content for redistribution on other sites.106 In these

instances, Craigslist affirmed its executive authority over the platform and its legal

immunity from any misconduct transpiring therein.

At the same time, Craigslist regularly accommodates state institutions. The saga

of the Craigslist Personals section is a nice illustration of this paradoxical relationship.

For many years, the platform included an Erotic Services section, where sex workers

often posted advertisements. In 2009, the same year that Craigslist faced off with the

101 Thomas Dart, Sherriff of Cook County v. craigslist, Inc., 665 F. Supp. 2d 961 (N.D. Ill. 2009). 102 "Terms of Use,” Craigslist, last modified December 19, 2017, https://www.craigslist.org/ about/terms.of.use.en. 103 craigslist, Inc. v. Naturemarket, Inc., 694 F. Supp. 2d 1039 (N.D. Cal. 2010). 104 craigslist, Inc. v. John L. Stover et al., CV-11-03308 SBA (N.D. Cal. 2012). 105 craigslist, Inc. v. Alecksey Kerbel et al., C-11-3309 EMC (N.D. Cal. 2012). 106 craigslist, Inc. v. 3Taps, Inc., 3:12-CV-03816-CRB (N.C. Cal. 2015).

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Sheriff of Cook County, platform executives met with attorney generals in multiple

states; and they ultimately replaced the Erotic Services section with an Adult Services

that was to be subject to manual review.107 A year later, after Craigslist executives were

called to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime,

Terrorism, and Homeland Security, the company shuttered the Adult Services section

entirely, releasing a statement that affirmed their cooperation with institutional actors: "In

Craigslist, law enforcement and NGO advocates have a highly responsive partner."108

More recently, Craigslist closed its Personals section, which became the de facto venue

for sex work in the wake of section shutdowns, in response to internet legislation

designed to fight human trafficking.109 This brief history demonstrates the ambivalence

toward the state operative in cyberlibertarianism: Craigslist evades state regulations, on

the one hand, and follows state directives, on the other.

Fraud, the Fatal Conceit

Internet markets embody the laissez-faire principles of cyberlibertarianism. They

are free markets, or spheres of economic exchange that are not subject to commercial

regulatory systems.. They feature no economic regulation in the form of contracts and

courts; and they feature no social regulation in the form of status codes and tight-knit

107 Alan Duke, "Official: Craigslist to Replace 'Blatant Internet Brothel,'" CNN, May 13, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/13/craigslist.sex.ads 108 Caroline McCarty, "Craigslist: We Won't Open Adult Services Section", CNet, September 15, 2010, https://www.cnet.com/news/craigslist-we-wont-reopen-adult-services-section. 109 H.R. 1865 — 115th Congress: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017. Retrieved from https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1865.

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communities. Further, as free digital markets, they feature no stable identities, insofar

users may create and delete online avatars with relatively little effort and with relatively

little consequence. Internet markets are built upon the mutual association and voluntary

cooperation of independent traders. According to cyberlibertarianism, they should be

self-regulating centers of economic activity. Yet these platforms are host to fraud,

deception, manipulation, and coercion, which occur through the manipulation of platform

protocols designed to replace regulations. Far from self-regulating, internet markets

feature diverse forms of economic conflict, underwritten by the very protocols designed

that are supposed facilitate cooperative exchange.

Fraud is a form of economic or social gain that operates at the intersection of

deception (having others think what you want them to think) and manipulation (having

others do what you want them to do). Scams, or confidence schemes, are sophisticated

forms of fraud that exploit foibles of the human psyche, such as greed, vanity, or naïveté.

Fraud is a major criminal problem on the internet. According to the United States Federal

Bureau of Investigation (FBI), internet fraud is the single most commonly reported

internet crime in the US, with over 100,000 complaints each year.110 In addition to

personal anonymity and physical distance, the predominance of linguistic communication

online makes the internet an ideal venue for deception. Lies are generally more difficult

to detect in computer-mediated encounters than in face-to-face ones, mainly because the

110 As fraud investigators note, the number of reported cases is far below the actual rate of occurrence. This is because victims are often embarrassed at having been defrauded; because they lose small amounts of money or minimally valuable goods and do not want to involve investigators in seemingly trivial matters; and/or because they discover that reported cases of internet fraud are rarely solved. Internet Crime Complaint Center, "Internet Crime Report, 2017,” last modified January 15, 2018, https://pdf.ic3.gov/2016_IC3Report.pdf.

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chief indicators of interpersonal deception — body language, facial expression, vocal

inflection, and conversational pauses — are absent in text-based, online interactions.111

Regulations typically safeguard merchants against fraud. There two major forms

of regulation that concern us here. There are economic regulations, or the formal legal

mechanisms by which institutions (including state institutions) intervene in trade relations

— the Federal Trade Commission, small claims courts, consumer protection agencies,

anti-trust laws, and so forth. In the sphere of exchange, the contract is the foundational

form of economic regulation, and the court system is the central enforcing authority.112

For instance, if a seller violates the terms of a contract, a buyer may seek institutional

recourse through legal arbitration in order to enforce the contract's terms.113 As Kojin

Karatani argues, economic regulations by the state help minimize the conflictual

dimension of capitalist market exchange.114 There are also social regulations, or informal

standards of appropriate conduct that indirectly mediate exchange relations — notions of

111 Jeffrey Hancock and Jamie Guillroy contest the idea that lies are more difficult to identify on the internet; but other work, including work by former intelligence officials, points a variety of physical behavior that can signal deception. Michail Tsikerdekis and Sherali Zeadally, "Detecting and Preventing Online Identity Deception in Social Networking Services,” IEEE Internet Computing 19, no. 3 (2015): 41-49, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7111875. Philip Houston et al., Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How To Detect Deception (New York: St. Martin's, 2012). Jeffrey T. Hancock and Jamie Guillroy, "Deception with Technology,” in The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technologies, ed. S. Shyam Sundar (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2015): 270-289, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118426456.ch12. 112 Avery W. Katz, "Economic Foundations of Contract Law,” in Gregory Klass, George Letsas, and Prince Saprai, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law (Oxford University Press, 2014): 171-192. 113 Stephen A. Smith, "Remedies for Breach of Contract: One Principle or Two,” in Gregory Klass, George Letsas, and Prince Saprai, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law (Oxford University Press, 2014): 341-361. 114 Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History, trans. Michael K. Boudaghs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

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reputation, fidelity, decency, character, and good faith. In the sphere of exchange, status

codes are a common form of social regulation, and the community is a central enforcing

authority.115 Michael Aglietta notes that social regulations are particularly important in

the context of contemporary market exchange, where traders meet one another as abstract

actors rather than as community members.116 Economic and social regulations both rely

the known identities of actors, who may be bear the consequences of contract violations

and status injuries.

On the internet, there are a variety of mechanisms designed to control user

behavior and stabilize internet exchange.117 One of these mechanisms is the protocol, an

infrastructural rule of engagement that sets the groundwork for computational

operations.118 For example, payment protocols determine whether or not a user has

entered valid financial information or placed money in a website escrow. As basic rules

of computational engagement, protocols are grounded in programmed systems, and,

though they may be overseen by humans, they are largely automated.119 By contrast,

115 J. Davis, "Forms and Norms: The Economy of Social Relations,” Man 8, no. 2 (June 1973): 159-179, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2800844. 116 Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London: Verso, 2015). 117 James Grimmelman, "The Virtues of Moderation,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 17, no. 1 (2015): 42-109, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol17/iss1/2. 118 Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018). The relationship between protocols and automation is convoluted: protocols are often automated, but not all automation is protocological. For example, online payment protocols are automated and protocological (being computational mechanisms with little human oversight); but Youtube flags are automated but not protocological (being computational mechanisms with subsequent human oversight). 119 Ajay Agrawal et al., The Prediction Machine: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review, 2018).

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regulations are grounded in jurisdictive institutions, such as courts and communities,

which can legitimately control human behavior through coercive measures, such as

contract violations and status injuries. Regulations are superstructural operations that rely

on judicious human arbitrations, while protocols are infrastructural operations that rely on

authenticating automated mechanisms.

Some studies of electronic commerce frame protocols as effective replacements

for regulations. These studies operate under the cyberlibertarian assumption that internet

exchange is fundamentally cooperative and that internet platforms are basically self-

regulating — with the caveat that automated protocols lay the foundation for self-

regulation. The idea that commerce can be fully automated, and thereby transcend the

vagaries of contract and state, is particularly evident in discussions of reputational

protocols. For instance, Eric Goldman argues that reputational protocols, or online

feedback systems, are effective replacements for market regulations.120 For Goldman,

reputational protocols ensure cooperation in online markets by exposing misbehaving

merchants through negative reviews. These protocols are "secondary invisible hands"121

that require no regulatory authorities, just as Adam Smith's invisible hand of price

determination requires no central institution to appraise the value of goods.122 Goldman

anticipates an objection to his argument: what if those feedback systems are themselves

120 Eric Goldman, "Regulating Reputation,” in The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Shaping the Offline World, eds. Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011): 51-62. Most essays in the collection follow Goldman in celebrating reputation over regulation. 121 Goldman, "Regulating Reputation,” 53. 122 Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Classic, 2003).

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unreliable, as when restaurant owners review their own businesses on Yelp123 or when

Amazon sellers use fake accounts to post feedback on their own wares124? Goldman

counters: to determine if reputation systems are reliable, users can furnish second-order

reputations systems that rate the quality of each feedback system. Goldman refers to this

meta-reputation system as the "tertiary invisible hand"125, a reputation system that

determines the reputation of another reputation system. For Goldman, the fraudulent

elements of exchange can always be mediated by a supplementary cooperative tool, and

the regulatory lacunae of internet platforms can always be replaced with automated

protocols.

Let's now turn to the internet markets under consideration. We'll begin with a

radically automated market (Silk Road), move onto a widely automated market (eBay),

and conclude with a minimally automated market (Craigslist).

Honor Among Thieves

Exchange relations on Silk Road were the most fraudulent and aggressive among

the internet markets under consideration, and they contradicted Ulbricht's cyberlibertarian

presentation of the platform as a principled libertarian sphere. As a free market, Silk

Road relied on a series of protocols in place of regulations. In place of status codes,

vendor pages featured a rating protocol through which buyers could assess the seller's

customer service, delivery time, and quality of purchased goods. In place of contracts,

123 Joel Grover and Amy Corral, "Don't Fall for Fake Reviews: I-Team Uncovers Them on Yelp, Facebook, Google,” NBC Los Angeles, September 25, 2017. 124 Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg, "How Merchants Use Facebook to Flood Amazon with Fake Reviews,” The Washington Post, April 23, 2018. 125 Goldman, "Regulating Reputation,” 53.

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transactions occurred through a payment protocol: when purchasing a product, buyers

placed their bitcoin in a site-supported escrow, which released the currency to the vendor

once the buyer confirmed receipt of the contraband. The escrow protocol also furnished

profits for the site executive, Ross William Ulbricht, who collected a commission from

each transaction, ranging from 10 to 20% of the sale price. In place of identities,

merchants used profile protocols. To create an account, users had to provide their bitcoin

wallet information and generate a unique username. Purchasing contraband on the site

also required buyers to provide a delivery address. Buyers alternately provided their own

home address, a postal office box, or a working mailbox at a nearby unoccupied home.

Anonymity distinguished Silk Road from the traditional black market, where face-to-face

interactions generally give rise to the status codes that the platform sought to automate.

126

Fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion were significant problems on Silk

Road. In those cases, users pursued their economic self-interest by manipulating platform

protocols designed to replace regulations. In white-washing scams, vendors exploited the

rating, payment, and profile protocols in order to develop trust, acquire capital, and leave

the site without major consequence. During rating extortion schemes, vendors

manipulated the rating protocol and the profile protocol, leveraging customer information

and the specter of state power in order to boost their platform reputation and on-site sales.

Ulbricht himself was subject to extortion through the payment protocol, as blackmailers

demanded that he send website commission their way, lest they expose him to state

126 Letizia Paoli, Mafia brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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power. Ulbricht ultimately turned to brute force to counter these protocol exploits,

enacting the very violence that the site was designed to obviate.

Vendor scams on Silk Road occurred through the manipulation of payment,

rating, and profile protocols. The most prevalent scam on the site was known as

whitewashing: a vendor developed a high rating, accepted multiple payments in exchange

for contraband, persuaded buyers to immediately verify their transactions, collected the

escrow payments released thereby, and then closed her vendor account without sending

the purchased products. Ulbricht's records and correspondences, gleaned from his federal

trial, paint a picture of a digital black market beset by scams.127 Less than a year after

launching the site, Ulbricht noted to a friend that he was banning between one and three

vendors per week for engaging in whitewashing scams.128 In January 2013, Ulbricht

banned a vendor for "scamming many buyers with fake products"129, after which the

vendor returned to the site under a different username. As Ulbricht explained in his

business log, "He goes in stealth and then comes back and repeats."130 In April, a Silk

Road vendor developed a "quickbuy" program that lured new buyers with product

markdowns, only to disappear after accepting payments.131

The site's discussion board was filled with accounts of these whitewashing scams,

as well as strategies to avoid them. After ordering three thousand dollars worth of

narcotics, a buyer was stonewalled by her vendor: "Now he will not answer my emails. I

127 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y., 2014). 128 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit DX 227A. 129 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 242. 130 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 242. 131 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 242.

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called his phone and he denied knowing who I was, even though I know his voice from

having spoken to him over the phone before." A discussion board poster noted that others

had complained about the same vendor, who "clearly built up his reputation and trust as a

vendor with small and medium sized orders" before "scamming people on his way out

with some big orders". One user maintained a list of Silk Road scammers on the

discussion board, and nearly sixty vendors were listed by the time the site was shut down.

Part of the problem of identifying scammers was the ease with which they could make

new accounts. After a reputable vendor, under the username tony76, executed the most

lucrative white-washing scam in the history of the site, users tried to identify his new

account through textual cross-analysis of his product advertisements. As one user noted,

"It's just so hard to punish scammers when everything is anonymous." One bitter user

complained that Silk Road was "nothing but scamming and hacking, disappearing

vendors and disappearing [bitcoin]". Another agreed, writing, "Out of the ~10 purchases I

have made, I have only NOT been ripped off on 1 order. Fuck [Silk Road]. Last time I

get ripped off."

The collection of buyer addresses for blackmailing purposes was quite common

among Silk Road vendors. Here, sellers exploited the rating protocol and the profile

protocol to leverage customer information and boost their platform reputation. Ulbricht's

correspondences reveal concerns over the practices of rating extortion. One user wrote

privately to Ulbricht in December 2011, warning him that a major vendor, Paperchasing,

was regularly extorting buyers for high vendor ratings: "Paperchasing is not only

blackmailing folks into 5/5's or face his wrath, he's also keeping addresses — or as he

says, he has a 'good memory' for them — so in spite of his 1000+ orders if someone

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who's [sic] crossed his little feedback fetish tries to order under another name, he can

'remember' their addy [sic] from before."132 During his testimony in United States v.

Ulbricht, a Silk Road vendor by the name of Mr. Duch confessed to similar practices.

Responding to questions from the prosecution, Mr. Duch explained:

Q: What records did you keep?

A: Essentially, I created a spreadsheet that tracked all the business that I

conducted, all the drugs that I sold on Silk Road.

Q: Did you keep your customers' addresses?

A: Yes, I did.

Q: You weren't supposed to do that under Silk Road's rules, right?

A: No, I wasn't.133

Mr. Duch even forced buyers to grant him high ratings as a condition of sale. As he

explained on his vendor page, "YOU MAY NOT ORDER unless you agree to rate 5 out

of 5 no matter what happens, with the product, the packaging, delays or anything else!"134

In a private conversation, Ulbricht referred to this kind of forced feedback as among the

site's "major issues", along with scams and fake products.135

On the site's discussion board, many users complained about being subjected to

rating extortion. When a buyer left a vendor a negative review in March 2013, the vendor

demanded a revision to the feedback, threatening, "I'll hand over your info to the cops...

I've got your address, your purchasing stats, a list of what your ordered from me." One

132 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit F. 133 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 1526. 134 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 700. 135 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 227A.

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discussion board poster noted, "Most vendors on here are stupid enough to keep a list of

addresses in a text document for blackmail purposes later." Another responded cheekily

to this claim, "Hey now... not always a text document. Some of them use an Excel

spreadsheet." When a buyer complained that forcing 5/5 ratings seemed "to defeat the

purpose of the review system", another responded, "It shouldn't be the norm, but it is."

The problem of address blackmail and feedback extortion lead some buyers to open a

P.O. box with false identifying information. This relieved their concern "about being

blackmailed" if they "worked with the wrong person". After a vendor offered free

samples of narcotics on the discussion board "to establish credibility", a buyer asked,

"How do we know you're not LE [law enforcement] or someone who is harvesting

addresses in order to blackmail people at a later date?" Similarly, in August 2013, a few

weeks before the site closed down, a discussion board poster asked, "What on EARTH is

there to prevent a vendor from turning into a blackmailer?"

Ulbricht himself was subject to extortion on numerous occasions, as blackmailers

exploited the payment protocol and the abeyant presence of state power to demand that

platform commission come their way. The executive kept track of these extortion

schemes in his personal records. In November 2012, he received a message from an

anonymous Silk Road user, who threatened to attack the site through a flaw in its

infrastructure: "I was able to exploit a vulnerability in one of the pages on silk road in a

way that will cause a DOS [denial-of-service] attack and SQLI [structured query

language injection] attack. Send 5k to [encrypted address] if you are satisfied with

WHAT I am doing. Send 15k to the same address to know HOW I am doing it."136

136 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 227G.

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Ulbricht apparently yielded and sent the ransom to prevent a shutdown. In May, Ulbricht

paid a steeper price to stop a similar attack, writing in his business log, "attacker agreed

to stop if I give him the first $100k of revenue and $50k per week thereafter."137 In

addition to the functionality of the site and its concomitant profitability, Ulbricht's

personal identity became an object of leverage during several extortion schemes. Shortly

before the attack in May, Ulbricht noted in his business log, "being blackmailed again.

someone says they have my ID, but hasn't proven it".138 By the next day, Ulbricht had

concluded that the blackmailer was a fraud: "guy blackmailing saying he has my id is

bogus".139

Ulbricht went to violent lengths to counter these threats and maintain his assets,

evading protocols altogether and employing the very coercion that the site was designed

to obviate. Ulbricht kept track of his revenge plans in his personal records. When a

vendor threatened to release thousands of buyer addresses in March 2013, Ulbricht hired

a hit man to identify, locate, and murder him.140 The hit man claimed to be associated

with The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, as Ulbricht noted in his business log.141 Yet, as

the federal court case revealed, the hit man was actually a con artist — one who

ultimately cheated Ulbricht out of three hundred thousand dollars for a hit that never

transpired.142 A month later, Ulbricht hired the same hit man to execute a Silk Road

vendor who, in classic whitewashing style, "[made] selling accounts, [sold] for a while,

137 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 247. 138 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 241. 139 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 241. 140 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 926. 141 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 241. 142 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Sentencing Submission, 15.

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and then [pulled] a big scam and just [kept] creating new accounts after he [did] his

scams".143 The hit man encouraged Ulbricht to have him execute not only the scamming

vendor but also his three associates, who had "probably ripped off millions of $ at this

point".144 Ulbricht responded quite casually to the suggested four-person hit: "hmm... ok,

I'll defer to your better judgment and hope we can recover some assets from them."145

The prosecution highlighted this occurrence in arguing "Ulbricht was just as willing as a

traditional kingpin to use intimidation and violence in furtherance of his criminal

enterprise."146 Indeed.

All of these forms of economic conflict relied on the manipulation of platform

protocols. White-washing vendors exploited the rating protocol to develop a positive

reputation; the payment protocol to receive an early payment; and the profile protocol to

leave the site without major consequence. These protocols respectively failed to replace

status codes, economic contracts, and stable identities — the conventional basics of social

and economic regulations. In cases of rating extortion, vendors manipulated the rating

protocol and the profile protocol, leveraging the delivery details of buyer profiles and the

abeyant presence of state power to artificially inflate their reputation. This kind an

artificial inflation could only occur because platform reputations were formalized and

automated, in contrast to an interpersonal community, where status is informal and

interpersonal. Further, the executive extortion of Ulbricht occurred through the

exploitation of the payment protocol and the specter of state power, as blackmailers

143 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 936. 144 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 936. 145 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit 936. 146 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Sentencing Submission, 16.

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threatened to shut down the site and expose Ulbricht to federal authorities, in order

collect platform revenue that flowed through the commission system. The state was

present in abeyance during rating extortion and executive extortion schemes, as the threat

of exposure to state power served as strategic leverage for blackmailers. At the same

time, the state was absent when Ulbricht needed it the most — as an institution to protect

his property rights over the platform. Without property rights, or even status claims,

Ulbricht had to rely on brute force to protect his ownership of the site, ultimately evading

protocols altogether and enacting physical violence.

The Perfect Store

Compared to Silk Road, exchange relations on eBay are far less fraudulent and

deceptive, but they stand in opposition to the platform's cyberlibertarian self-presentation

as a cooperative consumer arcade. As a free market, eBay relies on a series of protocols

in place of regulations. In place of status codes, the platform features a rating protocol

through which trading partners can assess their mutual experiences in conducting

commerce. After winning an auction for a product, buyers pay vendors through PayPal, a

payment protocol designed to replace contracts and commercial intermediaries. eBay

collects a commission on each transaction, ranging from ten to twenty percent of the

selling price, and charges a fee for vendors to post goods. In place of court arbitration, the

site maintains a dispute resolution center to resolve contested transactions, including

claims of fraud. The dispute resolution center is a largely automated economic protocol

that determines appropriate compensation through prescribed rules and algorithms.

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Finally, in place of identities, merchants use profile protocols, which require only a

working email address and, in the case of vendor profiles, a valid credit card number.

The dispute protocol is key to fraudulent exchange on the site, and its intricacies

are worth noting. eBay is a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to to

its investors.147 Because eBay collects a commission on each transaction, and because the

platform hosts far more products than customers, the company is also committed to

widespread buyer satisfaction. To assuage buyer concerns about internet fraud, eBay

maintains a Money Back Guarantee policy, which ensures that buyers will be refunded if

they are unsatisfied with their purchase.148 Consequently, eBay's dispute resolution center

is decidedly biased in favor of the customer. When buyer and seller differ in their

accounts of an exchange, the dispute resolution center overwhelmingly favors the buyer's

account of events. Significantly, when a contested transaction concludes in the buyer's

favor, eBay automatically refunds the buyer by charging the vendor's credit card or

Paypal account (recall that vendor profiles require a credit card number). When this

happens, eBay also prevents the buyer and the seller from giving each other ratings, lest

harsh words scare the former away. In this respect, the company's commitment to the

maintenance of a customer base undermines the neutrality of its dispute resolution center.

Hence, the dispute resolution protocol is far removed from the independent adjudication

of contract disputes found in institutional court systems.

147 eBay shares are listed on NASDAQ under the symbol EBAY. The company went public in 1998. For more on the history of eBay, see Appendix VI. 148 "eBay Money Back Gaurantee,” Help, eBay, accessed December 2017, https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy?id=4210. The policy was formerly known as Buyer Safety.

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eBay plays host to fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion. In such instance,

users pursue their economic self-interest through the manipulation of platform protocols.

During delivery scams and fake object scams, deceptive users exploit the dispute

resolution protocol, the payment protocol, and the profile protocol to obtain money or

objects without a reciprocal exchange of value and without significant consequence.

Intimidation tactics are likewise designed to occasion a one-way value transfer through

the manipulation of the dispute resolution protocol. State structures are less of a presence

on eBay than on Silk Road, furnishing the postal system through which auction items are

delivered without serving as an actual commercial intermediary. However, corporate

structures are more of a presence on eBay than on Silk Road, insofar as the platform's

financial organization informs the biases of the dispute resolution protocol — biases that

are exploited during fraudulent schemes. In all of these cases, eBay is far from self-

regulating; and digital protocols not only fail to replace regulations but contribute to the

economic conflict that regulations are designed to mediate.

Two scams are particularly common on eBay, and both rely on the manipulation

of the dispute resolution protocol and the payment protocol. In the delivery scam, a buyer

purchases a product from a vendor, claims that the received product is different from the

purchased one, demands a refund through eBay's dispute resolution center, and then

returns a different product entirely. This scam is effective, because there is no platform

intermediary who determines the accuracy of product description during exchange, and

because the dispute resolution center can be expected to grant buyer refunds. On the

discussion board, users relate their own experiences with delivery scams. Sellers, in

particular, bear the economic brunt of these fraudulent designs. After a seller auctioned

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off a pack of print cartridges in 2015, the buyer claimed that the cartridges had a terrible

smell and demanded a refund. The dispute resolution center sided with the buyer,

removed the initial payment from the seller's PayPal account, and instructed the buyer to

return the items. When the seller opened the returned box, inside was one print cartridge

— from a entirely different printer. Later that year, a new user sold his collection of

South Park DVDs, which the buyer claimed were "illegally duplicated copies... not at all

authentic or officially licensed". When the seller received the returned box, it was filled

with illegal duplicated copies of the South Park DVDs. The eBay subreddit also features

accounts of delivery scams. As related in the peripheral discussion board, a user sold a

used laptop with a Windows 7 Enterprise operating system. After the buyer claimed the

product was damaged, eBay issued a refund upon return of the item. When the seller

received the laptop, the operating system "was erased, along with all the software".

Another reddit user described a delivery scam that occurred in the midst of Bitcoin's 2017

price inflation: the seller sold a premium graphics card, which a buyer purchased, utilized

to mine cryptocurrency for a month, and then returned as defective. eBay granted the

return under the Money Back Guarantee and removed the original payment from the

account of the seller, who was left with a burnt-out graphics card and no compensation.

Still, eBay's discussion board featured most accounts of high-stakes delivery

scams. In one expensive case, a vendor auctioned off a $11,500 Rolex watch, packed and

shipped the product, and then received a message from the buyer claiming that the box

was empty. eBay's dispute resolution center ultimately ruled in favor of the buyer,

leaving the vendor without the watch and without the initial payment. As the incensed

vendor explained on the discussion board, "Bottom line is it is incredibly easy to steal

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tens of thousands of dollars from sellers on eBay. All you have to say it that it was an

empty box." Other vendors reported similar experiences in selling expensive platinum

rings, video game consoles, sets of dishes, vintage paper currency, and hardware tools.

Regular eBay users recognized the hazards of selling expensive goods on the platform.

One seller explained the ease with which buyers could defraud sellers, noting the

dysfunctional nature of the platform's feedback system:

Let's say you have a busted toaster. You can go on eBay and buy the same model,

brand new, and when the item arrives, you can open a case saying that the item

was defective and return your old broken toaster, and now the seller has to refund

your money PLUS shipping and give you a new toaster, FREE. No investigation,

no nothing. Seller policies mean nothing as long as the buyer rips you off within

30 days. The seller can't even leave negative feedback. This is a license to steal. It

has become so unethical, that I am now actively selling on Reverb.

Delivery scams are easy enough to execute and prevalent enough to send this merchant to

another exchange platform entirely.

On the other side of the exchange is the fake object scam, which exploits the

dispute resolution protocol, the payment protocol, and the profile protocol. In this

scheme, a vendor auctions off a product, purposefully sends the wrong object, and then

shuts down her account before the product arrives. This is similar to the whitewashing

scam on Silk Road, with one important exception: eBay's PayPal system issues a

payment to the vendor upon purchase agreement, rather than upon product delivery.

Consequently, vendors need not pressure buyers to verify the transaction in order to

receive an uncompensated payment. By the time the buyer receives the fake product, the

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vendor has left the platform with an uncompensated payment, and the burden of equitable

reimbursement falls on the platform itself. The discussion board features many accounts

of fraudulent exchange that are alternately comical and disturbing. One buyer purchased

a Macintosh computer and received "a certified letter from Jesus" instead. Another user

bitterly recalled receiving "a broken item, a rock, a phonebook" in place of purchased

products over the years. Several buyers complained about receiving a photograph of the

object that they had purchased, rather than the object itself. A new user was relieved to

receive a flash drive in good condition, only to realize that the write-only technology

couldn't retrieve the data it had stored. One user purchased two bottles of Bio-Oil, a high-

end skincare product. The product had a strange smell, so the user took the bottle to her

university's chemistry lab, where she discovered that the product "contained a chemical

dye that could be damaging to the skin". Bemoaning the "decline" of eBay, another user

claimed that "some eighty percent" of the products she had purchased on the platform in

recent years were "cheap replicas, wrong colour, damaged, spoilt, and altogether nothing

to do with the description".

Counterfeit items are commonly sent to defrauded buyers during fake object

scams. On the discussion board, many user complain about receiving pieces of jewelry or

technical equipment that are of exceptionally low quality. One user purchased a David

Yurman ring and received a compelling counterfeit. By the time she spoke with

salespeople at the David Yurman store, the vendor had disappeared from the platform.

Another complained about ordering a gold ring with a gemstone, having realized the

gemstone was artificial and the gold was thinly plated. Indeed, it was common wisdom

on the discussion boards that jewelry was a risky purchase on the site, given the high

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market price and relative ease of counterfeit. As already noted, Tiffany & Co. was willing

to sue eBay over the presence of knock-offs on the site. Permanently locked smart phones

are also common in fake object scams, revealing a link between the underground

economy of stolen goods and the online economy of auction sales. In those cases,

vendors sell dozens of phones at below-market prices and then leave the platform before

buyers realize they have been defrauded.

In certain instances, buyers harass, intimidate, and threaten sellers into sending

them additional products or providing them full refunds, exploiting the dispute resolution

protocol and leveraging the rating protocol. Regular eBay users refer to this as the bully

tactic: order a product, complain about its quality, and then threaten to demand a refund

through the dispute resolution protocol, unless the seller sends a supplementary gift. The

problem of intimidation is widely deliberated on the discussion board. After auctioning

off a flannel shirt, one seller received a threatening message from a buyer, who claimed

the fabric was not real flannel and threatened to demand a complete refund unless the

seller sent a gift to compensate. "What can I do?" the distraught seller asked on the

discussion board. "I feel like I'm being held hostage." The seller ultimately sent an

additional shirt in order to placate the buyer and avoid a full refund. A few days later, a

user replied to the original post, "Your buyer is using the bully tactic to get a freebie. It

usually works on small sellers with good accounts and little experience. They are usually

so afraid of getting a dispute that they will give the complainer a freebie to make the

problem go away." Abusive language is common during these intimidation schemes. One

seller gave his personal phone number to a buyer, only to be left with a hateful message

on his answering machine, in which he was called "a f---ing Arab" for allegedly sending

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a different product than the one described. Another seller was threatened "with prayers

for divine intervention that would result in [her] complete and utter destruction. The

words 'fire and brimstone' were actually mentioned." She was not the only seller to

receive death threats. One woman received a message from a suspicious buyer with

whom she refused to trade, reading, "You'll pay for this, for ignoring and turning away

my offers. It won't be long." A longtime seller even left the platform when the "profanity,

hate speech, and threats" had become intolerable.

On eBay, economic conflict occurs through the exploitation of digital protocols.

In delivery scams, deceptive users manipulate the dispute resolution protocol and the

payment protocol in order to acquire goods without a reciprocal payment. Automated,

biased, and predictable, these protocols are easy to jockey, unlike conventional economic

regulations, which are grounded in contracts and courts. Fake object scams exploit the

payment protocol and the profile protocol, as vendors disappear from the platform

without economic consequence (contract violation) or social consequence (status injury).

Intimidation tactics also leverage the dispute resolution protocol to occasion a one-way

value transfer, combining digital tactics of protocol exploit with confidence-scheme

tactics of interpersonal pressure. The state is in the background of these economic

conflicts, delivering objects through a postal system without serving as a formal

regulatory intermediary. By contrast, eBay's corporate structure is in the foreground of

these scams, as the publicly traded company orients its protocols to maintain a loyal

customer base and an positive balance sheet. Like the black market on Silk Road, the

auction market on eBay market is in no state of equilibrium. Digital protocols are poor

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proxies for conventional regulations, providing the raw material with which fraudulent

schemes are built.

The Social Conceit

Exchange relations on Craigslist are far less fraudulent and deceptive than those

on Silk Road and eBay. Still, the presence of fraud and deception on the local market

contradicts the platform's cyberlibertarian self-presentation as a casual sphere of

cooperative trade. As a free market, Craigslist relies on a series of protocols in place of

regulations. Site advertisements are published with a flag protocol, through which users

may report posts that appear suspicious.149 Advertisements are removed when they accrue

a certain number of flags, although that number is not publicly known. Craigslist utilizes

an auto-post protocol that prevents the posting of multiple identical advertisements.150

Users who wish to post advertisement are required to complete a profile protocol. This

consists of an email verification process, after which Craigslist furnishes a temporary

email account through which users can communicate with one another. The platform also

maintains a site manual for avoiding scams, which contains tactics for recognizing

deception, law enforcement resources, and examples of fraudulent messages.151 Craigslist

users meet in person to conduct commerce, at which point objects and money are

exchange.

149 Craigslist, "Flags and Community Moderation,” retrieved March 2017. https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/flags_and_community_moderation. 150 craigslist. Inc. v. Naturemarket, Inc. 694 F. Supp. 2d 1039 (N.D. Cal. 2010). 151 Craigslist, "Avoiding Scams,” About, last accessed 1 December 2017. https://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.

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Problems of fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion emerge on Craigslist. In

such cases, users pursue their economic self-interest through the manipulation of platform

protocols. In advanced fee scams, deceptive actors exploit the profile protocol and

outmaneuver the auto-post protocol, all while manipulating and coercing the victims of

their confidence schemes. These scams also rely on payment technologies and financial

institutions that exist outside of the platform, such as wire transfer payments through

Western Union. However, the Craigslist interpersonal encounter serves as a failsafe

against fraudulent exchange and deceptive communication. In face-to-face commerce,

false claims are difficult to uphold, and users cannot rely on platform protocols to defraud

and deceive one another. Still, Craigslist is far from self-regulating, and the exchange

process is in no state of equilibrium. Fraud occurs through the manipulation of digital

protocols, but, once users step outside of those protocols, the likelihood of deception

decreases.

The most common form of fraud on Craigslist is the advanced fee scam — a

confidence scheme designed to solicit payment without a reciprocal exchange of goods.

These are often variations on the now-classic Nigerian 419 email scam: an enthusiastic

seller with an elaborate backstory requires immediate payment before sending a valuable

or underpriced object. Because these scammers post unique advertisements, rather than a

barrage of identical messages, they are able to outmaneuver the auto-post protocol on

Craigslist. Once scammers have gained the attention and trust of their victims, they

request up-front payment through wire transfer and then disappear without sending the

promised good. Here, deceptive actors rely on external financial institutions to enact a

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one-way value transfer, and they exploit the profile protocol to leave the platform without

consequence.

On the Craigslist discussion board, users relate their various encounters with

advanced fee scams, as fraudulent actors aim to convince users to wire money in

exchange for a variety of goods and services: housing rentals, real estate, cars, bicycles,

sex, firearms, and job opportunities. One San Francisco user received a fairly typical

scam email while looking for a housing rental in 2011. The email read, in part,

I am the owner of the place you want to rent and also want you to know that it

was due to my transfer that makes me and my husband to leave the house and also

want to give it out for rent and looking for a responsible person that can take very

good care of it , as we are not after the money for the rent but to be clean at all

time and the person that will rent it have to take absolute good care of it as if it

were its own. I and my Husband came over to Africa for a missionary work, so i

[sic] hope you will promise us to take very good care of the house. So get back to

me on how you could take care of our house or perhaps experience you have in

renting home. Hope you are okay with the price of US$1,300 (1 months first

payment) with internet,gas,water,micro wave,hydro,heat laundry facilities, air

condition and so on. I am looking forward hearing from you ASAP so that we can

proceed .feel free to fill in the rent application form below so we can proceed

asap.

This message combines a variety of common scam tactics: an attractive object (the cheap

rental), an exceptional circumstance (the owner is out of the country and not interested in

profits), a sympathetic figure (the missionary worker couple), and a request for financial

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information (the rent application). As a paradigmatic confidence scheme, this email plays

on the vices of the human psyche — opportunistic greed for a cheap rental and emotional

benevolence toward a devout couple.

Rare and forbidden items regularly serve as bait during advanced fee scams — a

circumstance noted by many discussion board users, some of whom express anger over

the anarchic state of the local market. For instance, users report suspicious advertisements

for adopted children and nanny jobs, sports memorabilia and antiques, and vintage cars

and motorcycle parts. They also note the presence of forbidden items, which are formally

banned in the platform's terms of use, and which sometimes appear to be fraudulent

offers. One Vancouver user reported advertisements for "hookers, drugs, guns, other

prohibited weapons, sperm, pet breeding ads, overpriced pets... fireworks, tobacco,

alcohol, bootleggers, fake ID, counterfeit goods, just to name a few". Beyond rare and

forbidden items, Craigslist users on the discussion board widely recognize the presence

of advanced fee scams on the platform, variously referring to the site as "a cesspool of

deceit and thievery", "a tragedy of the commons", "a sewer of overposting and scam ads",

"a nest for vipers", and "a free-for-all flea market for the mindless and criminal elements

of the internet".

Scams are far less common when Craigslist users meet in person. The house of

cards of interpersonal deception often collapses when computer-mediated communication

gives way to material encounters. Several discussion board threads center on occasions

when scammers failed to their enact fraudulent schemes. Users who are angered by

scammers take particular pleasure in hearing stories of their botched plans. When a DC

woman posted a missed connection in 2011, she was thrilled when the man responded.

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She was less thrilled when she met him in person: he was not the handsome man she had

fleetingly encountered, but he did offer her a job smuggling drugs into the country. In

2012, a Manhattanite traveled to Brooklyn to purchase an ergonomic office chair, which

promptly collapsed upon use. The seller then accused the prospective buyer of breaking

the chair and demanded immediate payment. True to form, the Manhattanite told the

seller "to go fuck himself". A Florida man purchased an engine for his 240SX in 2013,

only to discover that the a cylinder rod bear was "blown to oblivion" and the engine was

essentially "a giant paper weight". A Tokyo user met with a seller to purchase a

refrigerator and washer, described as "in excellent condition". The transaction did not

transpire: the refrigerator was filled with worms, "yes, small red worms", and the washer

secreted "long, stinky, black liquid". In the next chapter, we'll consider how the state

makes an appearance during these interpersonal encounters. For now, let's note that face-

to-face exchange occurs outside of platform protocols — those mechanisms of fraud and

deception in the digital free market.

On Craigslist, fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion occur through the

exploitation of platform protocols. In advanced fee scams, users exploit the profile

protocol to defraud and deceive their victims without economic and social consequence;

they evade the auto-post protocol by posting singular advertisements; and they relay

financial institutions and wire technologies, external to the platform, in order to collect

payment at a distance. This dance of exploit, evasion, and externalization would be

unthinkable in context of economic contracts, status codes, and known identities. Unlike

Silk Road and eBay, Craigslist commerce features an interpersonal encounter. When

digital protocols give way to face-to-face agreements, the likelihood of fraud and

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deception generally decreases. This underlines, through contrast, the importance of

protocols to fraudulent behavior in the digital free market, without which deception is a

matter of rhetorical skill rather than automated exploit. Host to a wide spectrum of

exchange relations, Craigslist is not the self-regulating platform imagined by

cyberlibertarianism, and its digital protocols end up being the vulnerable points of its

electronic commerce system.

Invisible Hand All The Way Down

As venues of fraud, deception, manipulation, and coercion, internet markets are

far from self-regulating centers of economic activity. They embody the laissez faire

principles celebrated by cyberlibertarianism, yet they deliver entirely different results

than those predicted by the digital ideology. Fraud undermines the narrative of economic

equilibrium, as does the presence of state, commercial, and financial institutions in

exchange. On internet markets, fraud and deception occur through the manipulation of

platform protocols designed to replace regulations. Not only are automated protocols

poor proxies for conventional regulations; but protocols end up furnishing the very forms

of economic conflict that regulations are supposed to mitigate. In short, protocols can

backfire. This state of affairs has broader consequences for understanding

cyberlibertarianism, electronic commerce, and digital free markets.

Cyberlibertarianism and electronic reputation studies share a vision of internet

exchange as fundamentally cooperative. The dream of a self-regulating internet finds a

natural counterpart in the dream of a fully automated interet market. Lovely are these

dreams, in which the cumbersome realities of contract, court, status, and community give

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way to the streamlined protocols of payment, dispute, rating, and profile. The cooperative

bias of these paradigms underwrites a faith in automated mechanisms, despite their

significant flaws, and an animosity toward institutional bodies, despite their oblique

appearances. Indeed, if internet exchange is integrally cooperative, and if internet

platforms are basically self-regulating, then internet exchange platforms may be

automated and let loose without regulatory oversight or institutional interference. Eric

Goldman's insistence on an invisible hand "all the way down" — according to which the

conflictual dimension of exchange can always be alleviated by a supplementary rating

protocol — evinces an attachment to cooperation as a foundational principle of the digital

market. This account, in particular, overlooks the ways that rating protocols can become

mechanisms of user extortion, underwriting economic conflict rather than mitigating it.

The reproduction of cyberlibertarian assumptions in this scholarly account attests the

appeal of the digital ideology in broad conversations surrounding technology. It is not

only motivated actors who yearn to see internet exchange as basically self-regulating; it is

also scholarly observers.

Internet market companies also fail to account for the role of conflict in electronic

commerce. In casting their platforms as self-regulating, Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road

underplay the reality of regulatory breakdown in the digital free market, as well as the

vulnerability of the digital protocols at the heart of their electronic systems. Insofar as

they position themselves as neutral internet venues (Gillespie) marked by peer-to-peer

agreement (Scholz) and voluntary participation (van Dijk and Nieborg), these internet

market companies side-step debates over platform accountability, even as they are

regularly accountable to state and commercial institutions. The paradoxes of

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cyberlibertarianism are on display here. Internet market companies insist on freedom

from state regulations, yet they cooperate with state directives; and they insist on a free

digital market in perpetual equilibrium, yet they install protocols to prevent instability.

They want to have their regulatory cake and eat it too.

As sites of economic conflict, Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road demonstrate that

the internet does not obviate critiques of the free market but makes those critiques all the

more poignant. As Kojin Karatani and Michael Aglietta argue, economic and social

regulations stabilize competitive capitalist exchange. Internet markets dramatize these

arguments by playing host to forms of economic conflict in the conspicuous absence of

regulations. Part of this drama is the absence of stable identities on internet markets —

the kind of identities that are necessary for conventional regulations to be effective.

Internet markets show us what happens when anonymous and self-interested actors

engage in unregulated electronic commerce. They are objectified counterproofs to the

cyberlibertarian notion that a less regulated internet is a better internet. They are also

objectified counterproofs to idea that automation can comprehensively eliminate conflict

in the context of electronic commerce. On internet markets, protocols are designed to

replace regulations, but without the jurisdictional authority that gives regulations their

power. These protocols can hardly be expected to perform the regulatory functions of

courts and communities, which are complex formations that cannot be easily automated

or reduced to an algorithm. In the absence of conventional regulations, and in the

presence of digital protocols designed to replace them, it is scandalously easy to get away

with internet fraud.

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CHAPTER 2

ROADS TO COMMERCE

DEVELOPING SOCIAL CUSTOMS

On internet markets, actors take steps to mitigate concerns of fraud and control

the commercial process. Notably, users develop social customs that rely on website

infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions. Although internet markets are

supposed to be self-contained, digital trade implicates factors that are external to

electronic commerce. Website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions enter

the exchange process in ways contrary to the assumptions of cyberlibertarianism. As

informal commercial practices, social customs help us understand how cooperative

exchange occurs in the digital free market.

Custom and Control

Social customs are loose sets of practices oriented toward a general purpose. They

are one way of controlling the commercial process in the absence of regulations. In "The

Comedy of the Commons", Carol Rose argues that social customs are relatively effective

ways of managing the behavior of actors, without regulations or regulatory institutions.152

In the nineteenth century, Rose notes, thoroughfares and waterways were organized

through customary "rules of the road", which served as "informal techniques" for

managing transportation infrastructure.153 These were voluntary strategies by which

152 Carol Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property," The University of Chicago Law Review 53, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 711-781. 153 Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons," 744.

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travelers abided in the absence of regulations, terms of use avant le lettre. Through social

customs, the commercial public "ordered its affairs authoritatively"154 — without a

centralized authority enforcing regulatory controls. Insofar as roads and waterways

underwrote the movement of goods to and from the market, social customs facilitated

economic exchange. And they did so without exclusion or penalty, as travelers of all

stripes were welcome on roads to commerce. One of Rose's central arguments is that the

sphere of commerce benefited from unbounded access to transportation infrastructure,

made possible by social customs. As Rose puts the matter: "The more people who

engage in trade, the greater the opportunities for all to make valuable exchanges; and the

more exchanges, the greater the opportunities for division of labor and the attendant

increase in wealth and productivity that Adam Smith told us about."155 Here, social

customs underwrite economic activity through common access.

Social customs are also a way of controlling internet exchange in the absence of

regulations. Writing from a legal perspective, Trotter Hardy asks how one establishes

rules among internet users who "do not have prior contracts, by-laws, or other

agreements"156. He notes that one possibility for the regulation of online conduct is social

customs. Social customs on the internet parallel historical merchant laws, or lex

mercatoria, which were "sets of customary practices that inured to the benefit of

merchants"157 and governed exchange relations in the Medieval Europe across legal

jurisdictions. Like merchant laws, social customs develop among interested parties

154 Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons," 742. 155 Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons," 770. 156 Trotter Hardy, "The Proper Legal Regime of Cyberspace," University of Pittsburgh Law Review 55 (1994): 993-1056. 157 Hardy, "The Proper Legal Regime of Cyberspace," 1020.

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without "statute or other authoritative pronouncement"158. Hardy furthermore notes that

merchant laws were grounded in merchant courts. These alternative institutions arbitrated

trader disputes, and "their judges were drawn from the ranks of the merchant class itself

on the basis of experience and seniority"159. Similarly, Hardy argues, internet customs are

grounded in discussion groups, email, and other spheres of free association online. For

Hardy, these are "informal court systems,"160 where interested parties may resolve

disputes through customary rules in a common language. Drawing on Hardy's work,

David R. Johnson and David G. Post point to social customs on the internet as evidence

of the "self-regulatory efforts of cyberspace participants".161 Here, social customs are

ways of controlling internet exchange, enacted by users themselves.

Some see internet exchange as comprehensively economic, even in the presence

social customs. In her influential theory of free labor, Tiziana Terranova argues that

internet exchange is properly economic, because the collective labor of internet users is

central to the maintenance of digital technology.162 For instance, social media users "keep

a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating

advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations, and sometimes making the

158 Hardy, The Proper Legal Regime of Cyberspace," 1020. 159 Hardy, The Proper Legal Regime of Cyberspace," 1021. 160 Hardy, The Proper Legal Regime of Cyberspace," 1021. 161 David R. Johnson and David G. Post, "Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace," in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001): 143-195. 162 Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33-58.

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jump to collaborators"163. Unlike thinkers in the anarchist tradition,164 she argues that the

social and communal quality of internet exchange is not so discrete from its economic

and capitalist quality. Technology companies, for example, regularly capitalize on the

collective labor of the open source software community, which can debug and improve

its products without monetary compensation. For Terranova, the open source software

community demonstrates "the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free labor,

both in the sense of not financially rewarded and freely given"165. The open source

software community may have an anarchist sensibility, but its products are central to the

business plans of privately owned technology firms. In this respect, Terranova sees social

exchange on the internet as internal to the capitalist economy, insofar as social exchange

is consistently monetized by platforms. For Terranova, internet exchange is

comprehensively economic, because "it is technically impossible to separate neatly the

digital economy of the Net from the larger network economy of late capitalism"166. In this

context, where Eric Goldman sees an invisible hand "all the way down", Terranova sees

economic relations "all the way down".

Exchange Customs

On internet markets, users mitigate concerns of fraud and control the commercial

process by developing social customs that rely on website infrastructure, platform

163 Terranova, "Free Labor," 49. 164 Richard Barbrook, "The Hi-tech Gift Economy,” First Monday 3, no. 12 (1998): no pagination. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552. Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive (London: Pluto Press, 2008). 165 Terranova, "Free Labor," 51. 166 Terranova, "Free Labor," 51.

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culture, and state institutions. On Silk Road, users formulated social customs related to

vendor profiles, discussion boards, libertarian cultures, outlaw sensibilities, and state

surveillance mechanisms. eBay users develop sets of social customs that depend on

message functionalities, auction pages, dispute resolution centers, and auction cultures.

On Craigslist, email relays, local cultures, and local law enforcement bodies inform the

development of social customs. This means that internet markets are not the self-

contained islands of cyberlibertarianism, nor the purely economic realms of free labor.

Rather, digital exchange involves factors — infrastructural, cultural, and institutional —

that are formally external to the internet economy. The road to commerce is long and

winding.

Thick As Thieves

To mitigate concerns of fraud and control the commercial process, Silk Road

users developed social customs related to website infrastructure, platform culture, and

state institutions. Users utilized website infrastructure to locate reliable merchants —

searching vendor profiles for timestamps, evaluating trading partners through logistical

conversations, and listing deceptive vendors on the platform discussion board. The

libertarian, drug-enthusiast, and cyberoutlaw culture of Silk Road also influenced the

social customs developed by users, marking longstanding members as trustworthy trading

partners. The abeyant presence of state power Silk Road not only underwrote a culture of

libertarian solidarity; it also informed the customs, developed by merchants, to evade

state detection on the internet on the internet and on the ground. Unlike eBay and

Craigslist, Silk Road as a platform did not respond to these social customs, likely because

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the site was consistently profitable, because its tenure was relatively brief, and because

Ulbricht was evidently occupied with other site-related matters.167 This means that users

were free agents in the free digital market, and their social customs were particularly

important avenues to fair exchange. This also means that Silk Road was not a self-

contained island but an vast archipelago that covered infrastructural, cultural, and

institutional waters.

On the discussion board, Silk Road users formulated a variety of social customs.

Many of these customs concerned the location of honorable vendors, or sellers that would

honor trade agreements and avoid fraudulent behavior. The platform's Buyer Guide

offered few strategies for navigating the world of vendors, only an assurance that the

escrow protocol was designed "to prevent fraud on both the end of the seller and the

buyer".168 Users consequently developed a series of social customs to evaluate vendor

reliability. One custom relied on website infrastructure in the form of the rating protocol,

but not in the way envisioned by cyberlibertarianism or electronic reputation studies.

Users were to identify the length of time for which a potential vendor had been

conducting commerce on the platform. Users could determine the date at which

merchants started selling on the platform, by scrolling through customer ratings and

finding the date of the earliest feedback. As seasoned explained on the discussion board,

these timestamps were valuable proxies of merchant reliability: the longer the history, the

more trustworthy the merchant. This rule of thumb was partially grounded in the

platform's libertarian culture, which cast trade as an inherently egalitarian deed and Silk

167 See the discussion of Ulbricht and his federal trial in chapter 1. 168 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y., 2014), Exhibit GX 119.

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Road as a liberated outlaw economy. The political investment in Silk Road meant that

longstanding members were likely to engage in cooperative commerce on principle, as

acts of cooperation set against a coercive state. For instance, in response to discussion

board questions from a new buyer, a longstanding user advised all merchants to "read the

vendor info page to get a sense of their history" rather than "exclusively trust Silk Road

vendor reviews". Here, social customs reflected the commercial infrastructure of time

stamps and the platform culture of veteran traders. Users took seriously the possibility of

fraud and developed exchange customs that did not rely on good faith agreement or free

market equilibria.

As a consequence of this social custom, experienced vendors constituted a de

facto merchant elite, described by one discussion board users as "an old guard who has

been here since the beginning". These merchants generated social capital on the platform

through an enduring engagement with the dark web marketplace, and this allowed them

to generate economic capital, in turn. Silk Road witnessed the emergence of an informal

vendor hierarchy, of which sellers and buyers took notice. On the discussion board, a new

vendor complained about the difficulty of customer acquisition: "Unless you have a long-

established, respected, prior customer base to vouch for you, buyers just never know".

One buyer felt torn between the desire for new products and the assurances of established

vendors. "As much as I like to try out new vendors and their wares," the buyer explained,

"I'm almost to the point where I say fuck it and deal exclusively with the trusted vendors

I've established a relationship with. The only downside to that is I love to try new things.

Although knowing the transaction will be smooth as silk is a good feeling." Another user

was willing to sacrifice product variety for reliable commerce, exclusively conducting

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exchange with a "tight group of highly trusted vendors" that had been on the platform

since its early days.

Another social custom was to evaluate potential vendors through private

conversations on the website's internal message infrastructure. According to discussion

board posters, trustworthy vendors were generally willing to go into detail about their

products, delivery plans, and commercial standards. One user articulated the metric of

vendor evaluation in question form: did the seller seem willing "do anything they can to

keep the customer happy", or were they "vague, weird, and noncommittal" when asked

questions about their commercial practices? Platform culture played a role in this

evaluation custom. Libertarians took trade seriously and could be expected to elaborate

on their commercial process, and drug enthusiasts took substances seriously and could be

expected to elaborate on their contraband wares. By contrast, fraudulent vendors could be

expected to evade major questions and hard-sell their goods. As one user put it on the

discussion board, deceptive vendors "pressure you into buying asap" by insisting "'I'm

almost out'" of whatever the buyer seeks to purchase. Deceptive vendors would also offer

elaborate stories to justify exchange practices that were forbidden in the platform

guidelines, such as paying vendors outside of platform escrow. One discussion board user

summarized this evaluation custom succinctly: "The more bizarre the story... the more

likely it's bullshit."

These evaluation customs were effectively formalized when one user took

advantage of website infrastructure and posted a list of scamming vendors on the site

discussion board. Merchants could check the list before purchasing from a certain vendor,

effectively crowdsourcing interpersonal vendor assessment. For many users, the list

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represented the community's cooperative response to the problem of internet fraud, an act

of solidarity among cyberoutlaws. In response to the list, one discussion board participant

wrote, "Thanks for the hard work... we as a community need to be aware of the asshats

that are out there." The discussion board thread that hosted the list subsequently served as

a sounding board for evaluation customs. When a discussion board participant speculated

that the vendor 18kt was a scammer, another user responded, "I don't agree that 18kt is a

scammer himself: too much evidence that he is actually proud of this site, and likes being

on the libertarian forefront. He's like an underground hero, and if his site turns into just

another burn joint, it would distress him." In this cultural assessment, the vendor's history

on the platform and his commitment to libertarianism made him a trustworthy seller. By

contrast, suspicious behavior was a potential sign of fraudulent intent. On the same

thread, another user noted that the vendor Professortwak was "behaving strangely.

Logging on but not communicating with outstanding customers". In the spirit of

cooperation, the user added, "I'm sorry to be adding this if unfounded, but there is a

serious lack of communication on the sellers part [and] I don't want to see innocent

buyers for [whom] Finalizing Early is a necessity getting mugged. I will fully revoke all

inflammatory/negative comments if communications from this seller begin again." The

concerned user provided an update on the discussion board thread the next day: "OK, this

vendor has begun to communicate again, he may well have been having some

logistical/data handling issues at the end. Still be wary, but this is not a confirmed

Scammer and thus so his name should not be tarnished. However, as always. Exercise

caution." Two weeks later, the user provided a final appraisal on the discussion board

thread, writing,

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Just to confirm. The Professor came through. He maintained communications,

provided me with a tracking number and even doubled my original order to make

up for the delay. I received my order 7 working days to the uk after he provided

the shipping details. I think he is a genuine good guy, just had some bad luck/

logistical issues at his end, which he is working hard to rectify. I hereby revoke

any negative comments previously posted.

Evident in this elaborate appraisal is a principled respect for commerce that attended Silk

Road's libertarian culture. In this culture, a merchant's honor was not something to be

casually besmirched, given the importance of long-standing membership in the digital

black market.

The state was not only a common enemy that informed Silk Road's cyberoutlaw

culture. It was also an institution with surveillance abilities and prosecutorial powers —

both of which needed to be avoided by black market participants. Silk Road vendors

developed social customs to avoid state detection, and these strategies were designed to

control the commercial process, albeit to avoid state detection rather than economic

fraud. The logistics of the drug trade garnered a great deal of attention on the discussion

board. Buyers and sellers alike would crowd-source contraband delivery strategies: how

to take drugs on a plane, in a car across the US, on a train in Europe. Packaging and

shipping were topics of great debate, as merchants spoke with their peers about delivery

methods that could evade customs detection. One users suggested that cocaine sellers

place their products "inside a snap lock smelly proof bag, crushed flat and wrapped again

in lavender scented tissue paper and mailed in a greeting card". Merchants offered a

plethora of tactics for shipping contraband within the United States and across

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international borders, including hand-writing addresses and padding envelopes "by tri-

folding a few sheets of paper and taping the product to one of the sheets". Several

suggested decoy objects as a means of evading the watchful eye of customs: sealed

tampon boxes, potato chip bags, candy wrappers. One user reported receiving his cocaine

in a sealed Skittles bag. There was a substantive debate over how to check the delivery

status of mailed goods. When one user suggested tracking the Digital Customer

Notification (DCN) attached to packages, another user responded forcefully:

Don't check your DCN from Tor NOT MATTER what. The post office can tell

when DCN info for a particular package has been access through a Tor browser.

Though the post office can't track where you accessed the info from they can tell

the type of anonymous browser and that is a red flag. The post office will then

pay particular attention to your package because they know a person who does not

want to be known access the DCN info. Access the info from an internet cafe.

Another user contested this claim, stating that "nobody has ever provided concrete

evidence that the USPS [United States Postal Service] can even tell Tour is being used to

track packages. Do not believe this bullshit." The original commenter cheekily defended

his insider knowledge: "this is not a crypto-cyber-international-drug-smuggling-punk

urban legend, we have been told this by people who work in the postal services industry".

Social customs related to privacy strategies were also major points of debate on

the discussion board, and users exchanged their experiences with different anonymizing

services. In response to a discussion board question, merchants discussed Tor-supported

email services, including safe-mail.net and i2pmail, which added another layer of

anonymity on top of Tor relays. They also distinguished between degrees of online

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anonymity and noted the limits of Tor concealment. One user explained the relationship

between the federal government and Tor, writing, "Also well known that the feds operate

large capacity exit nodes on Tor. The more they operate, and if they operate internal

relays (sure they do) the easier it is for them to correlate traffic." A related thread

centered on the best places for off-shore hosting of dark web sites, the consensus being

Ukraine or Russia. After someone asked the community "Which Security Setup Is Best?",

users offered explanations of Tails and PGP for anonymous internet navigation; Debian

and Ubuntu for disk encryption; CC cleaner, Secure Remove, File Shredder for disk

deletion; and Windows versus Linux versus OpenBSD for secure operating systems.

Another asked which burner phones were the most secure for drug dealing, which

sparked a debate on the strength of Android encryption. Stash spots were also widely

debated, from credit union safety deposit boxes to secure compartments inside walls.

Hundreds of posts centered on Bitcoin logistics: where to buy and store Bitcoin, how to

convert Bitcoin into dollars, and which wallets and institutions monitored the

cryptocurrency most carefully. Silk Road users carefully followed the 2012

Congressional Treasury Committee debates over the property status of Bitcoin, offering

libertarian commentary on the public proceedings.

On Silk Road, users developed social customs that were not only economic but

also infrastructural, cultural, and institutional. Website infrastructure did not automate the

commercial process, as cyberlibertarianism would expect, but offered informal

opportunities to evaluate trading partners. In particular, the rating protocol was not a

proxy of status but a series of traces to be "read" by users in their search for fair

exchange. Platform culture turned out to be a relatively dependable way of predicting

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vendor behavior, even more so than the rating protocol designed to fill that exact

function. In addition to playing a role in extortion schemes, the abeyant state also played

a role in the social customs of users, serving as a common enemy in the platform's

libertarian culture and informing the commercial practices of digital contraband trade.

The digital black market was not an isolated libertarian economy but an embedded

economic system that implicated infrastructures, cultures, and institutions. Social customs

were a way of controlling the commercial process in the conspicuous absence of

regulations, in the potential presence of deceptive merchants, and in the looming

surveillance of state institutions. A winding road to commerce indeed.

Antiques Roadmap

eBay users also develop social customs to control the commercial process. These

customs leverage website infrastructure and platform culture in ways contrary to

cyberlibertarianism. In order to avoid deceptive merchants, users mark certain practices

as signs of potential fraud. For example, lucrative offers that take place outside of eBay

infrastructure may signal a merchant's desire to step outside platform jurisdiction and

enact fraudulent exchange. Users analyze merchant advertisements for signs of expertise,

jockeying the website infrastructure of auction pages and the platform culture of object

knowledge to ensure the legitimacy of prospective trading partners. They also analyze

merchant history, embedded in user profiles, in order to determine if an account has been

hacked, an increasingly common phenomenon in recent years. In cases when merchants

have already been defrauded, users develop customs to minimize commercial damage

through a careful engagement with the dispute resolution protocol. As a platform, eBay

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sometimes enters the drama of social customs by formalizing them in infrastructure or

policy. Not state institutions but corporate institutions enter the exchange process in this

way, creating a tentative feedback loop between user and platform. In all of these cases,

the auction market is far from a self-contained island of economy activity. Rather, digital

exchange on the platform implicates factors that are infrastructural, cultural, and

institutional.

As on Silk Road, social customs on eBay often concern the selection of honorable

vendors. On the discussion board, eBay users note that certain practices are often signs of

fraudulent intent. For example, according to seasoned users, fraudulent merchants

sometimes make lucrative offers to vendors who post expensive items or to buyers who

bid on them — but in private messages outside of the eBay auction infrastructure. These

offers usually culminate in a delivery scam, in which a vendor sends an item but

ultimately receives no reciprocal payment, or fake object scams, in which a buyer sends a

payment but does not receive the advertised object.169 The evasion of eBay's commercial

infrastructure is meant to limit platform jurisdiction during the inevitable dispute: if

merchants conduct a private transaction without eBay exchange protocols, then the

platform has no authority over the exchange and no responsibility for its resolution. Of

course, eBay disavows any responsibility for fraudulent commerce in its user agreements,

even if merchants utilize platform exchange protocols, making interpersonal trade a

double-whammy of platform immunity.170 Platform guidelines formally forbid members

"to contact each other to buy or sell items outside of eBay" and warns that violators may

169 See the discussion of eBay scams in chapter 1. 170 eBay, "User Agreement,” last modified April 3, 2018. https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/

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be subject to account suspension.171 Nevertheless, likely in response to the problem, eBay

briefly featured a Private Offer function, which allowed merchants to conclude auctions

in order to accept private offers, provided those offers were realized in platform payment

protocols. The function came and left in 2016, exemplifying a provisional feedback loop

between user and platform in a major internet market. In the case of private offers, a

social custom emerged in response to commercial infrastructure and platform guidelines.

The platform then attempted to make the custom unnecessary by incorporating private

offers into site infrastructure, thereby monetizing the interpersonal transactions against

which users warned.

Another social custom relies on the website infrastructure of profile protocols and

rating protocols, but not in the ways predicted by electronic reputation studies. On the

discussion board, users note that rating is not always a reliable metric of vendor honor,

but a complete absence of feedback marks a profile as suspicious; a merchant without

history on the platform has nothing to lose during a confidence scheme. Like Silk Road

users, eBay merchants generally distrust the rating system but trust the infrastructural

traces that the system leaves behind; and they tend to view platform longevity as an

imperfect proxy of commercial honor. Platform culture indirectly underwrites the

importance of longevity, as eBay's long internet history comes with veteran merchants

who respect exchange relations on the platform. In particular, antique culture on the

platform values commercial expertise and, by extension, the commercial experience

necessary to possess that expertise. Whatever their wares, merchants with economic and

171 eBay, "Offers to Buy or Sell Outside of eBay Policy," accessed February 18, 2018, https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/payment-policies/offers-buy-sell-outside-ebay-policy

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cultural investments in the auction market are more likely to engage in cooperative

commerce. When a buyer on the discussion posted a story about being defrauded, a

seasoned user replied, "This is the type of thing that we see all the time. Buyer comes

here and is upset that a transaction went bad. Then we find out it was a transaction with a

zero-feedback, brand new seller..." Another buyer realized independently that purchasing

a bike from a new seller had been a bad idea. As related in a discussion board post, the

bike had been offered "at a price that was too good to be true, from a seller with no

feedback". When the package for the bike arrived, it was an empty envelope.

In another social custom, eBay users leverage website infrastructure and platform

culture when they analyze auction pages for signs of confusion or inexperience. Auction

pages, according to this custom, should generally exhibit expertise about the commodity

and familiarity about its market. Part of the exhibition of expertise is the ability to

communicate in clear and technical terms about an object. This includes the ability to

speak in relatively clear English — a standard inflected through the stereotype of

Nigerian scammers, the anxiety surrounding the rise of Chinese sellers on the site, and

the generalized xenophobia of Western culture.172 In 2017, a new seller received a

message that combined the signs of potential fraud covered so far: a lucrative offer, a

private transaction, a blank profile, and an inability to speak intelligibly about a product.

The seller posted the message on the discussion board:

I will like to offer you $400.00 for the Vintage Fostex x15 4 Track recorder. If my

offer is been accepted the payment will be made through check. I will send the

check via mail and my mover will only come over for pick up when you notify

172 See the discussion of Chinese sellers on eBay in chapter 3.

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me that the check has been verified and cleared by your bank. Paying with check

will be easier for me on this transaction i haven't get chance to fund my PayPal

account recently due to the nature of my work here in Seattle and i really need to

buy this item for my business associate. Also due to the nature of my work i don't

have time to check my eBay messages.

The discussion board post prompted another user to explain why the sender of the

message should not be trusted. "It has so many scam markers," the user explained,

"offering more money than it's listed for, asking for your phone number for text

messages, vagueness — 'the nature of my work', can't check eBay messages". In eBay

parlance, "scam markers" are signs of potential fraud that distinguish certain practices as

suspicious. This jumbled message dramatically displays these scam markers and serves as

an object lesson for less experienced users.

Another social custom relies on the website infrastructure of profile protocols, but

not in the way anticipated by cyberlibertarianism. This custom concerns the identification

of hacked accounts, which are hijacked for the purpose of executing low-risk confidence

schemes. eBay accounts are not particularly difficult to hack, because username and

password are the only barriers to account access. However, as users point out, there are

relatively clear signs that an account has been compromised. Hacked accounts are usually

inactive for years and then suddenly hyperactive, making gaps and fluctuations in user

activity — which are visible in the profile protocol — potential marks of fraudulent

intent. On the discussion board, an experienced merchant listed the signs of a hacked

account for users new to the platform: "An account over 3 years old. Few if any feedback

as a seller, over a year old. Their buying feedback except for 2-3 recent feedback is all

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over a year old." Another user added: hackers often post "too good to be true item

listings" that "sell out in under 4 hours". This helps hackers execute whitewashing

schemes quickly and reliably: once the auctions close, hackers accept multiple payments

in exchange for the listed goods, transfer the payments from a PayPal account to a private

bank account, and then leave the platform without sending the purchased goods.

A related social custom concerns the platform culture of commodities. Criminal

market logic means that expensive and in-demand products are highly attractive to

hackers, who want to maximize the payments they receive prior to exiting the platform.

On the discussion board, users referred to these in-demand products as "scam items":

electronics, including smart phones and laptops; luxury items, such as bags and

accessories; and rare goods, such as collectibles and vintage objects. In particular,

according to users, smart phones are exemplary magnets for fraudulent exchange,

"because they are small, there is huge demand, and they are relatively valuable". Hackers

might auction off ten cell phones, sell them at $300 a piece, and then leave the platform

with a $3000 in profits before buyers realized that they had been defrauded. In 2017,

eBay instituted a new policy —one neither named nor mentioned in platform guidelines

— to cancel transactions conducted by hacked accounts. Black-boxed is eBay's

determination procedure for hacked accounts, but an eBay merchant who I interviewed

related the following account. After auctioning off an item, this merchant received an

email with a subject line, "Unauthorized use of buyer account — Transaction(s)

cancelled". The email read:

We’re writing to let you know that we had to cancel the following transaction(s)

because the item(s) were purchased without the account owner's permission... If

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you already sent the item(s) and they haven’t been delivered yet, please contact

your shipping carrier to find out if you can stop the shipment.

This merchant speculated that Russians had hacked the account, reflecting contemporary

anxieties surrounding Russian information warfare. That eBay is a corporate institution

likely played a role in its decision to monitor hacked account: the corporation may be

eager to avoid the public relations debacle that accompanies press reports of platform

infiltration. In the case of hacked accounts, social customs became formalized in website

policy, creating a feedback loop between users and platforms (and, perhaps, institutional

dynamics).

eBay merchants sometimes complete a transaction before realizing they have been

defrauded. In those cases, users develop social customs related to website infrastructure

in order to minimize commercial damage. Because users often come to the discussion

board in such moments, the arena of user debate is filled with strategies for negotiating

the dispute resolution protocol. According to one custom, the best way to deal with a

fraudulent buyer is to offer a partial refund on the object that they claim is "not as

described". The partial refund is a way to minimize the inevitable monetary losses

associated with the scam. Buyers have the upper hand in trade disputes,173 and the partial

refund decisively concludes those disputes and prevents the exchange from becoming a

one-way value transfer. This also forestalls any hostile encounters with buyers. eBay's

platform culture has a conflictual dimension, not just haggling and sniping but harassing

and coercing.174 Partial refunds offer a trap-door out of heated interactions with buyers.

173 See the discussion of eBay's dispute resolution protocol in chapter 1. 174 See the discussion of harassment and coercion on eBay in chapter 1.

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As one user explained on the discussion board, vendors should offer "no explanations, no

defending yourself, ONLY the same answer": a partial refund. On the eBay subreddit, a

dedicated seller went so far as to create a decision tree that informed vendors how to

handle the dispute resolution protocol in cases of delivery scams. The opening question

— "What reason did the buyer select for the return? — branches out to a series of actions

designed to minimize commercial damage. For instance, if the vendor suspects a

fraudulent return, the decision tree suggests that the vendor message the buyer and "ask

leading questions to see if the customer will admit to buyer remorse or altering the

product". The admission may then become leverage during the dispute resolution process.

This social custom allows users to control a commercial process that has become unruly.

This is particularly helpful in the case of delivery scams executed against vendors, who

must navigate a dispute resolution protocol that is decisively biased against them.

On eBay, users social customs develop social customs to mitigate concerns of

fraud and control the commercial process. These social custom relate to platform culture

and website infrastructure, including infrastructural protocols, but in different ways than

imagined by cyberlibertarianism. A lucrative offer outside of eBay's infrastructure is a

potential sign of fraudulent intent, as is a failure to conform to the platform culture of

object expertise. Users determine if an account has been hacked through the traces left by

the profile protocol, and eBay, as corporate institution, quietly enters the drama of

criminal infiltration by detecting hacked accounts and notifying users accordingly. In

cases when fraudulent exchange has already occurred, users take steps to control the final

stages of the commercial process through social customs related to the dispute resolution

protocol. These social customs are infrastructural, cultural, and (sometimes) institutional,

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extending well beyond the properly economic. eBay is not an autonomous sphere of

exchange but an embedded arena of economic activity, which implicates infrastructures,

cultures, and institutions.

Like A Good Neighbor

Craigslist users also develop social customs to avoid fraudulent exchange and

control the commercial process. These customs interface with website infrastructure,

platform culture, and state institutions. The state enters the exchange process most visibly

on Craigslist, compared to Silk Road and eBay, as users rely on local police stations to

ensure personal safety during face-to-face encounters. The website infrastructure of

advertisement solicitation and the platform culture of local commerce informs another

social custom, according to which merchants should conduct exchange in cash rather than

wire payment. Users respond to the website infrastructure of open exchange by

formulating social customs related to general market acumen. In all of these cases, social

customs help users manage local exchange, and they involve infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions that are beyond the economic as such. Craigslist is not an isolated sphere of

commercial activity but an entrenched arena of economic exchange that is infrastructural,

cultural, and institutional. Good fences might make good neighbors, but low fences make

good merchants.

A key social custom on Craigslist is to meet in person to conduct a transaction.

First and foremost, this custom is related to website infrastructure, which is designed to

furnish advertisements and connect merchants, but not to facilitate payment or delivery.

The interpersonal encounter helps mitigate concerns of fraud by reducing the ability of

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merchants to deceive their trading partners through digital protocols. At the same time,

the interpersonal comes with the risk of physical harm, unevenly distributed across social

categories, including gender.175 In response to this risk, as related in discussion board

conversations, Craigslist users adopt the social custom of meeting their prospective

trading partners in a public place: a city square, a parking lot, or a local business.

Craigslist formalizes this policy in its official guidelines for avoiding scams. While the

precise language has shifted over the past decade, the guideline reads, "Deal locally, face-

to-face —follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts."176

Some users build on this foundational social custom by involving state institutions

in the interpersonal encounter. In particular, women take steps to ensure their safety

during face-to-face transactions. On the Craigslist subreddit, women users related a social

custom of meeting prospective trading partners in front of a local police station or in a

public setting. In 2017, a woman asked the Craigslist subreddit where "a female on

Craigslist" should meet a prospective buyer, and users of both genders proposed a local

police station in response. One woman suggested that the entire transaction be conducted

in an open public setting, explaining, "I always meet inside a Starbucks. I get there early,

order a coffee, and lug whatever I'm selling inside. Don't help them carry it to their car; If

you can carry it in by yourself then they can handle it on their own. This is a very public

transaction and definitely puts you in a stronger position if they are shady." For this user,

the risk of a suspicious or "shady" merchant informed the practices of exchange. When a

175 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 176 "Avoiding Scams,” About, Craigslist, last accessed 1 December 2017, https://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.

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presumptively male user asked, "What does your gender have to do with anything?" the

woman responsible for the post foregrounded the material dimension of interpersonal

exchange: "Well, I am much smaller than a dude I guess. About 90 lbs? I guess thinking

about it, if shit went down, I suppose it wouldn't matter. But I still don't have the physical

heft." When I interviewed a Los Angeles woman in her 20s, she explained that she took

her safety seriously during interpersonal encounters by bringing pepper spray and "a

friend or someone just to be on the safe side".

Still, for those without chemical agents or trusted confidantes, the local police

station is a trusted venue for the interpersonal encounter. When a user on the Craigslist

subreddit asked how to handle a face-to-face transaction, several users suggested local

law enforcement as a commercial resource. One user wrote, "If anything makes you

uncomfortable then ask to meet at a police station or someplace public." Another agreed

that it was wise to "meet at or across from a police station". The state is not always a

neutral venue in these contexts. Several police departments, including those in

Philadelphia, Virginia Beach, and Boca Raton, have responded to this social custom by

encouraging merchants to conduct commerce in the lobbies of law enforcement

offices.177 The police department in Columbia, Missouri even created a commercial for

177 Lily Hay Newman, "Police Stations Increasingly Offer Safe Haven for Craigslist Transactions," Slate, January 30, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/30/ police_stations_offer_their_lobbies_as_safe_havens_for_craigslist_transactions.html. Robert Moran, "Online Exchanges Now Welcome In Philly Police Station Lobbies," Philly.com, March 6, 2017, http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Online-exchanges-now-welcome-in-Philly-police-station-lobbies.html.

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public television that advertised its lobby as an Online Exchange Zone.178 Here, not only

users but also state institutions work to control the commercial process within their

jurisdictions.

A related social custom is rooted in the platform culture of local commerce and

the website infrastructure of email relays. On the discussion board, users encourages their

peers to conduct exchange in cash rather than through wire payment, personal check, or

Paypal charge. These latter payment technology could be exploited by fraudulent

merchants, who might accept wire payments before handing over goods, write personal

checks that cannot be cashed, or send fake Paypal confirmation emails. If one party

insists on writing a check, so the custom goes, then the other party should cash the

payment before finalizing the exchange. As one user summarized, "Cash is the ONLY

way to go," because paper currency cannot be easily counterfeited or time-lagged. For

this reason, Craigslist users also avoid conducting commerce with distance merchants,

who contact them through the Craigslist message system, built into website

infrastructure, and make appealing offers to have the product delivered by post. Craigslist

formalized this custom in September 2014, when they added to their guidelines, "Ignore

178 Matthew Patston, "Columbia Police Department Opens 'Online Exchange Zone' To Deter Violence," Columbia Business Times, February 12, 2015, http://columbiabusinesstimes.com/ 2015/02/12/columbia-police-department-opens-online-exchange-zone-to-deter-violence.

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emails/texts from non-local persons"179 and, a month later, replaced that guideline with a

more specific one: "Do not extent payment to anyone you have not met in person."180

Craigslist users also follow broad social customs related to website infrastructure

in order to avoid fraudulent exchange. The absence of dispute protocols on Craigslist

means that users must fend for themselves in the digital free market. Part of this self-

defense is the knowledge of social customs related to market acumen. On the discussion

board, users refer to these customs as "due diligence" or simply "common sense". One

discussion board participant offered a set of questions to ask oneself before entering a

transaction: "Just be very careful. Ask yourself, 'Am I being caught up by greed or other

allure?' Ask, 'Can I afford the loss/hassle if this is a scam?'" Users cast greed as a

psychological trait that is easy to exploit, and they instruct their peers to beware of

listings that offer items well below their market value. When someone on the discussion

board reported a fraudulent car advertisement, a user replied, "Thieves get rich cheating

nitwits who think they can get something for nothing. NOBODY is going to sell a

beautiful 2008 Jetta with 77K miles for $2500. It is ALWAYS a scam." Another user

chimed in: "Scammers prey on cheapskates who think they can get something for

nothing." Cooperative exchange, according to many Craigslist users, was a matter of

psychological self-awareness. A seasoned platform merchant directly connected

179 "Avoiding Scams," About, Craigslist, updated September 21, 2014, retrieved from The Way Bakc Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20140914121202/https://www.craigslist.org /about/scams. 180 "Avoiding Scams," About, Craigslist, updated October 20, 2014, retrieved from The Way Bakc Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20141020025419/https://www.craigslist.org/ about/scams.

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fraudulent exchange with improper conduct, insisting in a discussion board post, "You

can't be scammed unless you cooperate". Another discussion board participant from Fort

Collins elaborated on the relation between fraud and acumen: "You can be scammed in a

bank or supermarket or anywhere online. One must use common sense, and it helps if one

reads up on potential fraud and scams."

On Craigslist, users develop social customs to mitigate concerns of fraud and

control the commercial process. These customs relate to website infrastructure, platform

culture, and state institutions. The absence of payment and delivery protocols in

Craigslist infrastructure means that merchants must meet in person to conduct exchange.

With the interpersonal encounter comes a series of practices that jockey state institutions

and public spaces (and, sometimes, chemical agents) to ensure personal safety. The state

serves as a backdrop of commerce in some cases, as when commerce is conducted in

front of a police station; and functions as a direct actor in other cases, as when law

enforcement authorities encourage citizens to meet in the lobbies of their offices. Gender

also figures into the social customs surrounding interpersonal encounter, as women take

concrete steps to ensure their safety during unregulated exchange. Infrastructure and

culture intersect in the social custom of cash exchange, which eschews long-distance

commerce conducted over email relays in favor of local exchange conducted through

immediate payment. The loose set of social customs related to market acumen also

eschews infrastructural commerce for local exchange, proper to the platform's

neighborhood culture. In these diverse cases, Craigslist is not a fenced garden but an

overflowing lawn that implicates infrastructures, culture, and institutions in its greenery.

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Here, electronic commerce is far from exclusively economic, as a variety of factors

external to exchange enter the commercial process for the benefit of users.

Hidden Abodes of Exchange

On Silk Road, eBay, and Craigslist, users take steps to control the commercial

process, developing social customs that rely on website infrastructure, platform culture,

and state institutions. This means that internet markets are not self-regulating, insofar as

users furnish de facto regulations in the absence of formal ones. This also means that

internet markets are not self-contained, as infrastructures, cultures, and institutions enter

the drama of exchange, either as passive or active players. Digital exchange is not purely

economic but also infrastructural, cultural, and institutional. Electronic commerce has

"hidden abodes", or external factors that inconspicuously facilitate exchange. Users are

well positioned to understand these discreet factors, because they take steps to manage

their exchange relations, drawing on available resources, both economic and non-

economic. The role of external factors within internet market exchange has consequences

for cyberlibertarianism, free labor, and electronic commerce.

Cyberlibertarianism and free labor share a view of internet exchange as

comprehensively economic. According to cyberlibertarian logic, if internet platforms are

self-contained islands of digital activity, then internet markets are self-contained islands

of economic activity. The digital ideology affirms the autonomy of these venues and the

importance of boundaries around them. This is part of how cyberlibertarianism justifies

the evasion of state regulations, understood as the unnecessary encroachment of these

boundaries. According to free labor logic, if internet activity is consistently monetized,

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then internet platforms are comprehensively economic. This is how Terranova refutes the

argument that the internet is anarchocommunist. These paradigms arrive at the same

general way of thinking about the internet platform economy, albeit through entirely

different routes. In both accounts, internet platforms are comprehensively economic,

either because non-economic factors do not breach platform boundaries

(cyberlibertarianism), or because non-economic factors turn out to serve economic

purposes once inside those boundaries (free labor).

Contrary to the ideas of cyberlibertarianism, non-economic factors enter internet

market exchange through unexpected paths. Further, contrary to the ideas of free labor,

these factors cannot be characterized as purely economic: even though they facilitate

commerce, they exhibit their own infrastructural, cultural, and institutional dynamics. To

characterize website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions as purely

economic is to miss these situated dynamics — the ways infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions enter the commercial process, not as sources of direct monetization but as

touch-stones of user practices. Further, to characterize these factors as purely economic is

to forward a functionalist argument, in which economic, infrastructural, cultural, and

institutional factors are woven together so thoroughly that they cannot be analytically

distinguished. It's the economy all the way down. Not only does the functionalist

perspective fail to account for the unique qualities of infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions in the context of electronic commerce. It also falls victim to paraconsistent

logic: everything is either economic or non-economic, but the non-economic contributes

to the economic, so the non-economic is also the economic. In a formal contradiction, A

= A and not-A = A. Free labor theory ends up endorsing a self-contained internet

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economy in much the same way that cyberlibertarianism endorses a self-contained

internet as such.

As venues of social customs, internet markets help us understand how users

control internet exchange in the absence of regulations. Unlike the merchant laws

mentioned by Trotter Hardy, social customs are not grounded in jurisdictive institutions.

Rather, they are grounded in the dynamics of infrastructures, cultures, and institutions

that are formally external to electronic commerce. These procedures can include the

traces left by website infrastructure, such as the feedback dates on Silk Road or user

activity logs on eBay; the sensibilities of platform culture, including the outlaw mentality

of Silk Road veterans or the local preferences of Craigslist users; or the functions of state

institutions, such as the surveillance function of the state on Silk Road on the protective

function of the state on Craigslist. These infrastructures, cultures, and institutions have

their own independent existence and operational procedures, but they are leveraged by

users aiming to control the commercial process nonetheless. Paradoxically, on internet

markets, the protocols that are formally designed to facilitate commerce become the

means of economic conflict, and the systems that have different formal purposes become

the raw materials of economic cooperation. If these digital free markets, which are meant

to be self-regulating and self-contained, implicate factors external to trade, then it is

likely that electronic commerce will always be more than electronic and more than

commercial — not an isolated island but a vast archipelago.

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CHAPTER 3

MONEY ON THE SIDE

PERFORMING MERCHANT LABOR

On internet markets, actors take steps to manage exchange. In performing the

lion's share of platform work, vendors develop selling strategies to control the

commercial process, including its potential for fraud and its potential for profit. These

actors have a particularly vested interest in equitable exchange, given the resources they

outlay during online sales. Like the social customs developed by users generally, vendor

strategies are connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state and

commercial institutions, but in ways that reflect the vendor goal of selling goods. This

means that even the business side of internet markets is more than just business: sellers

with properly economic motives leverage infrastructures, cultures, and institutions to

realize those motives. This is important, because internet markets are supposed to be self-

regulating and self-contained, yet vendors employ de facto regulations in the form of

selling strategies, and internet markets turn out to be embedded spheres of economic

activity in the very place where they should be thoroughly economic — the area of digital

labor.

Just Business

Scholarly and popular accounts of the digital economy tend to focus on its

properly economic dimension. In their Wikinomics manifesto, Don Tapscott and Anthony

D. Williams advocate a digital business plan centered on the monetization of online user

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activity and the ensuing minimization of overhead costs.181 Yochai Benkler, in The

Wealth of Networks, locates latent economic value in collaborative internet activity,

which he positions as constructively unregulated.182 Manuel Castells, during his

discussion of the digital economy in The Network Society, relates the structure of internet

networks to the global circulation of economic capital.183 The Four Hour Work Week by

Tim Ferris outlines an entrepreneurial strategy that leverages the distributed structure of

the internet to generate personal economic prosperity.184 Arun Sundararajan's The

Sharing Economy concerns the economic value of networks in the provision of on-

demand services.185 These studies of the digital economy ask: where are the economic

resources on the internet, and how should they be managed?

Critical accounts of digital labor likewise tend to focus on its properly economic

dimension, despite their focus on the production of value rather than its mere location.

Tiziana Terranova sees internet exchange as comprehensively economic, insofar as it is

monetized by technology firms.186 Christian Fuchs follows Terranova in highlighting the

181 Don Tapscott and Anththony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006). 182 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The concept of social production has roots, unacknowledged by Benkler, in Italian Marxism and Marxist feminism. David Peter Palazzo, "The 'Social Factory' in Postwar Italian Radical Thought from Operaismo to Autonomia" (doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 2014). Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (Oakland: PM Press, 2012). 183 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken: Wiley & Blackwell, 2000). 184 Tim Ferriss, The Four Hour Work Week (New York: Random House, 2007). 185 Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2016). I draw on Sundararajan through the rest of this paragraph. 186 Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy," Social Text 18, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 33-58. See the discussion of Terranova in chapter 2.

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economic value of user activity online.187 In line with Terranova and Fuchs, many

scholars argue that the surveillance of user activity is the skeleton-key to the extraction of

economic value on the internet; such that user activity, figured as a kind of digital labor,

sets the groundwork for a global industry in data.188 Lilly Irani analyzes the economic

bifurcation of digital labor into menial work and high-technology work.189 For Sarah

Roberts, content moderation is not just a user hobby but a legitimate micro-economy.190

These studies of digital labor ask: who provides the economic resources, and how does

that provision process work?

Despite their different perspectives and different objects, accounts of the digital

economy and accounts of digital labor are principally concerned with the economic

dimension of internet activity. When infrastructure enters the picture, it is an

infrastructure of capital circulation (Castells), monetized surveillance (Fuchs), or

outsourced task execution (Irani and Roberts). When culture enters the picture, it is a

187 Christian Fuchs, Digital Labor and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2014). Christian Fuchs, "Dallas Smythe and Digital Labor," in The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, ed. Richard Maxwell (New York: Routledge, 2016): 51-62. 188 Christian Fuchs et al., Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2012). Sebastian Sevignani, Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2016). Daniel Trottier, Social Media as Surveillance (New York: Routledge, 2012). Nick Dyer-Witherford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Ganaele Langlois et al., Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data (New York: Bloomsury Academic, 2015). Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle, eds., The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age. Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. 189 Lilly Irani, "The Cultural Work of Microwork,” New Media & Society 15, no. 5 (2015): 720-739, 10.1177/1461444813511926. 190 Sarah T. Roberts, "Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work," in Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, ed Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes (New York: Peter Lang, 2016): 147-160.

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culture of voluntary user participation (Benkler) to be widely monetized (Tapscott and

Williams) without user compensation (Terranova). When institutions enter the picture,

they are outdated commercial institution, such as taxis and hotels (Sundararajan), ready to

be disrupted (Ferris). In these accounts, infrastructures, cultures, and institutions occupy a

marginal position in the digital economy and in digital labor.

User Accounts

Internet markets tell a different story. On Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road, vendors

develop selling strategies connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state

and commercial institutions — factors considered minor players in accounts of the digital

economy, accounts of digital labor, and accounts of self-contained platforms advanced by

cyberlibertarianism. These selling strategies help vendors control the commercial

process. In contrast to user customs, however, these strategies reflect the vendor goal of

selling goods, and they tend to relate to different elements of infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions — factors that are not only present on internet markets but flexibly so. On

eBay, vendors formulate selling strategies connected to the website infrastructure of

algorithms, seller fees, hacked profiles, and digital protocols; the platform culture of rival

sellers, object expertise, and visual conventions; and the commercial institutions of

conventional businesses, yard sales, and thrift stores. On Silk Road, sellers execute

selling strategies related to the website infrastructure of price displays and seller

blacklists; the platform culture of anonymous users and unsophisticated actors; and the

surveillance of state institutions. On Craigslist, vendors develop selling strategies that

interface with the website infrastructure of filter protocols, post expiration, and scam text

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messages; the platform culture of casual buyers; and the state institutions of law

enforcement, as well as commercial institutions of retail stores. This is significant,

because digital labor is supposed to be an economic matter, and internet markets are

supposed to be self-contained spheres of economic activity. Yet even actors who treat

internet markets as business venues lean on infrastructures, cultures, and institutions

during digital exchange. Merchant labor on internet markets is more than just business.

The presentation of evidence in this chapter reflects the contextual nature of

selling strategies, or their connection to what, how, and why vendors are purveying

certain wares. Although I sometimes reference discussion board conversations, I

principally draw on the interviews I conducted with internet merchants in order to

provide a deep account of selling strategies.191 These are vendors portraits, which we will

consider one by one, with references to broader trends but a focus on individual user

accounts.

Practical Speculation

On eBay, vendors develop selling strategies to control the commercial process,

alleviating concerns of fraud and increasing profitable sales. These strategies are not only

economic but also infrastructural, cultural, and institutional. Vendors negotiate the

website infrastructure of market algorithms, which determine which products are

prominently displayed; seller fees, which inform the conditions under which sales are

profitable; hacked profiles, which are potential sources of fraudulent exchange; and

digital protocols, which inform what is technically possible on the site. Their selling

191 See the discussion of interview methods in Appendix II.

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strategies are also related to the platform culture of rival sellers, who may seek to

manipulate them; as well as object expertise and visual conventions, which inform the

way objects are presented. They furthermore interface with commercial institutions,

including formal business, yard sales, and thrift store. Even as they position profit as their

principal goal, these vendors leverage non-economic factors in their pursuit of online

sales. Digital labor on eBay is more than "just business", and the auction market is far

from a self-contained sphere of economic exchange. Rather, infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions enter into the process of merchant labor — the very part of digital exchange

that should be most thoroughly economic. In what follows, I describe the selling practices

of five eBay vendors who I interviewed.

A Baton Rouge man in his early 40s uses selling strategies related to the website

infrastructure of market algorithms and the platform culture of rival sellers. As an owner

of a pawn shop, he uses eBay to sell "purses, wallets, sunglasses, watches, jewelery [sic],

giftcards, and small electronics", which he has in stock in his store and which he knows

"will sell for sure". An eBay user since the late 1990s, he relies on a calculated pricing

strategy to decide on a reasonable starting price for goods. His formalized pricing

mechanism reflects the relatively high stakes of his online sales, bound up in his

professional goals. It also reflects his attempt to stand out in the expansive auction

market. eBay controls the visibility of items through a market algorithm, about which

vendors know little. This vendor reasons that a good price will attract user attention; and

this will, in turn, help increase the visibility of the object within the secret operations of

the market algorithm. "I care about eBay showing my stuff to people," the vendor

explained, and pricing strategy is a potential way to increase visibility. Price also takes on

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an increased importance from the perspective of eBay's history, a history to which this

vendor was witness over decades of platform involvement. In his recollection, Chinese

sellers flooded eBay with cheap electronics in the late 2000s, exploiting international

price differentials and crowding out pawn dealers like himself. These developments made

the market even more crowded and competitive, and they altered the platform culture by

shifting the kind of objects for sale on the site. Compared to the early days, he noted,

there are more technology vendors and "fewer average people selling off their junk". The

shift in object culture made his online sales more difficult, as eBay became increasingly

known for technological products rather than secondhand ones. More difficult than the

changes in platform culture, however, is the potential for fraudulent exchange on the site.

He recalled a recent incident, during which a buyer filed a return on a $1200 item just

days before the thirty-day cutoff for refunds. When he received the product, it had clearly

been used, but involving the dispute protocol was "not worth the mental effort", given its

bias in favor of the customer. Still, according to the vendor, the most frustrating part of

merchant labor is not the presence of fraudulent buyers but the platform culture of rival

sellers. "The most insidious people on eBay," he pined, "are the resellers who buy your

items because they think they are smarter than you." These are other vendors that will

purchase an item, leave a poor feedback as a form of vendor sabotage, and then attempt

to sell that item at a higher price. Rival sellers require that vendors remain attentive to

who is buying their products and why. Given the stakes of exchange, the Baton Rouge

develops selling strategies that are connected to these infrastructural and cultural

dynamics.

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Not all sellers use eBay as extensions of their professional endeavors, but even

casual vendors develop selling strategies to control the commercial process. A Raleigh

woman in her 50s sells miscellaneous goods on eBay to generate small profits for side

money, and her selling strategies are connected to the platform culture of visual

conventions and the commercial institutions of yard sales. She attends these sales several

times a month, "every weekend in the summer", and she purchases "guitars, clothing,

cosmetics, beer mugs, auto parts, pretty much anything [she] can make a little money

on". In tailoring her advertisements to the platform's visual standards, she spends "up to

four hours" each week taking pictures of her goods and writing detailed listings for them.

This is a significant amount of work, which she breaks up into small segments. As she

explains, "I go in spells where I'll list a bunch of stuff, then I won't do anything for a

while." Like the Baton Rouge pawn dealer, she points to fraudulent exchange as a

difficulty of merchant labor, one that has gotten worse over time. As she explains, "I've

seen more and more people that get taken advantage of because they don't cross every I

and every T." Despite the necessary attention to detail, she remains committed to the

thrill of speculative commerce, the "fun of buying something really cheaply at a yard sale

and selling it for a decent profit" to "someone who has been looking for it". Although her

compensation is usually minimal, in one exciting case, she purchased at a yard sale "a

particular type of musical keyboard, very old, very rare" and resold the instrument for

$299 to an antique collector. Her selling strategies proved effective during this exchange,

as she leveraged the commercial institution of yard sales and the platform culture of

visual conventions to sell a product at a significant profit.

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A New York man in his 60s, selling off his collectibles in retirement, likewise

takes steps to control the commercial process. These steps are connected to the website

infrastructure of digital protocols, as well as the platform culture of visual conventions

and object expertise. The vendor sells "mostly comics and magazines", as well as

"holograms, old games on CD, a small coin collection" that he has acquired over years of

collection. As a seller of collectibles, he puts great effort into the high-quality

presentation of his goods and the respectable presentation of himself. Responding to the

platform culture of visual conventions and object expertise, he explains, "I use sharp,

XXL photos/scans. Links to wikis and info. I position myself as an expert in the field." In

addition to presenting the objects according to platform conventions, the vendor stays up

to date on platform policies: "listing policies, branding, shipping times and policies,

return policies". The New Yorker repeated a common complaint about platform

protocols, mentioned by nearly all the vendors that I interviewed: sellers cannot leave

feedback on the profiles of deceptive buyers. The vendor referred to the feedback system

as "a total scam. Buyers can NEVER be negged [rated negatively]. Even the known

scammers have a 100% positive ratings." eBay's biased protocols, according to him,

make internet commerce feel like a typical job: "Ebay treats us like we work for it. Just

stocking it's shelves." Here, platform culture and website infrastructure inform the selling

strategies that are necessary in the auction market.

Meanwhile, a seasoned vendor in his 30s, based in the United Kingdom, uses

eBay as the principal sales venue for his computer hardware business. His selling

strategies interface with the platform culture of object expertise, as well as the website

infrastructure of digital protocols and hacked accounts. Given its relationship to his

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formal work arrangement, merchant labor takes up a significant deal of his time. Further,

given the technical nature of his wares, the vendor spends a plurality of this time

presenting his goods in an expert manner, as well as "testing the items and detailing all

the potential issues a customer will complain about". In addition to cultural conventions,

hardware sales at a distance comes with regular correspondence with customers over

delivery, maintenance, and quality. As a percentage, few customers complain; but the

business has a large customer base, meaning that there are many complaints in real

numbers. The website infrastructure of dispute resolution protocols, biased toward the

buyer, means that complaints are best handled "before they escalate" into full-blown

contests. Further, the website infrastructure of hacked accounts means that bad actors

have a clear path to free goods — a path that is treacherous for the vendor, given the high

cost of hardware products and the professional stakes of his online sales. After the vendor

sold a computer over eBay, he received an email from the platform, informing him that

the sale had been cancelled, because the buyer account had been hacked. The email read,

"We’re writing to let you know that we had to cancel the following transaction(s) because

the item(s) were purchased without the account owner's permission." The vendor was

relieved that he did not send the expensive product, but he expressed concern over the

recent presence of hackers on the site. Hacked accounts were now another dimension of

website infrastructure that informed his selling strategies, along with dispute resolution

protocols and platform conventions.

Lastly, a Virginia man in his 20s develops selling strategies related to the

commercial institution of thrift stores and the platform culture of rival sellers. Twice

weekly, he travels to nearby thrift stores, purchases miscellaneous items he thinks are

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valuable, and resells them for a profit in the auction market. These items include

"Gameboys, ink carts, old radios, fish finders, [and] curtains". He relishes this part of the

exchange process — the work of finding objects for resale, which he refers to as "a

treasure hunt, free money, ect. [sic]". But he finds the rest of the exchange process rather

tiresome. In particular, he finds frustrating the platform culture of rival sellers. One

vendor, he related, "bought a working radio, listed it on the same ebay account they

bought it with but several states from the original mailing address. While listed on their

ebay for sale, they opened a return claiming it didn't work, yet describing in their listing

that the radio was 'fully functional'." Nevertheless, he notes, navigating the platform

culture of rival sellers is worth the supplementary income that eBay furnishes. Despite

being oriented toward an economic end-game, his selling strategies are connected to

infrastructural and cultural dynamics.

On eBay, vendors develop selling strategies to control the commercial process

and execute successful sales. Even as they bear an economic purpose, these strategies

exceed the realm of the economic and implicate infrastructures, culture, and institutions.

Far from self-regulating, eBay relies on the de facto regulations of vendors, who work to

protect their assets in the free digital market. And, far from self-contained, eBay plays

host to non-economic factors, which figure importantly into the selling strategies of

vendors. The cyberlibertarian vision of an autonomous internet platform misses the ways

that digital exchange interfaces with factors that are formally external to electronic

commerce, even when digital exchange is treated as a business with properly economic

motives.

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Dark Figures

Criminologists define "the dark figure" as the number of crimes that occur but are

not recorded by the state.192 In considering Silk Road vendors, we are in a world of dark

figures — individuals who are remiss to detail their illegal activities, especially if those

activities continue into the present. Because I did not formally interview any Silk Road

contraband dealers, I must rely on secondhand accounts to paint a portrait of merchant

labor in the digital black market. Fortuitously, in August 2013, an unidentified individual,

claiming to have been a vendor on Silk Road, posted on Reddit an Ask Me Anything

(AMA) thread.193 In Reddit culture, an AMA is a real-time, question-and-answer thread,

hosted by people with a particular expertise or experience, from industry leaders and

politicians to computer scientists and factory workers. In this case, there is evidence to

suggest that the individual claiming to be a former Silk Road vendor was being truthful.

He was familiar with the technical niceties of the dark web, cryptocurrency, and stealth

product delivery; the cultural dynamics of the Silk Road discussion board; and the

chemical standards of drug purity evaluation. Moreover, in theory, a former dealer would

be more willing to talk about their experiences than an active dealer, and neither would

have anything to gain through a public forum, making an ulterior motive unlikely. In all,

there are compelling reasons to believe in the legitimacy of this individual, and, for these

reasons, the AMA will be the core of the subsequent analysis. We will also hear from

192 Heidi Mork Lomell, "The Politics of Numbers: Crime Statistics as Source of Knowledge and Tool of Governance,” in International Handbook of Criminology, eds. Shlomo Giora Shoam et al. (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2010): 117-151. 193 FormerSR, "I'm a former Silk Road drug dealer, AMA!" Reddit, r/Casualama, https:// www.reddit.com/r/casualiama/comments/1l0axd/im_a_former_silk_road_drug_dealer_ama

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other vendors, through their comments on the discussion board, and these comments will

help us identify trends in merchant labor in the digital black market.

On Silk Road, sellers developed selling strategies to control the commercial

process — its potential for fraud, for profit, and for state detection. These strategies were

related to website infrastructure of market prices, which were important determinants of

sales, and seller blacklists, which helped vendors avoid deceptive users. Vendor practices

were also connected to the platform culture of anonymous and unwitting users, who took

advantage of their dark-web privacy or failed to perform their due diligence during illegal

commerce. Notably, selling strategies interfaced with state institutions, which posed a

legal threat at nearly every stage of black market exchange. This means that Silk Road

was not self-regulating, insofar as vendors took steps to informally regulate the

commercial process and execute their economic goals. This also means that Silk Road

was not self-contained, as the digital movement of contraband marshalled factors that

were external to electronic commerce.

The Silk Road vendor who hosted the AMA did not directly identify his age or

location, but he did mention that he had recently impregnated his girlfriend, suggesting

that he is a man or an individual with male anatomy. I will consequently use the

presumptive masculine pronoun to refer to this vendor. According to his account, he was

a dealer of LSD, MDMA, and hash, none of which he would "personally consider

harmful", and he made "upper six-figures" over a year of part-time dealing. He worked a

conventional 9-5 job during his tenure on the platform, and, despite the profitability of

drug sales, he "never made a business out of it". His merchant labor generated money on

the side, and a lot of it — the markup on his products, or the difference between their cost

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of acquisition and their price of sale, ranged "anywhere from 40% to 300% depending on

the quantity". Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his capital gains, he characterized his vendor

experience as generally positive, stating, "I think the year or so I spent selling on SR was

one of the most satisfying things I've ever done." He also characterized the digital black

market as generally avant-garde, asserting, "SR is absolutely the future. Dealers are much

safer, customers can be assured of some level of quality control and there's little risk of

violence. Everybody wins."

In the first instance, his selling strategies were related to the website infrastructure

of market prices. Prices were listed alongside objects, and buyers could even sort objects

in ascending order of price. Of course, price is important in all markets. However,

because there were so many vendors for each kind of drug, price was a particularly

important way of capturing market activity. By listing items at an attractive price, and by

listing items that were in high demand, vendors could generate sales in a crowded black

market. For the AMA vendor, LSD was his best-selling product, because "it's very tough

to find in a lot of places so there's a big market for it". He often leveraged geospatial price

differentials through international orders, taking advantage of the economic circumstance

that "some things are much cheaper in some markets than others". Price and demand were

important market determinants, as vendors the discussion board noted. In May of 2012, a

Silk Road user began a discussion board thread entitled Getting Started as a Vendor,

seeking advice on creating a seller account. Recognizing the importance of platform

longevity, the poster asked how to jumpstart his commercial venture without a broad

platform reputation. One vendor assured him that a low price would help him stand out in

the market, writing that "sales will be slow at first but if the demand for your product is

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there, people will buy it". Undercutting the competition was a dependable path to market

dominance, because, as the vendor continued to explain, "there are people on here, like

me, who are poor enough to care about that [price] difference".

Merchant labor on Silk Road required more than a strong pricing strategy,

however. As the AMA vendor explained, the work of packaging and shipping contraband

constituted the core of merchant labor on Silk Road. This work was connected to the

abeyant presence of the state on the platform, where black market sales were triply

criminal — it is illegal to sell contraband (conspiracy to distribute), to send it through the

postal service (mail fraud), and to lie about the reason for receiving the contraband

payment (wire fraud). After photographing, describing, and selling a product — hardly an

easy task in a crowded and stylized black market194 — the AMA vendor started the

substantive work of packaging. Wearing gloves in order to prevent fingerprint traces, the

vendor first wrapped the outgoing product in mylar, "after initially working with double

vacuum sealing, which wouldn't be as dog-proof". He then put the product into a large

envelope, which he subsequently put in a larger manila envelope, preferring "a letter

format" over the fake package format used by other sellers.

The question of stealth packaging occupied many vendors on the discussion

board, with users offering a variety of strategies for deceptive or discreet containers: re-

sealed candy wrappers, re-glued tampon boxes, or the "inside a snap lock smelly proof

bag, crushed flat and wrapped again in lavender scented tissue paper and mailed in a

greeting card". In 2012, a vendor on the discussion board wrote about the labor of

packaging contraband, which served as a barrier to entry for new sellers: "I can spend

194 See the discussion of contraband advertisements in chapter 4.

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upwards of 4 hours a day just packaging... it is a VERY time intensive [sic] and you are

always under the gun to get product out. I think this is what kills many vendors in the

beginning. They think it will be easy but it isn't so they end up quitting." He also noted

that packaging constituted an investment with a delayed yield: "I spend as much as $500

a week on packaging supplies and postage... that is $500 out of my pocket before I ever

see any money from The Road..." Here, the logistical practice of packaging was an

overhead expense, made elaborate and complicated by the spectral presence of state

surveillance.

The AMA vendor continued: once the product was in a stealth package, the

package needed to be shipped. This selling practice was likewise connected to the

abeyant presence of the state, as vendors took steps to avoid detection by the institution at

every stage of delivery. First, because the wholesale purchase of stamps and shipping

materials could look suspicious to state authorities, the AMA vendor "bought [his]

stamps and other supplies from multiple different places". He used an in-state,

established business for the return address, musing, "I don't know if any one of those

businesses every got a surprise return delivery though!" Then — and this became more

important as his sales grew — he dropped the packages "at multiple mailboxes on

relatively quiet streets". These were postal mailboxes, meaning he utilized the federal

postal system, rather than couriers, who, he claimed, were "more likely to open and check

your packages". While most of his deliveries were successful, he knew of three packages

that "for sure were intercepted", but "all were small enough amounts (<$200) that they

just resulted in a letter" from customs to the buyer. As the vendor explained, "It's not

possible to prove that [the buyer] ordered something like that so it's tough to make it

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stand up in court. Small orders usually result in angry customs letter and no more." Here,

the vendor's shipping practices responded specifically to the prosecutorial dynamics of

the state, or its legal inability to prosecute without rigorous evidentiary support. These

practices were shared by other vendors who spoke about their experiences on the

discussion board. When someone began a humorous discussion board thread entitled "25

ways to get caught as a vendor on Silk Road", sellers posted cheeky comments about

rookie vendor mistakes. Several discussion board posters described blunders in the

packaging and shipping process: "Buy a lot of stamps in the same shop all the time"; "put

your actual correct return address on the package"; and "throw something personal from

your pockets between the envelopes in the mail". These witty responses highlighted,

through negation, the selling strategies involved in moving contraband through the state's

postal system.

The platform culture of anonymous users and unwitting buyers also informed

vendor practices. According to the AMA vendor, anonymity and naivety complicated the

customer service dimension of vendor sales. Reflecting on the nature of anonymous

trade, the vendor noted generally that "it's difficult to tell if the client is being honest or

not". This made fraud a potential obstacle in the commercial process. Unlike the dealer

who went by the name of Mr. Duch during the Ross William Ulbricht trial,195 he claimed

that he did not keep a spreadsheet of buyer information, but he did keep "a log of refunds

so [he] could see if somebody was trying it repeatedly". Fortunately, the discussion board

furnished a partial strategy to avoid fraudulent actors — "a sellers blacklist (for

blacklisting bad buyers)" to which the vendor "added a couple of users". The AMA

195 See the discussion of Mr. Duch and vendor blackmail in chapter 1.

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vendor went so far as to say that fraudulent and naive actors were more of a concern than

the law enforcement agents, who he believed were "browsing around the SR [Silk Road]

forums and such". The vendor, in particular, characterized irresponsible users as the

Achilles' heal of dark web markets. When someone asked about technological flaws in

dark web market architecture, the vendor inverted the question and offered a social

response. "Weakest point," he replied, "is the pile of meat sat in front of the keyword,"

referring to human actors, susceptible to error and manipulation. "There are enough

people out there with terrible OPSEC [operations security] that are too willing to trust

people they ultimately can't see." Dealing with the culture of anonymous and reckless

customers meant commercial record-keeping and infrastructural crowd-sourcing as

means to honorable commerce.

Other sellers related similar experiences on the discussion board. According to

one vendor, merchant labor partially consists of customers "bugging the shit out of you,

asking you all kinds of questions about each transaction". Here, the exchange custom of

vendor evaluation multiplied customer service work for the vendor, who needed to prove

his commercial trustworthiness through long conversations.196 When one user speculated

that "Silk Road drug dealer has got to be the best job on earth [sic]", "because it's so

damn easy", a vendor countered that sellers "have to deal with crappy ungrateful

customers", including "customers that lie about their package not making it". Another

agreed that "[h]aving to deal with idiot customers" was a principal challenge. According

to the AMA vendor, it was the "idiot customers" who were the most frustrating. "I had a

guy message me," he related, "every single day asking where he package was (it was

196 See the discussion of vendor evaluation in chapter 2.

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going international, I had no idea) and after about five days he starts asking for a refund

even though shipping usually takes 8-12 days. He left a bad review."

In these cases, vendors developed selling strategies to control the commercial

process in ways their reflect their goal of selling contraband. These strategies were

connected to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state institutions, which helped

vendors determine what to sell, how to sell, and to whom to sell. Infrastructures, cultures,

and institutions were not neutral backdrops but influential factors in the decision-making

operations of black market sellers. Silk Road was far from a self-regulating libertarian

utopia, as vendor practices were de facto regulations that helped sellers control the

commercial process. Vendors sought control over economic exchange by leveraging non-

economic factors, making Silk Road embedded rather than self-contained. With an eye on

infrastructures, cultures, and institutions, vendors developed strategies that well exceeded

the economic.

Free Trade

Craigslist vendors also take steps to control the commercial process in their

pursuit of profitable sales. These steps are related to the website infrastructure of the filter

protocol, which determines how many times users may post advertisements; post

expiration, which removes posts after a certain period of time; and scam text messages,

which can sometimes accompany the posting of contact information in advertisements.

Vendor strategies are also connected to the platform culture of casual users, who may

express interest in an item without actually following through on its purchase. Selling

tactics also interface with the state institutions of law enforcement, which can provide a

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failsafe during the interpersonal encounter, and the commercial institutions of retail

stores, which make the secondhand market attractive through high prices and regular

product turnover. Despite their economic motives, Craigslist vendors leverage

infrastructures, cultures, and institutions to control the exchange process. The local

internet market is far from the self-contained and self-regulating platform envisioned by

cyberlibertarianism. Rather, Craigslist implicates a variety of other factors that are

external to electronic commerce, as vendors aim to exert de facto regulatory control in

the digital free market. In what follows, I draw on interviews I conducted with five

Craigslist vendors.

A Los Angeles woman in her 20s takes steps to control the commercial process on

Craigslist, and these steps are related to the commercial institutions of retail stores and

the state institutions of law enforcement. She sells and buys furniture on Craigslist, and

local market has become her "go-to place for finding furniture/getting rid of furniture"

after seven years of use. Craigslist offers a reasonable alternative to furniture stores,

which she sees as "way overpriced". She offers her wares at a significant discount, not

only compared to retail prices but also compared to Craigslist prices: "I'll usually check-

out what's the current selling price and try selling it $5 less. If that doesn't bit [sic] after a

few days, I'll sell it a little bit more. I'll also research similar items on Craigslist what's

the selling price and either try to have a price that’s $1-2 less or a very good description

that entices someone to buy it." Like other women users of the site,197 she takes

precautions when meeting with potential buyers. She typically meets prospective

exchange partners at "the Santa Monica Police Station or near the entrance of a Target" in

197 See the discussion of interpersonal Craigslist encounters in chapter 1.

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her neighborhood. "I do usually go with a friend," she elaborated, "or someone just to be

on the safe side." Finally, she added, "I also always carry pepper spray." There are

institutions on either side of her selling practices: the commercial institution of the

furniture store motivates her to sell goods in the first place, and the state institution of law

enforcement allows her to safely finalize transactions.

Also in Los Angeles is a man in his 50s who has generated "about 1 million"

dollars in profits through Craigslist over the course of five years. His selling practices are

related to the website infrastructure of filter protocols and scam text messages. This

vendor uses the local market to rent out a three-apartment loft and a photo studio in

Downtown LA, both of which he "owns through prior circumstances". The former rakes

in "over 60K per year" in rent, and the latter brings in handsome returns through hourly

rentals. Craigslist labor is an addition to his formal employment, a job in finance with a

flexible schedule, Unlike the furniture dealer, he sells regularly on the platform, and he

includes in the exchange process a posting strategy that is infrastructural in nature.

Because he advertises multiple times each day, he schedules his advertisements to avoid

the platform's filter protocol, which removes repeated postings and sometimes bans over-

active IP addresses. "I post 6-8 ads a time, wait an hour then repeat," he explained. "I'm

competing with other people who run 40 50 ads per day". He subscribes to the Craigslist

subreddit because "CL [Craigslist] changes algorithms occasionally" and the group

discussion allows him "to get ahead of the ball". For him, fatigue accompanies the

infrastructural practice of scheduled advertisements: "I'm so tired of posting," he

conceded, "but it's easy." He has less control over another infrastructural element of the

local market. By including his contact information in hundreds of advertisements, the

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vendor opens himself up to scam text messages, which he fights of "every day".

Scammers locate the contact information listed in his advertisements and, as he explains,

"use my phone number for scam texts and calls". The vendor could not even make it

through our hour-long interview without receiving a scam text message, remarking to me,

"just had one while we chat". Still, the open structure of the platform is what makes the

local market attractive. The vendor's motivations for using the local market revolves

around cost, utility, and reach: "It's free and very popular and it works." For this vendor,

website infrastructure is a major touch-stone of the commercial process, which he

alternately controls through a pricing strategy related to the filter protocol, or fails to

control through the reception of scam text messages.

Meanwhile, a Philadelphia woman in her 40s employs selling strategies related to

the website infrastructure of post expiration. She sells furniture and jewelry as a way to

clean out her living spaces and make casual revenue. A veteran of local commerce, she

has been on the platform for "more than 20 years", and she feels that the site has "not at

all changed" in that time. She continually renews her advertisements to prevent them

from expiring, an infrastructural feature of the platform. Because each "posting will

expire in a new days", she must regularly "refresh the posting" by posting it again and

again. This practice keeps her wares visible in the crowded market. Like the LA woman

selling furniture, she takes gender into consideration when planning interpersonal

encounters with prospective buyers. "I meet them at a halfway point," she told me.

"Sometime [sic] I have them come to my house only if it's a female." She does not rely

on state institutions to protect her against interpersonal conflict, but she does take steps

related to website infrastructure.

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Further north, a Toronto woman in her 30s uses Craigslist to sell her copy-editing

services, which she performs as an addition to her job in publishing. Her selling strategies

interface with the website infrastructure of post expiration and scam text messages. For

this vendor, the commercial process begins with the composition of an advertisement, an

important practice, given that superlative writing is part of the service that she is offering.

"Writing quality ads is a lot of work," she told me. "A good ad has to have all the

keywords that clients are looking for, but be unique enough to stand out. It also can't

replicate the hundreds of other ads on the site." Moreover, she schedules her

advertisements in relation to the website infrastructure of filter protocols, posting "at the

same time once per day in a set rotation" in order to habitualize the practice and avoid the

platform filter. Posting on the platform has become more difficult during her ten years on

the platform, she told me, because "you get scam txts [sic] if you post ads with your

contact info", and "the volume of scam [sic] has increased dramatically" in recent years.

Like the LA real estate vendor, she manages these unwanted messages as a price of entry

into the local market. Her selling strategies, in this respect, are infrastructural: she tailors

her posts to the filter protocol embedded in website infrastructure, even as that

infrastructure furnishes unsolicited text messages from scammers.

In contrast to these seasoned vendors, a New Jersey man in his 20s came to

Craigslist with minimal experience and stumbled through commercial process in 2017.

The commercial institution of car dealerships, the platform culture of casual buyers, and

the website infrastructure of scam messages figured centrally in his experience of

secondhand auto sales. After he wrecked his first car, he went to a dealership to sell it for

parts, but he wasn't satisfied with the offered price. A friend suggested he post the vehicle

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on Craigslist, which he did, at which point he received a variety of dead-end inquiries: "I

had several people text me asking for more pics and when you send them they just don't

respond. They'll seem interested then just ghost you." The casual culture of Craigslist

meant that buyers were quick to inquire about product but slow to finalize the transaction.

Corresponding with casual buyers "felt like work", and the practice of ghosting, or the

sudden cessation of interpersonal communication, multiplied the correspondence labor.

Having included his contact information in the advertisement, he also began to receive

scam text messages "from unknown area codes with horrific grammar or very clearly not

human, asking generic vague questions". In his experience with scammers, "when you

answer, they’ll send you a wall of text taking [sic] about how they’re in the military or

out of country or in the hospital etc, and would like to PayPal you the money and have an

'agent' pick up the car." At last, he was pleased to receive a reasonable offer from "a guy

who wanted to rebuild [the car]". However, on the day of the meet up, something didn't

feel right. As he explained, "[The buyer] told me he couldn't make it last minute, and that

his brother was coming to pick up the car." The sudden change of plans seemed like a

prelude to fraudulent exchange: "I thought this was some kind of play," he recalled.

Fortunately, his concerns were not warranted, as the buyer's story "turned out to be

legitimate, and [the buyer's] brother gave me cash and took the car." Unlike seasoned

sellers, he did not have a set of tactics for navigating the market, and he consequently

struggled through the commercial process. Indeed, without the know-how of more

experienced vendors, this rookie came close to entering a potentially fraudulent

exchange. Still, the local market remained attractive to him. When I checked up on the

New Jersey vendor a few weeks after our interview, he had just posted another car for

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sale, although he had not yet received any offers. "It's a more expensive car," he told me,

"so I didn't expect it to sell too quick [sic]."

In these cases, Craigslist vendors take steps to control the commercial process, but

in ways oriented toward their goal of selling goods. These are not purely economic steps

but ones related to website infrastructure, platform culture, and state and commercial

institutions. This means that Craigslist is not a self-contained sphere but an embedded

arena of economic activity, as vendors marshal non-economic factors in realizing their

economic motives. This also means that Craigslist is not a self-regulating market, but one

that relies on the de facto regulatory controls of motivated users.

Embedded Economies

On internet markets, vendors take steps to control the commercial process, but in

ways that reflect their goal of selling goods. These steps are de facto regulatory controls

that are designed to facilitate fair exchange. Despite being oriented toward an economic

goal, these steps implicate website infrastructure, platform culture, and state and

commercial institutions. This matters, because internet markets are supposed to be self-

regulating and self-contained, yet vendors draw on factors that are external to electronic

commerce in order to manage online exchange. Merchant labor on internet markets is not

a purely economic affair but one that significantly involves non-economic factors. These

factors are not mere backdrops of exchange but important touch-stones in selling

strategies of commercial control. Even as business venues, internet markets are

embedded spheres of economic activity that are infrastructural, cultural, and institutional.

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It is important to underline the role of infrastructures, cultures, and institutions in

merchant labor on internet markets, because accounts of the digital economy and

accounts of digital labor tend to focus on the economic dimension of internet activity.

These accounts help us understand how economic value is distributed and produced on

the internet; but they do less to shed light on the role of infrastructural, cultural, and

institutional factors in the digital economy and in digital labor. To be sure, such factors

appear in these accounts, but they are more often treated as background conditions and

less often treated as significant touchstones of user activity. Cyberlibertarianism takes

this treatment one step further by positioning internet platforms as island of economic

activity — self-regulating, self-contained, and self-sustaining. Once again, the

assumptions of cyberlibertarianism are not far-off fantasies but radicalized versions of

conventional thought patterns. In other words, where accounts of the digital economy and

digital labor position infrastructures, cultures, and institutions in the background of value

production, cyberlibertarianism removes these factors from the scene entirely — save for

the infrastructural protocols that make cultures and institutions irrelevant.

Internet markets are privileged sites for the study of infrastructures, cultures, and

institutions in the context of digital labor and electronic commerce. This is because

external factors become vitally important when vendors aim to control the commercial

process and execute profitable sales in the absence conventional regulations. Internet

markets represent a kind of ground-zero of digital exchange, where market actors freely

encounter one another with few commercial safeguards. Without the trappings of

conventional electronic commerce, internet markets visibly show us how digital workers

leverage the scattered resources available to them. The importance of these resources as

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touchstones of merchant labor complicates the view of electronic commerce as purely

economic. Although debates over digital value production are beyond the scope of this

research, it is worth noting that the value produced by internet vendors is connected to

infrastructures, cultures, and institutions that appear external to digital labor.

Paradoxically, by removing the trappings of conventional regulations and by isolating

vendor practices as conceptual objects, internet markets end up revealing the deeply

embedded qualities of digital labor in the context of electronic commerce.

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CHAPTER 4

THINGS FOR SALE ON THE INTERNET

CIRCULATING INSTITUTIONAL OBJECTS

Institutions also aim to control the commercial process on internet markets.

According to cyberlibertarianism, internet markets should be self-contained spheres of

economic activity, beyond the messy realities of institutions. Yet state, commercial, and

domestic institutions figure centrally in the circulation of objects on internet markets. In

particular, institutions take steps to control the circulation of contraband, antique, and

secondhand objects. These objects often enter digital exchange in exceptional moments

when institutional control falls short, changes orientation, or exceeds expectation. These

moments include: overflows, gaps, and bottlenecks in commercial institutions;

byproducts in domestic institutions; and lacunae in state institutions. Contraband, in

particular, exemplifies the role of institutional "failure" in digital exchange: because state

institutions are tasked with the management of contraband, every act of contraband

exchange is effectively a failure of institutional regulation. Far from being a white whale

of the dark web, contraband circulates across Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road alike. Every

internet market is thus a black market — a final plot twist in our drama of exchange and

an object lesson in digital commerce. That internet markets circulate contraband

demonstrates the link between the anomalies of institutional regulation and the

circulation of material goods.

Market Objects

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Commodities are widely studied conceptual objects. In his classical formulation,

Karl Marx defines commodities as privately owned goods exchanged in the capitalist

marketplace for a profit, an exchange that alters the social perception of goods.198 Walter

Benjamin follows this line of thinking in his analysis of consumer systems, which

similarly transform the perceptual status of commodities.199 Since Benjamin's midcentury

work, consumer culture has been widely studied as a social, psychological, economic,

political, and historical phenomenon.200 Studies of digital consumer culture generally

follow topical precedent and take a discursive approach to the question of online

consumption.201 Theorists of eBay, for instance, argue that the expansive collection of

objects online is alternately exhilarating and overwhelming to users.202 A recent line of

thought, sometimes referred to as materialist media studies, has moved from a symbolic

conception of commodities to an infrastructural one.203 Here, consumer objects are not

198 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 199 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1982). 200 Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Influence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Julie Schor and Douglas B. Holt, eds., The Consumer Society Reader (New York: The New Press, 2000). Lawrence B. Gluckman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Jean Baurdillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1968). Jennifer R. Scanlon, ed., The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2000). 201 Fortuitously for the present analysis, eBay is a mainstay in studies of digital consumer culture, many of which treat objects as forms of discourse. Michele White, Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Durham: Duke University Press). Ken Hills et al., eds. Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2006). 202 Janice Denegri-Knott and Mike Molesworth, "'Love It. Buy It. Sell It.' Consumer Desire and the Social Drama of eBay," Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 56-79. 203 Jeremy Packer and Steven B. Crofts Wiley, "Strategies for Materializing Communication," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 107-113, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.652487.

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only signifiers of symbolic meaning but fluid phenomena that require systems of

maintenance and preservation.204 Studies of the internet of things take an infrastructural

approach by considering the vast systems of production, distribution, and maintenance

that make possible smart objects.205 The discursive tradition and the infrastructural

tradition are two key paradigms for understanding the circulation of commodities.

Contraband, antique, and secondhand goods are widely available on the internet.

A brief survey of their presence across the web will help us understand their unique

position within internet markets. The early internet featured several prominent drug

forums and marketplaces.206 At some point in the early to mid-2000s, users began to

populate Craigslist with drug advertisements, although this became decreasingly common

as Craigslist deleted its Erotic Services section, then its Adult Services Section, and, most

recently, its Personals Section.207 Drug distribution on the dark web began with Silk Road

204 Trevor Pinch, "Technology and Institutions: Living in a Material World," Theory and Society 37 (2008): 461-483, doi 10.1007/s11186-008-9069-x.m 205 Samuel Greenhard, The Internet of Things (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin Group, 2017). Nitesh Dhanjani, Abusing the Internet of Things (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2015). 206 Edward Murguía et al., eds., Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). Sarah N. Gatson, "Illegal Behavior and Legal Speech: Internet Communities' Discourse About Drug Use," in Edward Murguía et al., eds., Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007): 135-160. Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar, eds., Plant Medicines, Healing, and Psychedelic Science: Cultural Perspectives (New York: Springer, 2018). Mike Sugarman, "The World of Psychedelic Mushrooms Online," Hopes & Fears, March 17, 2017, http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/drugs/168731-psilocybin-mushrooms-and-the-rise-of-authentic-counter-cultures-on-the-internet. 207 By 2008, the popular press was regularly reporting on illegal Craigslist activity, including drug traffic and sex work. Note that many of the police reports mentioned are the results of independent investigations, rather than habitual practices, within law enforcement agencies. Patrice O'Shaughnessy, "Drug Dealers Doing Roaring Trade on Craigslist, Say City Investigators," New York Daily News, November 16, 2008, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/drug-dealers-roaring-trade-craigslist-city-

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in 2013.208 Weapon markets on the dark web began to thrive once the alternative

communication network grew in popularity.209 Less expected than the existence of a

weapons market on the dark web is the existence of a weapons market on Craigslist and

eBay. A 2008 study by the United States Governmental Accountability Office discovered

troves of restricted military equipment on the sites, including body armor vests and

nuclear chemical gear.210

Antiques were among the first objects to be widely circulated online. The history

of eBay, in particular, is a history of antique exchange: dealers in collectibles populated

investigators-article-1.338953. Bruce Lambert, "As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice," The New York Times, September 5, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/nyregion/05craigslist. Gary Klein, "Fake Drugs Lead to Arrests; 'Cocaine' Dealer Sold Cops Baking Soda," Marin Independent Journal, March 10, 2007, http://www.marinij.com/article/zz/20070310/NEWS/703109975. Duff Wilson and Serge F. Kovaleski, "Olympic Booster Tied to Clinic in Drug Inquiry," The New York Times, March 7, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/sports/othersports/07doping. Alan Duke, "Official: Craigslist to Replace 'Blatant Internet Brothel,'" CNN, May 13, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/13/craigslist.sex.ads. Claire Cain Miller, "Craigslist Says It Has Shut Its Section for Sex Ads," The New York Times, September 15, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/business/16craigslist. In March 2018, the United States government passed into law an exception to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Under the new legislation — Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) — internet platforms may be held legally liable for "knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating" sex trafficking. H.R. 1865 — 115th Congress: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1865. 208 European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, "The Internet and Drug Markets," EMCDDA Insight 21 (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union). 209 Giacoma Persi Paoli et al., "Behind the Curtain: The Illict Trade of Firearms, Explosives, and Ammunition on the Dark Web", RAND Corporation (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2017). 210 United States Governmental Accountability Office, "Internet Sales: Undercover Purchases on eBay and Craigslist Reveal a Market for Sensitive and Stolen U.S. Military Items," Testimony Before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives, April 10, 2008.

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the auction site in the late 1990s, furnishing a baseline market in objects that helped the

platform reach a critical mass of users in the early days of the internet.211 Bringing the

antique market online was a boom for the collectibles industry, as well as a boom for the

illicit antiquities industry, an underground market in cultural relics, dominated by the

hyper-wealthy.212 By contrast, the online market in used goods is one dominated by the

middle and lower classes.213 Secondhand economies tend to emerge when the lifespan of

objects is high and the costs of conducting exchange is low.214 The secondhand market is

part of a broader landscape of used good exchange: yard sales, car-boot sales, and flea

markets, as well as clothing swaps, trash pickings, and other micro-economies sans

currency.215 In these cases, contraband, antique, and secondhand objects circulate in the

margins of technological and economic systems.

Object-Oriented Economy

Contrary to the cyberlibertarian vision of a self-contained internet platform, and

against the grain of the discursive tradition and the infrastructural tradition in commodity

studies, institutions play key roles in the circulation of objects on internet markets. In

211 Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2003. See the discussion of eBay's history in Appendix VI. 212 Simon Mackenzie, "Illict Deals in Cultural Objects as Crimes of the Powerful," Crime, Law and Social Change 56 (2011): 133-153, 10.1007/s10611-011-9317-2. 213 Gretchen M. Herrmann, "Haggling Spoken Here: Gender, Class, and Style in US Garage Sale Bargaining," Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2004): 55-81. 214 Valerie M. Thomas, "Demand and Dematerialization Impacts in Second-Hand Markets," Journal of Industrial Ecology 7, no. 2 (2003): 65-78, https://doi.org/10.1162/108819803322564352. 215 Colin C. Williams and Christopher Paddock, "Reconciling Economic and Cultural Explanations for Participation in Alternative Consumption Spaces," Geografiska Annaler 85, no. 3 (2003): 137-148.

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particular, state, commercial, and domestic institutions aim (and sometimes fail) to

control the movement of objects within their jurisdiction. Contraband objects enter digital

exchange when the state fails to regulate them through laws and law enforcement bodies

— a failure related to jurisdictional structures and resource allocations. The online

circulation of antiques follows from gaps and overflows in commercial antique

institutions, which allow objects to circulate on the internet, but on institutional terms.

Bottlenecks in commercial retail institutions and overflows in domestic institutions

underwrite the entrance of secondhand objects into internet markets. Secondhand goods

alternately represent the failure of retail institutions to dominate the exchange of goods

within their purview, and the ability of domestic institutions to control the after-life of

household goods. These institutions variously attempt to control the commercial process,

making them yet another player in the regulatory drama of internet markets. In what

follows, we'll consider the objects in escalating order of platform presence: first, antiques

on eBay; then, secondhand goods on Craigslist and eBay; and, finally, contraband on Silk

Road, Craigslist, and eBay. Contraband will be the main focus of the chapter, given its

empirical and demonstrative presence across the internet markets.

Act One: Antique Objects

On eBay, the circulation of antiques follows from overflows and gaps in

commercial antique institutions. Objects qualify as antiques by virtue of their historical

production origins. In antique culture, the production origin of an object — where, when,

and by whom it was produced — is central to the object's qualification and valuation as

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an antique.216 Customs authorities have regulatory jurisdiction over the movement of

antiques, and they determine which objects should not be removed from their production

origins. This is because antiques have a long history of being illegally transported.217

Antiques are also subject to regulation in the form of appraisals by trade associations.

eBay is part of a vast economic landscape in antique goods — retail venues, auction

houses, yard sales, and flea markets — its position within the antique landscape is

connected to its regulatory dynamics.218 On the one hand, eBay is more regulated than

yard sales and flea markets: vendor send auction items through the postal system, making

those items subject to customs regulation. On the other hand, eBay is less regulated than

auction houses and estate sale organizations, which employ in-house appraisers to ensure

the legitimacy and legality of antique goods. eBay thus occupies a middle ground in the

antique landscape between casual sales and formal institutions.

The circulation of antiques on eBay is related to the platform's middle ground

position. Let's consider two antiques that recently circulated on eBay. An antique plate

from eighteenth-century China attracted an opening bid of $25 in early 2018. When I

216 Leon Rosenstein, Antiques: The History of an Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 217 For instance, Lord Elgin stole and resold Athenian artifacts during the nineteenth century, and John Paul Getty purchased looted Italian art in the 1980s. Erin L. Thompson, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). In a recent example, Hobby Lobby, a retail craft store in the United States, attempted to illegally import thousands of Iraqi relics from the United Arab Emirates and Israel, where, customs authorities determined, they belonged. Capturing the near-human status of objects, the court case was entitled, The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae. In the US, objects themselves are tried when they are seized by customs officials. 218 Kim Leggett and David Leggett, The Antique Atlas: The Guide to Antiquing America (New York, Rainy Day Publishers, 1997).

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interviewed the amateur antique dealer who posted the Chinese plate, he explained that

he purchased the item at an antique fair in New Orleans. Drawing on his knowledge of

Chinese history, the dealer reasoned that the plate was worth "about $200, at least $150",

nearly three times what he had paid for it at the city fair, and he hoped to resell the

antique for a profit. However, few buyers at his local flea market in Baton Rouge could

afford or appreciate the antique. Nor were auction houses an appealing option, given their

tendency to buy low and sell high. As he explained, "They "rip you off by telling you [the

antique] is crap and then making a low-ball offer." eBay offered a commercial middle

ground. "If I post it on eBay," he projected, "it'll actually get goods bids. If I try to sell it

here [in Baton Rouge], people will offer me jack shit." Here, the antique circulated

through a gap in the landscape of commercial antique institutions — namely, the middle

ground between the yard sale and the auction house.

The next antique is a product of a prestigious commercial institution. Where the

plate seller captures the proficient but amateur vendor, the next seller embodies the

institutional dealer, extending retail business into the online sphere. In 2017, an

established antique house posted for sale an eighteenth-century English cabinet with an

opening bid of $11,000. I spoke to the woman who posted the advertisement — an

antique dealer in her early thirties who works at the affiliated auction house and who

started the bookcase auction after the object failed to sell at the venue's brick-and-mortar

showing room. She described eBay as a "back up plan" for the sale of specialized

antiques, and her decision to post on eBay revolved around an excess of supply.

Following a brief stint in the main gallery of the auction house, the cabinet was "sitting in

storage" and "taking up space" for weeks. This prompted the vendor to advertise the

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object on eBay in search of an erudite and resourceful buyer from out of town. In this

case, the antique entered eBay through an overflow in the commercial antique institution.

In these cases, commercial antique institutions either forfeited or exerted control

over objects that fell within their purview. Neither yard sales nor auction houses sought

to control the movement of the Chinese plate, and this institutional indifference prompted

the dealer to sell the object on eBay. By contrast, the English cabinet was an object of

institutional control. The antique house placed the object in digital circulation, but on its

own terms — specifically, on the terms that it would sell and help solve an institutional

problem related to storage infrastructure. Here, the antique market played host to the

interplay of institutional indifference and institutional control. Far from self-regulating

and self-contained, eBay implicated institutions, their regulatory drives, and their

infrastructural capacities.

Act Two: Secondhand Objects

Secondhand goods enter Craigslist and eBay through bottlenecks in commercial

institutions and as byproducts of domestic institutions. On Craigslist, furniture, vehicles,

and electronics are major objects of secondhand exchange. These objects are widely

unregulated.219 They are also widely produced, being manufactured by industries oriented

around economies of scale (vehicles and furniture) or planned obsolescence

(electronics).220 Finally, they are widely purchased. Several social trends keep furniture,

219 Automobiles are the obvious exception, as a car deal requires a bill of sales in many states. United States Division of Motor Vehicles, "Bill of Sales Requirement," Selling Your Car, accessed February 4, 2018, https://www.dmv.org/bill-of-sale. 220 Thomas A. Kochan et al., eds., After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Susan M.

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vehicles, and electronics in high demand: a residential culture of rapid relocation, an

autocentric national infrastructure, a bike-friendly city infrastructure, and a vast consumer

market in video games, televisions, cell phones, and assorted technological toys.221 These

objects are widely unregulated, widely produced, and widely purchased — factors that

typically grease the wheels of commerce. Yet furniture, vehicles, and electronics pass

through retail bottlenecks once they enter the market. Furniture outlets, car dealerships,

bike shops, and electronics retailers sell these commodities at high price, well above the

cost of manufacture. This commercial gridlock — expansive production, broad demand,

and restricted distribution — is a perfect storm for secondhand markets: there are many

of these goods, there are many potential customers for them, and they are far cheaper to

exchange once they leave the sphere of commercial institutions.

In the interviews I conducted with Craigslist users, many identified the platform

with inexpensive secondhand objects. These objects, they explained, could be bought or

sold at prices that were more reasonable than commercial retail outlets. In buying and

selling furniture on the platform, a Los Angeles woman in her 20's explained that "prices

are more reasonable" compared to retail stores. The high turnover rate of furniture by

individuals could occasionally lead to spectacular deals on secondhand interiors,

Walcott, A Profile of the Furniture Manufacturing Industry (New York: Business Expert Press, 2013). Peter Scott, The Market Makers: Creating Mass Markets for Consumer Durables in Inter-War Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 221 Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities (Eugene: Oregon State University Press, 2009). Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Inventing the Electronic Century.

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"because people get desperate trying to get rid of things". A three-time car buyer with

whom I spoke likewise preferred the platform over conventional dealerships in light of

major price differentials. "I've witnessed dealerships tend to be more expensive," he

explained, "being that they have to make a profit and pay salaries. And I've found that

dealers are more inclined to hide problems with the vehicle that could cause major

problems." Exchange on Craigslist, according to him, was less profit-oriented and less

opaque than exchange at a car dealership, where institutional factors complicated

commerce and drove up the price of goods. For another user I interviewed, the exchange

of electronics on Craigslist was far more equitable than exchange at an electronics retail

venue. Video game retailers, the user complained, are willing to repurchase secondhand

consoles and games — but at an offensively low price. They will, for example, sell a new

XBox One for $500, purchase a used one for $80, and then resell the used ones for $200.

In these cases, secondhand objects enter Craigslist circulate through bottlenecks in

commercial retail institutions.

On eBay, secondhand goods enter the market as byproducts of domestic

institutions. In the auction market, electronics, clothing, and sporting goods are major

objects of secondhand exchange. Since we already spoke about electronics, we'll focus on

clothing and sporting goods here. Clothing and sporting goods are widely produced and

potentially longevous: they may be maintained over years through proper care.222

Moreover, clothing and sporting goods are household objects that circulate through

222 Leslie Davis Burns et al., The Business of Fashion: Designing, Manufacturing, and Marketing, 5th ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Richard A. Lipsey, The Sporting Good Industry: History, Practices, and Products (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006).

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domestic institutions, or spaces of human development, such familial households and

other institutions of care. In these domestic spheres, care workers are able to maintain the

longevity of clothing and sporting goods by means of domestic labor — the ongoing

work of washing, drying, folding, sorting, and storing goods. Domestic caretakers, who

are overwhelmingly women, maintain the quality of secondhand objects and thus make

them eligible for resale on internet markets. In this way, secondhand objects on eBay

circulate as derivatives of the domestic care system. The practices of human

development, performed by women and other caretakers, underwrite the afterlife of

consumer objects. Often, this is unintentional: caretakes maintain objects within the

proximate context of domestic institutions, and this long-term care ends up making these

objects eligible for resale.

I interviewed several women who have used eBay to sell clothing and sporting

equipment that their children no longer needed. A California woman began to sell her

daughter's old clothing on the platform in order to clear the house for an upcoming move.

She described the collection as "years of clothes", "nice stuff" that was "basically

collecting dust". After selling "a ton of dresses and shirts", plus "all of the purses" that

she had posted, she took down the remaining advertisements and gave the unsold goods

to charity. Another woman with whom I spoke sold used sporting equipment out of

which her sons had grown: "bats, helmets, cleats, you name it". During our interview, she

reflected on the amount of object turnover within her family. "Everybody needs

something," she stated, referring to her husband and sons, "and then a year later forget

[sic] about it." When a mother of five, who I interviewed, became an empty nester, she

and her husband decided to renovate their basement, which had served as storage space

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for domestic detritus. The pair ended up making "several hundred dollars" by selling a

full pair of old golf clubs, "at least a dozen dresses", and other miscellaneous objects. In

such instances, secondhand objects circulate as byproducts of domestic care systems.

Secondhand objects on internet markets are bound up in institutional dynamics.

Commercial retail institutions try but fail to control the exchange of commodities in their

purview. Furniture outlets, car dealerships, bike stores, and video game retailers seek to

dominate the movement of goods that fall within their respective markets, but their

distribution bottlenecks make them unnattractive commercial venues for many

consumers. By exchanging objects outside of these bottlenecks, Craigslist users avoid the

high prices and slick selling tactics of conventional retail institutions. By contrast,

domestic institutions effectively control the after-life of household goods, even if that

control is unintentional at first. Care work gives secondhand objects a second life,

enabling them move outside of domestic institutions into venues of electronic commerce.

In such cases, merchant labor serves as an extension of domestic labor. Care work not

only makes secondhand objects eligible for resale; but the act of reselling is itself a

means to clean, and thereby maintain, the household. In one fell swoop, domestic care

workers maintain the household and generate revenue for the domestic institution. In both

cases, institutional dynamics figure centrally in the circulation of objects through internet

markets.

Here, role of institutions within electronic commerce stands in contrast to the

cyberlibertarian vision of a self-contained internet platform. It also exceeds the realms of

discourse and infrastructure, which are considered integral factors in commodity

circulation.

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Act Three: Contraband

On Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road, the circulation of contraband follows from

lacunae in state institutions. More than commercial institutions, and far more than

domestic institutions, state institutions vigorously attempt to control the movement of

objects under their jurisidiction. By and large, they succeed in this attempt — enforcing

drug, firearm, and military equipment laws through authoritative state agencies. Yet the

digital exchange of contraband represents a failure by the state to regulate outlawed

objects. Silk Road enjoyed a temporary vacation from institutional control due to the

state's jurisdictional structure, in which only federal agencies have the capacity to execute

technologically sophisticated operations. On Craigslist, the movement of contraband also

follows from the jurisdictional structure of the state, but in a different way: local law

enforcement bodies generally lack the resources necessary to monitor illegal

advertisements and locate offending parties., Contraband on eBay likewise follows from

the jursidictional structure of the state, falling into a middle ground between federal and

local agencies. Loopholes in the state laws also figure into the circulation of contraband

on these platforms. That all three internet markets are also black markets underlines the

relationship between state institutional "failure" and internet market objects: contraband

enters digital circulation in those situated spaces where the state fails to control the

objects in its purview. Let's begin with drugs on Silk Road and Craigslist before turning

to the arms trade on Silk Road, Craigslist, and eBay.

On Silk Road, multiple lacunae in state power made possible the circulation of

drugs on the platform. In a 2013 Senate hearing on Bitcoin, Silk Road, and the dark web,

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federal law enforcement officials explained the problems associated with the enforcement

of cybercrime.223 The hearing sheds light on the institutional gaps that Silk Road

exploited durings it brief tenture.

First and foremost, the circulation of drugs on Silk Road followed from a jurisdictional

gap related to the infrastructure of the dark web. Conventionally, the United States

government, like many European states, divides jurisdiction over the enforcement of drug

laws between multiple agencies at municipal, state, and federal levels.224 However, in the

case of black markets on the dark web, federal agencies — specifically, the Federal

Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — are exclusively equipped to enforce drug

laws, because they possess the resources and expertise necessary to shut down dark web

markets.225 Recall that dark web infrastructure is highly anonymous and that federal

agents could only shut down Silk Road after gaining access to its administrative

homepage via the login credentials on Ulbricht's seized laptop.226 Today, federal agencies

continue to shut down dark web markets, but only from the inside, after infiltrating their

root systems.227 Being the original black market on the dark web, Silk Road enjoyed a

223 "Beyond Silk Road: The Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies," Hearing Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 113th Congress, November 18, 2013. 224 Joost van Slobbe, "The Drug Trade on the Deep Web: A Law Enforcement Perspective," in European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, "The Internet and Drug Markets." 225 "Beyond Silk Road," 11-25. 226 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y., 2014). See the discussion of the Silk Road takedown in Appendix VI. 227 For instance, in 2017, the United States Department of Defense took down several major black markets on the dark web, including AlphaBay, after infilitrating their root systems. According to reports, the DOJ waited several weeks between infriltration and shut-down in order to collect information on users. Martin Kaste, "Justice Department

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relatively long tenure before being taken down, in the wake of a three-year federal

investigation.228 Because only federal agencies were equipped to enforce drug laws on

the platform, and because that enforcement took years to enact, drugs on Silk Road

circulated through a lacuna in state power that was jurisdictional and transitory in nature

— on the one hand, the absence of non-federal agencies who could typically enforce drug

laws, and, on the other hand, the temporal delay in looming federal enforcement.

Silk Road took additional steps to evade state power while conducting black

market exchange on the platform. In a second lacuna, drugs circulated through a digital

cryptocurrency designed to dodge state power. Unlike interpersonal drug exchange, drug

transactions on Silk Road were technical processes with inevitable digital trails. Even as

the black market was briefly immune to state takedown, individual merchants could still

be identified and prosecuted through their financial dealings. Silk Road merchants

accordingly conducted commerce in Bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that supports

verifiable and anonymous transactions without a centralized third party.229 Bitcoin may

be exchanged electronically between parties and without the direct involvement of banks

or states, as the digital "wallets" that hold Bitcoin are currently not under the regulatory

purview of either institution.230 Bitcoin may be sent over the internet with relative ease

Announces Seizure of Dark Web Marketplace", NPR, July 20, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/07/20/538370711/justice-department-announces-seizure-of-dark-web-marketplace. 228 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. Federal agents testified to the length of the investigation during Ubricht's federal trial. 229 "Beyond Silk Road." 230 Of course, the popular image of Bitcoin as a rogue or anti-institutional technology is fundamentally flawed, insofar as financial institutions and elite capitalists control a significant portion of Bitcoin trade. Further, it is likely that the United State Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will classify Bitcoin as a security, making it necessary for Bitcoin holders to claim their coins as assets during tax filings.

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and stored in a digital wallet with relative anonymity, making the currency attractive to

those looking to evade state surveillance online. Beyond the reach of the state and

between the parties involved, Bitcoin allowed Silk Road drugs to be exchanged outside

the purview of state records and state surveillance. Covert delivery practices (discussed at

length in chapter 3) also allowed drugs to be exchanged without detection by the state.

Silk Road drugs were often delivered through the postal system, which, according to

vendors on the discussion board, tended to examine the contents of exchange less often

than private couriers. In order to evade detection by postal authorities, vendors

camouflaged drugs in the mail by padding envelopes, using discreet boxes, and

concealing items inside a variety of containers meant to distract or deceive: tampon

boxes, potato chips, and candy wrappers.231 The relatively small size of controlled

substances made covert shipment a possibility. Here, state postal authorities fail to

control the movement of contraband within their purview.

On Craigslist, drugs circulate through lacunae in state power related to the

jurisdictional structure of law enforcement. Thomas Dart, the former sheriff of Cook

County in Illinois, explained the jurisdictional problem of illegal activity on Craigslist

when he filed an unsuccesful lawsuit against the company for facilitating prostitution.232

His statements in court help us understand the allocation of state resources at the level of

231 See the discussion of postal delivery strategies in chapter 2 and 3. 232 Thomas Dart, Sherriff of Cook County v. craigslist, Inc., 665 F. Supp. 2d 961 (E.D. Ill. 2009). Although the court leaned on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it was in response to this legal case that Craigslist altered, and then shuttered, its Erotic Services section. The problem of digital law enforcement has also been taken up in studies of online sex trafficking. Abby Peter, "Policing the Virtual Red Light District: A Legislative Solution to the Problems of Internet Prostitution and Sex Trafficking," Brooklyn Law Review 77 (2012): 823-859. See also the discussion of Craigslist litigation in chapter 1.

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local law enforcement. Municipal law enforcement agenices typically possess jurisdiction

over local drug exchange.233 However, because these agencies rarely have the resources

to track down internet users, and because federal agencies generally focus on the

takedown of large black markets, drug traffic on Craigslist occurs in a jurisdictional gray

zone — too large of a task for local authorities and too little of a problem for federal

ones.234 That Craigslist is willing to provide law enforcement agencies with whatever

information they require matters little when those agencies lack the resources necessary

to track down actors involved in online contraband exchange. The regulation of

contraband by the state becomes less vigorous on local level, due to the resource

limitations of municipal law enforcement agencies.

Craigslist actors take additional steps to protect themselves from state power.

After all, even though local law enforcement agencies do not meticulously survey

Craigslist, these agencies still operate in the places where Craigslist traders conduct

illegal exchange. Local commerce means cash exchange: the technical trappings of

Bitcoin and Paypal are unnecessary during face-to-face transactions, and cash is the

preferred medium of exchange for criminal actors broadly, because cash is supremely

easy to launder.235 Local commerce also means that temporary mobile phone ("burners")

and peer-to-peer messaging services play roles in the economy of Craigslist contraband

exchange. Trading partners must arrange the details of the exchange and the interpersonal

encounter in real time, and these temporary and encrypted media allow merchants to

evade state power in so doing. Here, the evasion of state power informs the transactional

233 "Beyond Silk Road," 11-25. 234 Thomas Dart, Sherriff of Cook County v. craigslist, Inc, 44-57. 235 "Beyond Silk Road," 16-25

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and communicative dimensions of contraband. Finally, because Craigslist formally

prohibits the exchange of illegal objects on the platform,236 drug vendors on the platform

use obfuscated text, colloquial terms, and linguistic cyphers to evade platform filters.

Coded terms, vague and ever-changing, are able to evade the site's automated protocol,

formalized and static. Craigslist drugs consequently circulate through loopholes in digital

protocols, in addition to gaps in state institutional control.

Lacunae in state power also make possible the digital exchange of weapons on

internet markets. Despite the wide production and the minimal regulation of guns in the

United States,237 the arms trade on Silk Road faced significant regulatory challenge.

Firearms law in the United States requires a federal license to ship firearms across state

lines, one of the few regulations by which gun retailers on the internet must abide.238

Unlike drugs, weapons cannot be hidden in candy wrappers and shipped in secret. Yet a

condition in firearms law permits gun parts or "components" to be shipped without a

license.239 Consequently, Silk Road vendors broke down weapons into their constituent

parts, and shipped each part separately. Buyers were responsible for assembling the

weapon on their own, a task covered in gun tutorials on firearm websites.240 This postal

236 Craigslist, "Prohibited," About, accessed January 22, 2018, https://www.craigslist.org/about/prohibited.html. 237 The Firearms Industry Trade Association, "Firearms and Ammunition Industry Economic Impact 2018," Government Relations, https://www.nssf.org/government-relations/impact. Audrey Carlson and Sahil Chinoy, "How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries," The New York Times, March 2, 2018. 238 Mayors Against Illegal Guns, "Trace the Guns." 239 United States Postal Service, "Mailability", Firearms, Restricted Matter, Hazardous, Restricted, and Perishable Mail, accessed January 20, 2018, https://pe.usps.com/text/ pub52/pub52c4_009. 240 Youtube also featured gun construction videos during Silk Road's tenure, although they began to restrict gun-related content in the 2017 and 2018. Valentina Palladino, "Youtube Expands Firearms Restrictions, More Gun Videos to Be Banned," Ars

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hack is essentially a commercial version of packet switching, the computing process by

which information is broken down into constituent bits for delivery and then reassembled

upon arrival. Where the computational process exploits the small size of bits for speedy

delivery through a digital network, the delivery method exploits the legal status of

weapons parts for permissible delivery through a postal network. Drugs circulated

through this exception in firearms law — a state regulation designed to control the

movement of guns.

Where the arms trade on Silk Road relied on a postal loophole in firearm law, the

arms trade on Craigslist relies on an the interpersonal loophole in firearms law — that

weapons may be exchanged freely between private citizens.241 Firearms on Craigslist

circulate through the regulatory exemptions of interpersonal weapon exchange, an

abeyance in the state enforcement of firearms law. Further, because Craigslist is a local

market that relies on face-to-face encounters, users of the platform are exempt from

postal regulations, both the legal permits of online gun distributors and the obfuscation

strategies of Craigslist merchants. Craigs formally prohibits weapons, just as it prohibits

drugs and other illegal items.242 Indeed, weaponry is the first group of items on the

platform's list of prohibited objects, suggesting that the platform recognizes the existence

of an arms trade on its site. In its Prohibited policy, Craigslist forbids the exchange

"weapons; firearms/guns and components; BB/pellet, stun, and spear guns; etc." and

Technica, March 22, 2018, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/youtube-to-crack-down-harder-on-videos-about-building-buying-firearms. 241 Wintemute, Background Checks for Firearm Transfers. 242 Craigslist, "Prohibited."

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"ammunition, clips, cartridges, reloading materials, gunpowder, fireworks, explosives".243

Yet firearms advertisements appear regularly on the platform, often without textual

obfuscation, in places such as New York, Texas, and Georgia. The explanatory logic of

firearms circulation finds a limit in the platform's black box filter. It is possible that the

filter errs on the side of laissez faire and that some weapon advertisements are indeed

taken down. What is evident, however, is the presence of an arms trade that evades state

and platform regulations alike.

On eBay, weapons circulate through a different lacuna in state power. eBay

mainly features auxiliary protective gear and defense equipment. The items that qualify

as contraband are those that the military produces for internal use only. According to

2008 report by United States Governmental Accountability Office, eBay circulates a

variety of sensitive military equipment: F-14 antennas, biological chemical gear, and

body armor plates, some of which are in demand by enemies of the US.244 This is

equipment that is regulated by the military, but that escapes the military's system of

object control, presumably through theft and mishandling. (However informative, the

GAO survey does not detail the internal military policies surrounding the regulation of

sensitive defense equipment.) Although the report is dated, restricted military equipment

continues to appear on the platform, contrary to eBay's formal ban on illegal objects.245

Following black market logic, military gear is often more valuable than firearms,

precisely because firearms are so widely produced. For instance, a 2017 auction for a

243 Craigslist, "Prohibited." 244 United States Governmental Accountability Office, "Internet Sales." 245 eBay, "Prohibited and Restricted Items," Help, accessed January 16, 2018. https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/prohibited-restricted-items?id=4207.

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Kevlar helmet directly indicates its exclusive use in the military. As on Craigslist, the

platform's black box filter prevents a clear expanation of this state of affairs. It is possible

that the filter is more permissive than restrictive in determining what objects are allowed

to circulate in the auction market. Regardless, these pieces defense equipment circulate

through a breakdown in the state regulation of objects— in particular, the military

regulation of objects.

In all of these cases, the circulation contraband on internet markets follows from a

failure of state institutions to regulate the objects that they outlaw. This failure is the

exception, not the rule, as the state conventionally wields its legal authority to effectively

prevent the circulation of contraband. Platforms likely take down more contraband than

they passively allow to circulate, cooperating with law enforcement authorities when

necessary. Yet state institutions feature jurisdictional structures, resource limitations, and

legal exceptions that make possible the online circulation of contraband. Contrary to the

cyberlibertarian vision of a self-regulating and self-contained internet platform, the

regulatory endeavors of state institutions figure centrally in the digital exchange of

contraband.

Whose Objects?

Cyberlibertarianism casts internet markets as self-regulating and self-contained

spheres of digital activity, discrete zones of electronic commerce that are immune to

regulatory concerns and external interferences. Central to the cyberlibertarian vision of an

internet platform in perpetual equilibrium is the absence of institutions — those bugbears

of libertarianism and cybernetics that are said to undermine the integrity of economic and

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technological systems. Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road variously subscribe to this

cyberlibertarian vision, even as they cooperate with state institutions and operate

according to corporate structures. The dream of fully automated commerce is also a

dream of commerce beyond institutional involvement. Yet state, commercial, and

domestic institutions figure centrally in the circulation of objects on internet markets.

These institutions take steps to control the movement of goods within their purview.

These steps range in character from vigorous to casual, but they make institutions key

players in the regulatory drama of internet markets.

Contraband is the most conspicuous case of institutional and regulatory drama, as

states invest significant resources in the regulation of contraband yet fail to

comprehensively undercut the movement of outlawed goods. In such cases, black market

actors not only exploit the circumstantial absence of institutional control but take

additional steps to evade state detection. The interplay of institutional control, actor

strategy, and market activity in the context of contraband exchange exemplifies the

regulatory drama of internet markets. That contraband circulates across Craigslist, eBay,

and Silk Road alike demonstrates the relationship between electronic commerce and

regulatory exception: objects enter the free digital market in moments when institutional

control falls short, changes orientation, or exceeds expectation. Anomalies in institutional

regulation helps underwrite objects in digital circulation. A strange day for one is a

typical day for the other.

The digital free market shows us how institutions enter into the exchange process

through the provision of market objects. This is important, because internet markets are

designed to make regulations and institutions obsolete. If institutions make oblique

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appearances in the very place where they are supposed to be irrelevant, then it is likely

that electronic commerce will always be connected to institutions in some fashion. The

role of institutions in digital exchange may be obvious in the context of postal delivery

systems, which help transport the objects sold online; but it is less obvious in the context

of object provision, as institutions help furnish the goods that make digital exchange

possible. In addition to discourses and infrastructures, then, institutions can play

important roles in the circulation of commodities on the internet. With material interests

and regulatory powers, institutions are not neutral backdrops but motivated actors in

digital exchange. As we saw in the last two chapters, users and platforms sometimes rely

on institutions to control the commercial process, as when Craigslist merchants meet in

front of local police stations or when eBay tailors its policies to corporate structures. But

this is not all: institutions themselves enter the theater of electronic commerce and exert

regulatory control over the movement of objects. The digital free market also show us

how institutional regulatory control can break down, alter course, or surpass expectation.

On internet markets, institutions can fail to realize their regulatory goals, shift their

regulatory strategies, or perform regulatory functions without prior intention. This helps

us understand how institutions work in the context of electronic commerce — and how

they fail.

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CONCLUSION

BEYOND CYBERLIBERTARIANISM

According to cyberlibertarianism, internet markets should be self-regulating and

self-contained spheres of digital economic activity. Yet exchange platforms are scenes of

regulatory drama, as actors of all stripes — individual, institutional, casual, and dedicated

— take steps to control the commercial process and alleviate concerns of fraudulent

exchange. Automated protocols, designed to replace regulations, end up being the very

means by which economic conflict occurs. Website infrastructure and platform culture,

figured by cyberlibertarianism as neutral backdrops of exchange, end up being vital

resources for actors intent on controlling the commercial process. State, commercial, and

domestic institutions, cast as irrelevant to an autonomous internet by the digital ideology,

end up furnishing many of the objects involved in internet exchange. Far from the

cyberlibertarian vision of digital exchange beyond regulations and institutions, internet

markets are embedded spheres of electronic commerce, which implicate control

mechanisms and external factors in their core operations. My critique of

cyberlibertarianism, rooted in the dynamics of internet markets, has broader

consequences for how we understand the digital ideology, the dynamics of electronic

commerce, and the role of regulations and institutions on the internet.

As venues that actualize cyberlibertarian principles, internet markets are ideal

case studies of the digital ideology. The actualization of cyberlibertarian principles is

important, because advocates of the digital ideology are wont to complain that

regulations prevent the emergence of an internet equilibrium. Karl Polanyi noted this

tendency in his midcentury critique of free market libertarianism, which always insists

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that its theory will be realized, once the next regulation is removed (and the next, and the

next).246 By meeting the laissez faire conditions demanded by cyberlibertarianism,

internet markets are experiments in the digital ideology that decisively disprove its

predictions. They foil the cyberlibertarian excuse that internet regulations are standing in

the way of an autonomous digital sphere. If the predictions of cyberlibertarianism cannot

be realized in the free digital market, then they likely cannot be realized anywhere. This

makes internet markets valuable objects of study: they uniquely actualize the tenets of

cyberlibertarianism and, in so doing, demonstrate significant flaws in the influential

paradigm. Moving forward, they may serve as a counterpoint to the claim that an internet

equilibrium is just one regulatory removal away.

Nearly two decades ago, Lawrence Lessig penned a classic work on internet

regulation. In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig critiqued the idea that

conventional regulations could not touch the internet.247 Several years later, in the preface

to the second edition of Code, Lessig noted that he had originally set out to evaluate the

fashionable notion that "cyberspace was beyond the reach of real-space regulation"248.

Popular ideas about the internet have considerably changed since the original publication

of Code. Today, one popular idea is that regulations ought not touch the internet — an

idea that I characterize as cyberlibertarianism. Central to this ideological imperative is the

rejection of regulations and institutions on the internet. In this line of thought, internet

activity, including commercial activity, is fundamentally cooperative, making regulations

246 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 247 Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Book, 1999/2006). 248 Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, ix.

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effectively unnecessary, and making institutions largely obsolete. Peter Thiel's vision of a

libertarian island nation is a nice material analog to the vision of internet platforms as

self-regulating and self-contained spheres of digital activity.

Still, cyberlibertarianism is changing. For instance, internet platforms have begun

to install increasingly sophisticated systems of content moderation.249 Laissez faire might

be the company line, but the company practice is quite different. This recalls a paradox of

cyberlibertarianism, discussed in the introduction: internet platforms insist on immunity

from state regulations, even as they cooperate with state institutions in various ways. The

state is also whistling a different tune when it comes to platform liability. Recent

legislation introduced an exception to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

by eliminating platform immunity in cases of human trafficking.250 This is the very first

crack in the legal edifice of Section 230, upon which platforms have relied to defend their

autonomy against state interference. Mark Zuckerberg's 2018 Congressional testimony

captures some the changes in cyberlibertarianism as they unfold within states and

platforms. Although the questions posed by members of Congress were far from

sophisticated, the governmental demand that Facebook account for its mismanagement of

data denotes an institutional willingness to, at the very least, have a conversation about

internet regulation, institutional oversight, and platform responsibility. Zuckerberg's

token response to the problem of regulation was not self-regulation by users (as it was in

2010) but self-regulation by automation — specifically, artificial intelligence tools

249 Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 250 H.R. 1865 — 115th Congress: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017. Retrieved from https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1865.

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designed to monitor and analyze content. This answer, which I discuss in more detail

below, suggests an active approach to platform regulation that does not simply rest on the

combined decisions of users. In this respect, cyberlibertarianism is coming to feature

another paradox: platforms insist that they are basically self-regulating, but they install

regulatory controls nonetheless. As with the paradox of the state, platforms want to be

seen as self-regulating and get credit for installing regulations. "We don't need

regulations," the new company line seems to run, "but we're going to install them

anyway."

If cyberlibertarianism overlooks the role of regulations and institutions on the

internet, then actors outside of the technology industry should insist on the reality of

regulations and institutions in order to create a fair and cooperative internet. Part of the

critical intellectual tradition consists of identifying the ideological assumptions that

structure social life. Cyberlibertarianism is an ideology that structures social life in its

technological aspect. It is crucially important that we understand cyberlibertarianism —

not only because technology companies have major public platforms upon which to

espouse their views and defend their practices, but also because other forms of thought

share assumptions with cyberlibertarianism. My argument in this project identifies the

subtle parallels between cyberlibertarianism and certain scholarly formulations. In

pointing out these parallels, I do not mean to suggest that these formulations of thought

should be dismissed as unwitting puppets of the digital ideology. Rather, I mean to

demonstrate that cyberlibertarianism is far from a pet theory of motivated technology

actors. It cannot be reduced to an ideological pawn that serves the economic interests of

Silicon Valley (although it certainly does serve those interests). Cyberlibertarianism

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should instead be understood as a compelling way of thinking about technology and

society, which variously influences internet policy, public debate, and scholarly research.

In the context of internet markets, cyberlibertarianism shares key assumptions

with electronic reputation studies, free labor theory, and accounts of digital economy,

digital labor, and digital commodities. Cyberlibertarianism and electronic reputation

studies converge on a view of internet exchange, including economic exchange, as

fundamentally cooperative. Here, in the absence of conflict, regulations and institutions

have little importance as mechanisms of cooperation that are grounded in productive

authority. These paradigms overlook the important difference between regulations, which

can be enforced by jurisdictional institutions, and protocols, which can only be embedded

into computational systems. Code, as Lessig had it, is indeed a kind of law — but a law

without a regulatory institution to enforce its conditions. In Kojin Karatani’s political

terms, code is law in the “nation” sense of guiding behavior but not in the “state” sense of

enforcing behavioral standards. In overlooking this distinction, cyberlibertarianism and

electronic reputation studies are unable to account for the manipulation of platform

protocols, whereby actors take advantage of institutional absence to avoid regulatory

consequence. In particular, the idea that rating systems can replace status codes misses

the regulatory enforcement that face-to-face communities are able to enact. Recognizing

the difference between protocols and regulations can set the groundwork for platforms

regulations that are actually effective and that don't rely on a vision of fully automated

commerce.

Meanwhile, in its focus on monetization, free labor theory ultimately forwards an

economic functionalism, in which all internet activity contributes to the online production

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of capital. Tiziana Terranova frames internet platforms as economic whirlpools that drag

all activity into their monetizing currents. Despite its roots in the critical tradition, this

framework is not so different from the cyberlibertarian vision of internet markets as self-

contained economies. The upshot of both paradigms is that economic forces are

fundamental and non-economic forces are marginal. Yet internet markets demonstrate the

importance of non-economic forces in the operations of digital exchange. The claim that

economies are embedded is far from original, but, in the context of the internet economy,

the claim needs to be asserted as a counter to an economic functionalism that privileges

the movement of capital as proper to internet platforms. Here, economic functionalism

neglects the role of regulations and institutions online, unless they play conspicuous parts

in digital monetization.

The conceptual focus on resource allocation continues in accounts of digital

economy and digital labor. These accounts generally sideline infrastructures, cultures,

and institutions in their emphasis on the location and provision of economic resources

online. As functions of institutions, regulations play even less of a role in many of these

accounts. Such accounts are willing to recognize the role of non-economic factors, but as

conditions that set the scene rather than as elements that drive the narrative — as prelude,

not as plot. Wikimomics makes no mention of regulatory concerns over data brokerage,

and The Rise of the Network Society assumes that immaterial and material objects will

float through global networks without regulatory stopgaps.251 Accounts of digital labor

fare better in this evaluation. Lily Irani and Sarah Roberts consider the infrastructure and

251 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006). Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken: Wiley & Blackwell, 2000).

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the culture of technology work, but they mainly focus on the economic value generated in

these outsourced spheres.252 Although many of these writers would certainly recognize

the embedded nature of the digital economy and digital labor, this recognition does not

necessarily play out in their analyses. The conceptual focus on economic resource

distribution can overlook the ways that non-economic factors enter into that distribution.

In the context of the internet, scholars should follow the money — but keep going once

they find it.

The discursive tradition and the infrastructural traditions of commodity analysis

are more willing to consider the role of non-economic factors in the circulation of

consumer objects. Still, these traditions tend to treat commodities as symbolic objects or

systemic objects, rather than as institutional objects. When institutions do enter the

picture, they are sites rather than agents: commercial institutions produce objects, and

domestic institutions consume them. This brings us back to the lacuna of exchange,

discussed in the introduction: the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption are

well covered in the scholarship, but the sphere of circulation is less comprehensively

studied. Institutions operate differently in the context of circulation, as they take on the

messy task of controlling the movement of objects. State institutions, in particular, face a

staggeringly complex task in the control of contraband circulation. As black markets,

exchange platforms underline the relevance of state institutions to the study of

commodities. More broadly, insofar as institutions provide many of the objects that

252 Sarah T. Roberts, "Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work," in Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, eds. Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes. (New York: Peter Lang, 2016): 147-160. Lilly Irani, "The Cultural Work of Microwork,” New Media & Society 15, no. 5 (2015): 720-739, doi: 10.1177/1461444813511926.

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circulate in the free digital market, exchange platforms encourage us to think about

commodities as symbolic, infrastructural, and institutional objects. To overlook the role

of institutions in the circulation of commodities on the internet is to risk a

cyberlibertarian formulation, in which exchange platforms play host to the movement of

goods beyond the banal realities of institutions.

Cyberlibertarianism, then, is not a pipe dream of technologists but an appealing

framework for understanding technology and society. Those who are interested in an

equitable internet must understand the appeal of cyberlibertarianism in order undermine

its influence. The appeal of cyberlibertarianism is partially rooted in its relationship to

other ideologies and its simplicity as a conceptual framework. First and foremost, the

digital ideology draws on the celebration of the market as an engine of prosperity; this

celebration continues today, even after the decline of free market fundamentalism in the

Hayekian vein.253 It is not a far leap from a self-regulating market to a self-regulating

internet to a self-regulating internet platform. The celebration of the market, in turn,

draws on the classical liberal formulation of negative liberty, which defines freedom as

the absence of authority, including institutional authority. Here, freedom and control are

mutually exclusive forces that are in perpetual competition with one another.

Cyberlibertarianism follows in the footsteps of market ideology and negative liberty by

making an absolute distinction between internet freedom and institutional control. This

way of thinking about freedom and control is seductively simple: it creates a storybook

narrative of good actors and bad actors, and it pins all problems of technology and society

on the overbearing control tendencies of the bad actors.

253 Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

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Individuals invested in a cooperative internet must understand the appeal of

cyberlibertarianism in order to create new frameworks that may counter its influence. We

need to think of compelling ways to frame technology and society that demand

accountability from actors in industry and in government. We need to be critical of state

power without framing institutions as fundamentally burdensome; and we need to

forward a view of positive liberty online, according to which institutional involvement

underwrites individual freedom on the internet. We need to be open to regulations

without framing them as panaceas to structural problems, which would only contribute to

the regulatory capture being executed by technology companies today. It is certainly

easier to create a seductive theory that is simple in nature, but the situation is too nuanced

and the stakes are too high for watered-down formulations. If we don't influence the

conversation around technology and society, then powerful actors with deep pockets and

compelling ideologies will.

One place to enter the conversation is contemporary discussions surrounding

automation. Part of what distinguishes internet markets from conventional markets is

their attempt to fully automate exchange and thereby facilitate commerce without

regulations and institutions. Blockchain advocates understand automation as a means to

outmode regulations and institutions in the context of electronic commerce. The

blockchain is a public ledger that records every cryptocurrency transaction and is,

undoubtedly, an important technological development.254 However, for many blockchain

advocates, the public ledger is a viable replacement for regulations and institutions,

254 Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” published online 2008, https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper.

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because the technology makes all transactions open and transparent.255 In this line of

thought, contracts are unnecessary when the blockchain is recording all transactions, and

courts are obsolete when the blockchain serves as a public record of exchange. For

advocates of the technology, the blockchain protocol promises to automate trade and

transcend the banalities of contract and court. The dream of fully automated commerce

lives on. In contrast to this dream, we should underline the shortcomings of automation

and highlight the differences between protocols and regulations. We should also consider

the role of the state in electronic commerce without subscribing to a blanket opposition to

institutional involvement.

In his 2018 Congressional hearing, Mark Zuckerberg positioned automation as a

clean technological solution to complex structural problems related to content

moderation. The idea that automation will comprehensively solve platform dysfunction

relies on a cyberlibertarian vision of a digital system in perpetual equilibrium. We should

counter this vision by highlighting the problems of internet conflict — not only

harassment and hate speech, but also deception and fraud, which treat automated

protocols as raw materials rather than definitive barriers. Paradoxically, by affirming the

reality of conflict on the internet, we can make inroads to a more cooperative web. In this

respect, contemporary studies of platform cooperativism could benefit from a broad

recognition of internet conflict, which will continue to be a problem on democratically

owned platforms.256 Internet conflict can become a point of departure for broader

255 David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 256 Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, eds., Ours to Hack and to Own (New York: OR Books, 2017).

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conversations surrounding platform governance, understood as regulations that are

institutionalized on the level of platforms.

Internet markets showcase the flaws of cyberlibertarianism, and they help us

understand the root structure of the digital ideology — its core assumptions, its idealized

visions, and its seductive qualities. Cyberlibertarianism is a sleek way of thinking about

the relationship between technology and society in an increasingly complex world:

innovation and freedom are good, institutions and regulations are bad, and the internet, to

revise Stewart Brand's formulation, wants to be free. Internet markets offer an alternative

account of freedom and control in the context of electronic commerce, and they help us

reframe the relationship between technology and society without the biases and blind

spots of cyberlibertarianism. The past decade witnessed considerable changes in

conversations surrounding technology, and the next decade will likely follow suit. As

cyberlibertarianism changes form, there is an opportunity to shift the dialogue in a

nuanced and cooperative direction. The state and the public are no longer willing to sit

back and let technology companies sidestep issues of accountability. At this critical

juncture, free digital markets help us understand the stakes of an unregulated internet, and

they furnish evidence that allows us to reframe conversations surrounding technology. A

new digital framework should ask what makes electronic commerce equitable or unfair,

what makes platforms functional or dysfunctional, what makes the internet cooperative or

conflictual, and what makes technological life liveable or, all to often, unliveable.

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APPENDICES

Appendix I

Discussion Boards

Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road each feature an internal discussion board on their

respective web domains, as well as auxiliary discussion boards on the Reddit web

domain. They each feature hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of conversational

threads, and they reach back to the origins of the markets themselves, or to the origins of

Reddit in the 2005. In these discussion boards, merchants have carte blanche freedom to

discuss anything that they please, from commerce and technology to culture and politics,

as well as critiques and complaints about the hosting platform. Understandably, most

discussion board conversation revolves around commerce, that being, after all, the topic

that unifies these internet merchant. Discussion boards are attractive research sources,

because they feature organic and topical conversations among many users, including

experienced users, over an extended period of time.

As organic discursive phenomena, discussion board conversations constitute

naturally occurring talk, understood as "informal conversation which would have

occurred even if it was not being observed or recorded, and which [is] unaffected by the

presence of the observer and/or the recording equipment"257. Naturally occurring talk

offers a window into the experiences, practices, and attitudes of interlocuters, without the

257 Stephanie Taylor, "Locating and Conducting Discourse Analytic Research,” in Discourse as Data, ed. Margaret Wetherell (London: Sage, 2001): 5-48. 27.

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mediation of the researcher and concomitant liabilities of her observing presence.

Discussion board conversation unfolds without the onus of being an object of

observation. Naturally occurring talk should not be cast as purer than other sources of

data that include observation,258 but it is useful for capturing extemporaneous interactions

between speakers.

From a methodological perspective, there are important limitations and drawbacks

to discussion board conversations. As digital discursive phenomena, discussion board

conversations do not include "the details of talk"259, such as pauses and non-verbal

expressions, which can offer insight into user attitudes. In addition to being uniquely

polished, discussion board conversations are unevenly distributed: not all users

participate in discussion board conversations, and, among those who do participate, some

contribute more than others. Further, as crowd-sourcing venues, discussion boards feature

what might be called the problem of experiential extremes. In a typical case of a

discussion board thread, a very inexperienced user asks a question, to which a very

experienced user offers an answer. Here, middle-ground perspectives are absent, and

discussion board analysis risks an over-emphasis on user extremes (naiveté and

expertise). Further, as crowd-sourcing mechanisms, discussion board conversations are

often oriented around problems. For instance, users may come to discussion boards after

they have been defrauded, in order to to vent, complain, or fix their commercial mistakes.

258 Christine Griffin, "Being Dead and Being There: Research Interviews, Sharing Hand Cream and the Preference for Analyzing 'Naturally Occurring Data',” Discourse Studies 9, no. 2 (2007): 246-269. doi: 0.1177/1461445607075340. 259 Kathryn Roulston, "Issues Involved in Methodological Analyses of Research Interviews,” Qualitaitve Research Journal 16, no. 1 (2016): 68-79, 73, doi: 10.1108/QRJ-02-2015-0015

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Here, successful exchange is absent, and discussion board analysis risks an over-

emphasis on market breakdown. The problems of experiential extremes and market

breakdowns informed my processes of data collection, as discussed below. Despite these

problems, discussion boards are valuable sources of internet research, and there are many

precedents for analyzing user conversations in order to understand platforms.260

In order to identify trends in user activity on internet markets, I ran a total of

eighteen (18) web crawls — three on each of the six discussion boards. These crawls

were custom-built scripts in Python and Java, and they utilized a series of computational

tools to pull data out of HTML files and render them in manageable parse trees. These

tools included Celery, an asynchronous task queue that executes multiple jobs at once;

RabbitMQ, a messaging agent that manages these tasks; and Docker, to help coordinate

these programs. Given that thread conversations on discussion boards follow a comment-

response cycle, I designed the scripts to render whole threads rather than singular posts,

and this allowed me to capture the ebb and flow of naturally occurring web discourse.261

In effect, the scripts crawled (went through page by page) the discussion boards and

rendered (put into a separate document) all of the conversations that included select

keywords. When crawling the internal discussion boards of Craigslist and eBay, I

incorporated temporal boundaries and only rendered threads composed after 2010,

260 Nancy Baym "From Practice to Culture on Usenet,” in The Cultures of Computing, ed. Susan Leigh Star (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 29-53. Gary Burnett and Laurie Bonnici, "Beyond the FAQ: Explicit and Implicit Norms in Usenet Newsgroups,” Library & Information Science Research, 25 (2003): 333-351. Andrea Forte et al. "Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance,” Journal of Management Information Systems, 26 (2009): 49-72, doi: 10.2753/MIS0742-12222602013. 261 Norman K. Denzin, "Cybertalk and the Method of Instances,” in Doing Internet Research, ed. Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999).

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around the time that Craigslist and eBay solidified their internet presence, as discussed in

the case studies section. Temporal boundaries helped limit the number of threads

rendered from these expansive and longevous discussion boards, which began in the

1990s.

I ran these scripts in groups of six at three different intervals. Let's go through my

logic for each script, foregrounding methodological processes in the spirit of Cho and

Trent, before discussing data analysis and interpretation. I used an iterative criterion

sample to guide my data collection during the web crawls. 262 That is, I sampled

discussion board data based on a criterion (the inclusion of certain keywords) and ran

multiple iterations of web crawls based on the findings of the preceding crawl(s).

Collecting data in waves helped "clarify the main patterns, see contrasts, identify

exceptions or discrepant instances, and uncover negative instances — where the pattern

does not hold"263. The criterion was theoretically driven: I began with general concerns,

and then developed orienting concepts as I went along.264 This process ran as follows.

Motivated by the relative absence of research on internet fraud,265 I began with a

series of keywords related to topic: fraud, scam, con, trick, and their semantic variations.

In this first wave, I ran web crawls with fraud-related keywords on each of the six

262 Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994). 263 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, 29. 264 Glaser and Strauss refer to this latter process as "theoretical sampling". Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1967). 265 The handful of studies of internet fraud come from computer science and law. Youngsam Park et al., "Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams,” in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, eds. Jen Grossklags and Bart Preneel (Berlin: Springer, 2016): 3-21. Calkins, "My Reputation Always Had More Fun Than Me".

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discussion boards under study: the internal discussion boards and the Reddit boards of

Craigslist, eBay, and Silk Road. It should be noted that the Silk Road discussion board

that I crawled was an archived version of the original site,266 and, while the subreddit is

technically active, all of the posts from the Silk Road era were archived by Reddit. In

analyzing and interpreting these fraud-related threads, I noticed that users developed

commercial practices related to fraud evasion and market success. This lead to my second

set of crawls, which rendered threads with the following keywords: trust, honest, fair,

cooperative, good, best, and their semantic variations. This second round helped counter

the problem of market breakdown on discussion boards, or their tendency to foreground

failure and malfunction. In analyzing and interpreting these cooperation-related thread, I

found that users had different opinions on the matter, depending on their position as

buyer or seller. This lead to my third round of crawls, which rendered threads with the

following keywords: seller, vendor, sales, work, labor, business, and their semantic

variations. Each of these web crawls rendered between two hundred and three thousand

threads related to the topical keywords.

After developing a corpus of posts, I pattern-coded the parsed data with themes

that emerged progressively during the initial review.267 The data was rendered in a

Microsoft Word document, and I included pattern codes in the top left hand of the

document. (See coding protocol below.) I developed the pattern code in an iterative

fashion, moving between the collected data and my interests in electronic commerce.

This lead to the identification of typical case samples, which exemplified user activity in

266 Gwern Branwen et al., Dark Net Market Archives, 2011-2015, (July 2015), https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives 267 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis.

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the context of fraud, cooperation, or labor.268 I concluded the pattern-coding when I

reached a saturation point, having had repeated (and decreasingly valuable) encounters

with the same set of accounts of user activity.269 Each waves of crawls generated

evidence that exceeded the concerns of its original criteria. In analyzing fraud, I came

across patterns of user customs and collective intelligence; in analyzing customs and

intelligence, I came across patterns related to labor and sales; in analyzing labor and

sales, I came full circle to patterns about fraud and customs. Through them all, I came

across patterns about systems and objects, those mute shadows of user activity.

Following collection, I employed a critical, interpretive approach to these case

samples. Drawing on textual analysis, I sought to identify patterns in user activity,

understood as a triplex of user experience, user practice, and user attitude.270 These

patterns were often explicit, as when users simply recounted what they did, how they did

it, and what they thought about it. Sometimes, these patterns were implicit, as when user

statements evinced deeper assumptions about commerce or technology. In those cases, I

followed Stuart Hall in considering the ideological "deep-structure" of discussion board

statements — their operative assumptions, embedded in the social and institutional

contexts of their utterance.271 Like critical discourse analysis, this type of analysis

respects the veracity of actors while remaining remaining attentive to their underlying

social position and material interests.272 Unlike critical discourse analysis, it does not rely

268 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 269 Glaser and Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory. 270 Elfriede Fürsich, "In Defense of Textual Analysis: Restoring a Challenged Method for Journalism and Media Studies,” Journalism Studies 10, no. 2 (2009): 238-252, 10.1080/14616700802374050. 271 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2013). 272 David R. Howarth, Discourse (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2010).

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on a formalized semantic code to unveil latent meaning; rather, it uses humanistic

interpretive methods to navigate the explicit and the implicit dimensions of a text.273

The question of ethics accompanied the collection of discussion board data. Users

were not entirely anonymous, because their statements were connected with their

profiles, and their profiles were connected to an active email. That said, users were

relatively anonymous, given the distance between identity and avatar.274 Craigslist, eBay,

and Reddit users posted in a public forum, "open and available to anyone with an internet

connection"275, with the knowledge that it would be read by others, although not

necessarily analyzed by others. Silk Road users posted in a semi-public forum, "available

to most people"276 with the technical know-how to navigate to the dark web. That data is

public or semi-public does not mean researchers have a priori permission to use the data

in their work.277 Privacy is a matter of "expectations and consensus"278, and internet

research needs to be attuned to the propriety of information flows.279 In the case of the

discussion boards, there was an evident public or semi-public quality, as well as a

relatively high degree of anonymity — either by virtue of the avatar/identity distance, or

273 Fürsich, "In Defense of Textual Analysis." 274 Bryan H. Choi, "The Anonymous Internet,” Maryland Law Review 72 (2013): 501-570. 275 Malin Sveninsson Elm, "How Do Various Notions of Privacy Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research?" in Internet Inquiry, eds. Annette Markham and Nancy Baym (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009), 75. 276 Elm, "How Do Various Notions of Privacy Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research?” 75. 277 Annette Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan, "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0),” (August 2012), http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf. 278 Annette Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan, "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research,” 7. Elm, "How Do Various Notions of Privacy Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research?" 279 Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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by virtue of anonymizing dark web protocols. Still, in order to protect user expectations

of privacy, and to ensure reasonable distance between individual, avatar, and research

data, I followed others in internet studies and refrained from citing individual discussion

board numbers, as these would shorten the figurative distance between individual and

research data.280

The nature of the discussion differed between venues and platforms. Craigslist

and eBay users discussed a set of commercial concerns that were not particularly

sensitive, given the general social acceptability of internet exchange.281 Silk Road users

discussed a set of commercial concerns that were particularly sensitive, given the illegal

nature of contraband exchange. I found that two factors mitigated this ethical issue. First,

users who posted on the Silk Road discussion board could only do so through a Silk Road

account, which required a dark web address for registration; this added a level of

anonymity to posts. Users who posted on the Silk Road subreddit did not have this

anonymous protection, but they posted on a public forum with less expectations of

privacy. Second, the Silk Road discussion board is an inactive website, making it even

more difficult to trace the connection between an avatar relic and an anonymized user.

On both the internal discussion board and the Silk Road subreddit, all users were a priori

former users. Like public circulation, temporal distance does not give researchers

280 Barbara Sharf, "Beyond Netiquette: The Ethics of Doing Naturalistic Research on the Internet," in Doing Internet Research, ed. Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999): 243-256. Chelsea Reynolds, "'I Am Super Straight and I Prefer You Be Too:' Constructions of Heterosexual Masculinity in Online Personal Ads for 'Straight' Men Seeking Sex with Men," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 39 (2015): 213-231, doi: 10.1177/0196859915575736. Baym, "From Practice to Culture on Usenet." 281 Annette Markham, "Ethical Concerns in Internet Research" in The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, ed. James Wright (Philadelphia: Elsivier Press, 2015): 340-377.

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permission to use data sets, but it does lessen the stakes of admitted illegal activity.282

Between the expectations of privacy, the anonymizing technologies, and the archived

nature of the websites, I determined that discussion board conversations related to Silk

Road could be ethically collected. More broadly, given the proper storage and

management of the data, I found that discussion board conversations qualified as ethical

sources of research.

Crawl Details

Craigslist Forum

Website https://forums.craigslist.org

Technical Elements Python (Celery, RabbitMQ, Docker)

Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 905

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 488

282 Emma Wincup, Criminological Research: Understanding Qualitative Methods (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2017).

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Seller, vendor, work October 2017 654

Craigslist Reddit

Website https://www.reddit.com/r/craigslist

Technical Elements Python (Celery, RabbitMQ)

Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 248

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 112

Seller, vendor, work October 2017 186

eBay Discussion Board

Website https://community.ebay.com/t5/Discussion-Boards/ct-

p/12001

Technical Elements Java (Celery, RabbitMQ, Docker)

Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 1022

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 356

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Seller, vendor, work October 2017 768

eBay Reddit

Website https://www.reddit.com/r/Ebay

Technical Elements Python (Celery, RabbitMQ)

Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 296

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 183

Seller, vendor, work October 2017 205

Silk Road Forum

Website (original) http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion

Website (archived) https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives

Technical Elements Python (Celery, RabbitMQ, Docker)

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Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 176

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 97

Seller, vendor, work October 2017 112

Silk Road Reddit

Website (presently) https://www.reddit.com/r/deepweb

Website (formerly) http:www.reddit.com/r/silkroad

Technical Elements Python (Celery, RabbitMQ)

Keywords Dates Renders

Fraud, scam, trick July 2017 84

Best, good deal, fair August 2017 68

Seller, vendor, work October 2017 47

Coding Protocol

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1. Establish that the post concerns the keyword topic: fraud, cooperation, selling, objects.

2. Mark the post as relating to one of the keywords.

3. Identify patterns within the marked posts to develop subcategories.

4. Mark the keyword-marked post as relating to one of the subcategories.

5. Stop when the subcategorized posts stop exhibiting diversity.

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Appendix II

Interviews

Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with internet merchants constitute the

second major source of research data. I followed IRB protocol at each stage of interview

research, from contacting participants to storing data, and I received IRB approval from

the University of Pennsylvania.283 Where the discussion boards offered a breadth of data

related to user activity, the interviews offered a depth of data related to user activity. This

allowed me to hone in on the experiences, practices, and attitudes of individual users. On

the one hand, these interviews had an emic dimension, being concerned with platform

activity from the first-person perspective of individual users, each with their own

idiosyncratic circumstances, practices, and viewpoints.284 In this capacity, the interviews

gave me insight into the life-world of users and permitted me to "explore the meaning(s)

participants give to ideas and terms"285. This was helpful, for example, in understanding

how users thought about fraud. User perception plays a role in platform activity, blurring

the boundaries between the internal world of users and the external world of platforms.286

On the other hand, these interviews occurred within the broader etic orientation of the

research study, concerned with platform trends more than user perception. In this

283 "Online Interviews with Craigslist and eBay Users,” approved by the Institutional Review Board, University of Pennsylvania. 284 Cho and Trent, "Validity in Qualitative Research Revisited.” 285 Michelle Kazmer and Bo Xie, "Qualitative Interviewing in Internet Studies,” Information, Communication, & Society, 11, no. 2 (March 2008): 257-278, doi: 10.1080/13691180801946333. 286 Griffin, "Being Dead and Being There: Research Interviews, Sharing Hand Cream and the Preference for Analyzing 'Naturally Occurring Data,'"

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capacity, the interviews were valuable as triangulation mechanisms, as users elaborated

on platform trends identified in other sources.287 Conducting semi-structured interviews

over a seven-month period meant speaking to users about particular phenomena as

patterns emerged in the research. Still, my concern in those cases was with depth of data:

had users encountered this phenomenon, and, if so, what did they think about it?

Participant responses lead me in unexpected directions: some patterns appeared

significant but were not confirmed by users; and other patterns appeared insignificant but

turned out to be major concerns for users. Here, triangulation supported, but did not

conclusively guarantee, the identification of trends, whether expected or unexpected.

I selected interview participants first through a theoretical sample and then

through a sequentially-driven conceptual sample.288 In the theoretical sample, I sought

out experienced users of internet markets, understood as users who had been on Craigslist

or eBay for over seven years. These participants were "encultured informants"289 who had

command over platform activity and "access to information"290 derived from their time

on the site. In order to locate experienced users, I posted a call for interview participants

on four discussion boards: the internal discussion boards and the subreddits of Craigslist

and eBay. From this round of posting, I found thirteen users (seven from Craigslist and

six from eBay) who fit my criteria, and I conducted interviews with them over the course

of four months. Reddit was my most effective recruitment venue, as nine of the thirteen

287 Atkinson and Coffey. "Revisiting the Relationship Between Participant Observation and Interviewing." 288 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 289 James Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Boston: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979). 290 Carol Warren, "Qualitative Intervewing," in Handbook of Interview Research, ed. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001): 83-100.

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users contacted me through my advertisement on the site. These participants ranged in

age from 20s to 60s, and nine of the thirteen participants were men. In order to enhance

the credibility of my findings, I sought interview participants who would "reflect a

variety of perspectives"291. While the age range of the first sample was relatively varied,

the gender composition was not. Both men and experienced users were over-represented

in the sample, and this informed the next stage of recruitment. I returned to the discussion

boards and, through another set of advertisements, took a conceptually-driven sequential

sampling of women users and inexperienced users.292 In other words, my "initial choice

of informants lead [me] to similar and different ones"293 as points of comparison and

contrast. From this round of posting, I found eight users (four from Craigslist and four

from eBay). Five of them were experienced women users, two of them were

inexperienced men users, and one of them was an inexperienced woman user. These

interview took place over the course of two months. My last round of interviews occurred

over a month and proceeded according to a different conceptual frame — not the

characteristics of users but of objects. I identified typical advertisements for secondhand

and antique goods on eBay and Craigslist, and I contacted the users who posted those

objects for sale. Among those who agreed to be interviewed, two were men, and four

were women. These participants, ranging from expert dealers to casual resellers,

contributed to the experiential and gendered variety of the sample. I concluded the

291 Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012). 292 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. 293 Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, 27.

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interviews when they reached a saturation point and stopped exhibiting significant

diversity.

Following recruitment, I conducted hour-long, semi-structured interviews with

participants in order to understand user experiences, practices, and attitudes. These were

text-only internet interviews that occurred in private chat rooms over Cyph, a peer-to-

peer online messaging system.294 I followed IRB protocol in protecting the confidentiality

and privacy of the interview data during each stage of the research process.295 As internet

interviews, they featured a degree of "contextual naturalness"296, understood as a sense of

conversational ease, arising from the familiar circumstance of a computer terminal, as

opposed to a face-to-face interview. This allowed participants to "use language the way

they do in most of their everyday interactions"297. However, as textual interviews, they

lacked the material richness of face-to-face interviews, being without facial expression

and body language, as well as "details of talk"298 — silences, verbal pauses, and self-

corrections. These non-verbal communication practices, valuable to the interview

researcher, were not available during my text-based, internet interviews.

In creating an interview template, I followed Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin in

thinking of interviews as "structured conversations"299 designed to cover research

problems, which the interviewer develops beforehand, and to explore organic themes,

which arise during the course of the interview. I also followed Rubin and Rubin in

294 "About Cyph,” Cyph, retrieved July 22, 2017, https://www.cyph.com/about. 295 "Online Interviews with Craigslist and eBay Users,” approved by the Institutional Review Board, University of Pennsylvania. 296 Kazmer and Xie, "Qualitative Interviewing in Internet Studies,” 259. 297 Kazmer and Xie, "Qualitative Interviewing in Internet Studies,” 259. 298 Roulson, "Issues Involved in Methodological Analyses of Research Interviews,” 73. 299 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 129.

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structuring the interview into main questions, follow-up questions, and probes. These

question forms are designed to occasion "depth and detail, vivid and nuanced answers,

rich with thematic detail"300. Here, interview participants are understood as

"conversational partners"301, both information sources and meaning makers, and the

importance of follow-up questions and probes reflect this constructionist sensibility.302

First, I developed twelve main questions related to my research problems, such as fraud,

customs, and labor. These were general questions about user activity. How long have you

been using this platform? Are you more of a buyer or seller? What do you buy or sell on

the platform? Have you ever been scammed? Some of these were questions about user

opinions. Does selling on the platform feel like work? What do you think about platform

policies? Do you ever feel unsafe during meet-ups? I also included a few droll questions

that were relevant to my research questions but that also introduced some levity into the

(relatively intensive) interview. What was the weirdest thing you have ever seen on the

platform? Do you have a favorite memory associated with the site? Second, during the

interviews, I asked follow-up questions in response to participant statements. These

questions were formulated to occasion rich and nuanced explanations of user activity.

Detail and description were central guiding principles, as I focused on specific events and

objects. How did you come upon that rare antique? What happened the time you were

defrauded? Why did you post that item for sale online in the first place? How did you feel

about that? Third, as corollaries to the follow-up questions, I asked probes in order to

elicit clarity and deepen user responses. What do you mean by that term? Could you give

300 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 129. 301 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 79. 302 Warren, "Qualitative Intervewing.”

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me an example of that? In preparing and conducting the interview, I worked to be

reflexive about my position as a researcher. I understand reflexivity as a process of self-

questioning in which the researcher remains "conscious of their cultural, linguistic,

political, and ideological origins and those they are studying"303. Aware of my

background in the university304, I used conversational language and steered clear of social

science categories305, asking low-stakes and open-ended questions in everyday terms.306

In analyzing the interviews, I pattern-coded the data with themes that emerged

progressively during review. The interviews were rendered in PDF documents, and I

included pattern codes in mark-ups to the documents. Some of themes overlapped with

patterns in other sources of evidence, and some of them were standalone themes unique

to the interviews. On the one hand, I treated the interviews as autonomous texts with their

own themes and patterns. I sought to identifying common experiences, practices, and

attitudes, while respecting the particularity of each user's experience. On the other hand, I

positioned the interviews alongside other sources of evidence. Consequently, during the

pattern-coding of the interviews, I identified patterns internal to the interviews, as well as

themes that cross-referenced with other sources of evidence.

303 Cumming-Potvin, "'New Basics' and Literacies: Deepening Reflexivity in Qualitative Research." Qualitative Research Journal 13, no. 2 (2013): 214-230, doi 10.1108/QRJ-04-2013-0024. 304 Rubin and Rubin argue that being associated with the university "has plusses and minuses" — one is allowed to ask questions but also seen as judgmental. Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing, 85. 305 Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, "Eight Challenges for Interview Researchers,” in The Sage Handbook of Interview Research, eds. Jaber Gubrium et al. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2014): 555-570. 306 Cumming-Potvin, "'New Basics' and Literacies: Deepening Reflexivity in Qualitative Research."

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Following collection, I employed a critical, interpretive approach to the interview

data. As in the interpretation of discussion board conversations, I drew on textual analysis

in identifying patterns in user experience, user practice, and user attitude. These patterns

were both explicit and implicit, sometimes at the same time — as when users recounted

experiences (explicit) but did so in a way that belied deeper (implicit) assumptions about

that experience. In analyzing the implicit dimension of interview statements, I continued

to follow Stuart Hall in considering their ideological "deep-structure", or their covert

conceptual underpinning.307 As in critical discourse analysis, I respected the veracity of

actors while remaining remaining attentive to their underlying social position and

material interests.308 Still, I did not employ the semantic tools of critical discourse

analysis, preferring the tools of humanistic interpretation to navigate the manifest and

latent dimensions of interview statements.309 The specificity of interviews as a research

source also informed my interpretation of the data — and distinguished it from my

approach to the discussion board. Where discussion board conversations offered a

breadth of data and allowed for the interpretation of user activity within a far-reaching,

group context; interviews offered a depth of data and allowed for the interpretation of

user activity within a well-rounded, individual context. Unlike the discussion board,

interviews wove together the three dimensions of user activity — experience, practice,

and attitude — as users painted inclusive portraits of their platform engagement.

Comparatively, discussion board statements were fragmented: users related experiences,

practices, and attitude that fit the conversational circumstances, often without context.

307 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. 308 Howarth, Discourse. 309 Fürsich, "In Defense of Textual Analysis."

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For example, where a discussion board participant might mention a strategy for selling

antiques in response to a question about sales, an interview participant could explain that

their selling strategies are derived from their experiences of purveying antiques and their

opinions about digital antique culture. The holism of the interview made for rich

interpretation, in which the explicit and the implicit were interwoven, and the three

dimensions of user experience were linked in single cases.

In reporting the interview, I followed Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn in

making transparent the conditions of the interview, including the active role of the

interviewer.310 This meant, for example, mentioning when a statement was a response to

a specific question asked by me. I aimed to balance a commitment to transparency, on the

one hand, with a sense of flow in the presentation of evidence. Unlike other studies

involving research interviews, I did not reproduce the question and answer format of the

exchange. This was because my interpretation did not occasion a semantic analysis and a

concomitant breakdown of statements into constituent parts.311 There were other

limitations to the interviews beyond linguistic approaches. I did not collect data on class,

race, sexuality, ability, and other social factors that are part of internet markets insofar as

they are part of social life. I relied on a large-scale Pew survey of internet merchants to

set a baseline understanding of class and race on these platforms — which are

overwhelmingly occupied by middle-class whites.312 Still, given the absence of relevant

data in my research, I avoided arguments related to these topics, despite there being many

to be made. Finally, as already mentioned, I did not conduct ethnographic field work, and

310 Potter and Hepburn, "Eight Challenges for Interview Researchers." 311 Roulston, "Issues Involved in Methodological Analyses of Research Interviews." 312 Smith, "Gig Work, Onling Selling, and Home Sharing."

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my interviews cannot be taken as comprehensive accounts of internet markets, but only

as situated perspectives on experiences, practices, and opinions.

Recruitment Post

Hi everyone. Are there any regular [eBay/Craigslist] users interested in a paid and

anonymous interview? I'm looking for regular [eBay/Craigslist] users willing to

participate in a paid and anonymous interview about the platform — $40 via paypal for

an hour-long online chat interview.

A bit about me: I'm a phd student at the university of pennsylvania studying digital

economy. My dissertation is on internet markets, and [eBay/Craigslist] is one of my case

studies. You can check out my credentials on the university of pennsylvania website:

asc.upenn.edu/people/students/jonathan-pace

Safe travels and thanks for reading.

eBay Interview Questions

1.! What is your current city, gender, and age range (20s, 30s, etc.)?

2.! For how long have you been using eBay?

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3.! Are you more of a buyer or a seller?

4.! What are some examples of things you have purchased on eBay?

5.! What made you choose eBay over a conventional retail store?

6.! Have you ever purchased goods from other internet markets, such as Craigslist?

7.! Do you shop at antique stores or yard sales, as well?

8.! Have you ever seen bizarre or unexpected objects for sale on the website?

9.! What are some examples of things you have sold on eBay?

10.!What prompts you to post something for sale on the website?

11.!Do you have any selling strategies?

12.!Are you generally pleased with the price at which things sell?

13.!How much does selling through the website feel like work? Does it take up a lot of

time?

14.!Have you ever posted something for sale and received no bids on it?

15.!Have you ever encounter problems with fraud or scams?

16.!Are you active in the [forums/reddit] ? What is your interest there?

17.!Do you have a favorite memory or fun story associated with the website?

Craigslist Interview Questions

1.! What is your current city, gender, and age range (20s, 30s, etc.)?

2.! How long have you been using Craigslist?

3.! Are you more of a buyer or a seller?

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4.! What are some examples of things you have purchased on Craigslist?

5.! Why did you choose Craigslist over a conventional retail store?

6.! Where do you meet up with sellers to conduct transactions?

7.! Have you ever felt unsafe during a meet up?

8.! Have you ever seen bizarre or unexpected objects for sale on the website?

9.! Have you ever purchased goods from other internet markets, such as eBay?

10.!What are some examples of things you have sold on Craigslist?

11.!What prompts you to post something for sale on the website?

12.!Are you generally pleased with the price at which things sell?

13.!How much does selling through the website feel like work? Does it take up a lot of

time?

14.!Where do you meet up with buyers to conduct transactions?

15.!Have you ever posted something for sale and received no inquiries about it?

16.!Have you ever encounter problems with fraud or scams?

17.!Do you think Craigslist is doing enough to prevent fraud and scams?

18.!Are you active in the [forums/reddit]? What is your interest there?

19.!Do you have a favorite memory or fun story associated with the website?

Coding Protocol

1. Mark user statements as relating to one of the keywords: fraud, cooperation, selling,

objects.

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2. Identify patterns within the marked statements to develop subcategories.

3. Mark the keyword-marked statements as relating to one of the subcategories.

4. Stop when the subcategorized posts no longer exhibit significant diversity.

Interview Dates and Participant Numbers

Round 1 13 participants July 2017

Round 2 8 participants September 2017

Round 3 6 participants October 2017

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Appendix III

Governmental Records

In analyizing governmental records. I looked at court cases; public reports from

governmental agencies; Congressional hearings, codes of law, such as contract, fraud,

postal, drug, and firearms law. I accessed these documents through PACER, an online

service that provides access to court records and documents; the University of

Pennsylvania law library; and governmental websites. My goal in looking at these

records was to understand the legal and governmental systems within which internet

markets operate. I began with a theoretical sample of institutional documents that directly

involved my case studies: court cases to which they were party and public reports in

which they were directly mentioned. This lead me to documents that indirectly involved

my case studies: court decisions that set precedents for internet laws under which they

operate; public reports about the internet crimes that occur on them; and Congressional

hearings related to their infrastructure, such as payment and dark web infrastructure, and

related to the regulation of contraband, which platforms circulate. Finally, I sought out

codes of law to fill in the gaps of my knowledge: contract and fraud law to understand the

legal dimensions of electronic commerce, and postal, drug, and firearms law to

understand the circulation of contraband through internet markets.

In analyzing the data, I pattern coded the material according to themes that

emerged during review. These pattern codes took the form of mark-ups on PDF

documents. Some of these themes overlapped with those developed in other sources. On

the one hand, I was interested in connecting institutional activity to user activity and

181

platform activity. This was helpful, for example, in understanding how the circulation of

contraband (a user activity) could proceed without the intervention of content moderation

(platform activity) or law enforcement (institutional activity). On the other hand, I sought

out the novel components of the legal and governmental record, searching for evidence

that was unique thereto. For example, courts of law may demand that platforms explain

their secret or "black box" technologies in order to resolve legal disputes, and those

explanatory instances are valuable for internet research. Similarly, Congressional

hearings offered insight into the internal processes of governmental agencies, such as law

enforcement agencies.

In interpreting the documents, I continued to employ a critical, interpretive

approach, drawing on textual analysis to identify patterns in the systems surrounding

internet markets. Here, however, I foregrounded the institutional context of their

production. These are governmental documents, composed within state organizations that

have routinized processes and clear interests. Those who are speakers in these documents

— judges, federal officials, government workers — are embedded within this state

organization and follow its rubrics. I aimed to respect the veracity of these actors while

remaining remaining attentive to their underlying institutional position.313 In addition to

drawing on textual analysis, I drew on political-economic analysis in seeing states as

actors with material and symbolic resources, as well as strong incentives to protect and

maintain those resources.

313 Howarth, Discourse.

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Documents List

Court Cases

•! Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law v. craigslist. Inc. 519 F.3d

666 (7th Cir. 2008).

•! craigslist. Inc. v. 3Taps, Inc. 3:12-CV-03816-CRB (N.C. Cal. 2015).

•! craigslist. Inc. v. Alecksey Kerbel et al. C-11-3309 EMC (N.D. Cal. 2012).

•! craigslist. Inc. v. John L. Stover et al. CV-11-03308 SBA (N.D. Cal. 2012).

•! craigslist. Inc. v. Naturemarket, Inc. 694 F. Supp. 2d 1039 (N.D. Cal. 2010).

•! Grace v. eBay. Inc. 16 Cal. Rptr. 3d 192 (California Ct. App. 2004).

•! The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient

Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3.000) Ancient-Clay Bullae,

Case No. 1:17-cv-03980 (2018).

•! Thomas Dart, Sherriff of Cook County v. craigslist. Inc. 665 F. Supp. 2d 961 (E.D. Ill.

2009).

•! Tiffany (NJ) Inc. v. eBay, Inc. 576 F.Supp. 2d 463 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).

•! United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht. 31 F. Supp. 3d 540 (S.D.N.Y..

2014).

183

Governmental Reports

•! United States Governmental Accountability Office. "Internet Sales: Undercover

Purchases on eBay and Craigslist Reveal a Market for Sensitive and Stolen U.S.

Military Items." Testimony Before the Subcommittee on National Security and

Foreign Affairs. Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. House of

Representatives. April 10, 2008.

•! Internet Crime Complaint Center. "Internet Crime Report, 2017.” Last modified

January 15, 2018. https://pdf.ic3.gov/2016_IC3Report.pdf.

Congressional Hearings and Legislation

•! "Beyond Silk Road: The Potential Risks. Threats. and Promises of Virtual

Currencies." Hearing Before the Committee on Homeland Security and

Governmental Affairs. United States Senate. 113th Congress. November 18, 2013.

•! "Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017." H.R. 1865.

115th Congress.

Coding Protocol

1. Establish that document is relevant to one or more of the research topics.

2. Mark document as relating to one or more of the keywords: fraud, cooperation, sale,

objects.

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3. Identify patterns within the marked statements to develop subcategories.

4. Mark the keyword-marked statements as relating to one of the subcategories.

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Appendix IV

Platform Documents

Platform documents included user agreements, terms of use, user guidelines,

market policies, and promotional materials. In the case of Silk Road, I also used internal

platform records that detailed major site-related activity; these records were retrieved by

the Federal Bureau of Investigation during their investigation into Silk Road, and they

were presented as evidence by the prosecution in the criminal trial of Silk Road's

architect. I took a theoretical sample of platform documents related to user activity. Each

of these documents was designed to control user activity (guidelines and policies) or to

protect markets from problematic user activity (user agreements and terms of use). I

pattern-coded this data with themes that emerged progressively through review, and some

of these overlapped with themes that developed from other research sources. For

instance, a user agreement bans a practice that, as relayed in discussion board

conversations and interviews, nevertheless occurs on the platform; and the phrasing of

the user agreement reflects the state of internet law, as relayed in the legal records. Note

how triangulation unfolds in this case — not with the goal of comprehensive

generalizability but with the goal of credible trend identification. In interpreting these

documents, I drew on textual analysis to identify patterns in platform activity. More

notably, I drew on political-economic analysis to consider how the material interests of

platforms inform their user documentation. This includes, for instance, how user

agreements enable platform companies to control economic resources or evade legal

liabilities.

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Document List

•! Craigslist

o! "About"

o! "Avoiding Scams"

o! "Flags and Community Moderation"

o! "Jim Buckmaster"

o! "Prohibited"

o! "Terms of Use"

•! eBay

o! "Money Back Guarantee"

o! "Prohibited and Restricted Items"

o! "User Agreement"

•! Silk Road

o! "Weekly Reports"

o! "Expense Reports"

o! "Net Worth Calculator"

o! "Breakdown of Sales Data"

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Appendix V

Supplemental Media

ABC News

AIM Group

Alexa Statistics

The Atlantic

Ars Technica

Bright Planet

Business Insider

CBS News

CNN

CNet

Columbia Business Times

Crunchbase

The Economist

Fast Company

Finance India

Forbes

Gawker

Gizmodo

GQ

The Gothamist

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The Guardian

The Hill

Marin Independent Journal

Mashable

The Morning Call

The New York Times

The New Yorker

NBC Los Angeles

NBC Washington

Philly.com

Quartz

SF Gate

Slate

Tech Crunch

Vanity Fair

Variety

VICE

The Washington Post

Wired

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Appendix IV

Primer on the Case Studies

Craigslist

The history of Craigslist begins in 1995, when Craig Newmark, a computer

programmer turned consultant, started a e-mailing friends and coworkers about events in

San Francisco related to art and technology.314 The e-mail chain eventually snowballed to

a formal listserv that included two hundred people, who introduced apartment searches

and job hunts into the discussion. When the listserv grew too large, Newmark created a

website with a dot-org top-level domain; he named the platform Craigslist, because, as he

recalls, users told him, "'Hey, we already call it Craigslist. Let's keep it personal and

quirky and just call it Craigslist.'"315 By 1999, when Newmark hired Jim Buckmaster to

oversee the site's technical operations, Craigslist was being visited over a million times

per month, making it one of the most popular platforms on the (relatively) budding

internet.316 Over the next few years, Buckmaster expanded the platform to include locales

beyond San Francisco and beyond the United States. He also instituted a community

moderation system, which allowed users to flag posts that seemed off-topic or

illegitimate; this removed the onus of content review from the company's shoulders and

permitted Buckmaster to focus on back-end maintenance rather than front-end upkeep.

314 Susan Freese, Craigslist: The Company and Its Founder (North Mankato: ABDO, 2011). I draw on Freese through the rest of this paragraph. 315 SF Gate Staff, "Craigslist / On the Record: Craig Newmark,” SF Gate, August 15, 2004, https://www.sfgate.com/business/ontherecord/article/CRAIGSLIST-On-the-record-Craig-Newmark-2733312.php. 316 Freese, Craigslist: The Company and Its Founder.

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With these developments, Buckmaster became company president and CEO, while

Newmark remained as chairperson of the board of directors. Craigslist rode the wave of

Web 2.0 through the early 2000s, and, by the end of the decade, one in five adults

reported using Craigslist every month. Since then, Craigslist has solidified its technical

structure and dropped from the eighth to the fifteenth most popular website in the country

— hardly a Roman fall, given the general increase in traffic and platforms on the internet

since then.317 True to the "quirky and personal" spirit of the platform, Newmark and

Buckmaster continue to eschew targeted advertising and information brokerage.

Craigslist generates revenue by charging fees for job postings in certain locations and for

brokered apartment listings in New York City.318

Outside of commerce, Craigslist has a laid-back platform culture and a popular

reputation as a no-frills market that is utilitarian and effective but also "quirky and

personal". Several cultural objects attest to this reputation. In 2005, a Montreal man, Kyle

McDonald, began to barter objects on Craigslist with the purpose of obtaining

increasingly valuable goods.319 Documenting the journey on a personal website, he began

by trading a red paperclip for a pen, and, less than a year later, he was trading a role in

movie for a two-story farmhouse in Saskatchewan.320 "Weird Al" Yankovich wrote a

parody song about the website, in the style of 1960s blue rock.321 There, he hums on

317 "Internet Growth Statistics,” Internet World Stats, retrieved January 2018, https://www.internetworldstats.com. 318 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2010): 141. 319 Kyle McDonald, One Red Paperclip: How to Trade a Paperclip for a House (Austin: River Grove Books, 2007). 320 "About,” One Red Paperclip, http://www.redpaperclip.com/about. 321 Caroline McCarthy, "Weird Al Takes on Craigslist with The Doors,” CNet, June 16, 2009, https://www.cnet.com/news/weird-al-takes-on-craigslist-with-the-doors.

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about the idiosyncrasies of platform commerce and user posts: a missed connection from

"Saturday at the mall"; the trade of a Chevy Malibu for and "old wheelbarrow and a

slightly used sombrero"; "an open letter to the snotty barista at the Coffee Bean on San

Vincente"; and a "trash can of Styrofoam peanuts" offered for free — but only the

peanuts, "the trash ain't part of the deal".322 2009 saw the premiere of Craigslist Joe, a

documentary about a man living off of food, shelter, and transportation gleaned through

Craigslist interactions.323 The film concludes with the sentiment that people are

"overwhelmingly trustworthy and generous"324. Craigslist Joe echoed the humanistic

tone of 24 Hours on Craigslist, a documentary capturing the stories of people who posted

in the San Francisco section Craigslist over the course of a single day.325 These character

vignettes include an Ethel Merman impersonator, a member of a support group for

diabetic cats, and a ballroom dance instructor. In the words of Variety film critic Dennis

Harvey, the documentary is a "colorful human mosaic", less about the internet than about

"the stubborn nonconformity for which it provides an outlet"326. These eclectic objects in

popular culture evince the Craigslist's reputation as simultaneously utilitarian (McDonald

finds a house, Weird Al exchanges goods, Joe locates provisions, and diabetic cat owners

find support) and eccentric (a paper clip turned piece of property, a missed connection, an

open letter, a free trash can of peanuts, and a cast of colorful characters).

322 "Craigslist by 'Weird Al' Yankovic,” Genius Lyrics, https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-craigslist-lyrics. 323 Craigslist Joe, directed by Joseph Garner (CLJ Films, 2012), DVD. 324 Craigslist Joe, directed by Joseph Garner. 325 24 Hours on Craigslist, directed by Michael Ferris Gibson (Zealot Pictures, 2005), DVD. 326 Dennis Harvey, "24 Hours on Craigslist,” Variety, February 17, 2005, https://variety.com/2005/film/reviews/24-hours-on-craigslist-1200527841.

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From a technical perspective, the Craigslist interface is scandalously

unassuming.327 The interface features blue text in an Arial font, set against light gray

banners and a white background — an iconic layout that the platform has barely altered

since the 2000s.328 A home page outlines the site sections and subsections, listing

platform documents beneath a live calendar. One of the sections is a discussion section,

home of the discussion boards that constitute a major research source in this project. The

discussion boards are organized in topic, ranging from art and literature to money and

taxes, and they are structured in conversational threads, publishing comments in

chronological order in response to a foundational post. For instance, an owner of a

diabetic cat might begin a new thread in the Pet section by posting a question about

animal medication; users would then reply to the post, and their comments would be

listed in chronological order beneath the original post. Unlike the Craigslist market,

discussion boards are not locally bounded, and users from all over the world may post on

the same board. They are analogous in structure to Usenet or Reddit forums.

Craigslist users post classified advertisements in specific categories, and

interested users reply directly to the poster through email or phone number. Classified

advertisements may be viewed as a list of thumbnails, as a gallery of photos, or (if

relevant) as a map of locations. Outside of job and housing postings, users pay no fee to

publish advertisements, which expire after several weeks. Despite the simplicity of the

posting from the perspective of users, Craigslist features several protocols and

327 Gary Wolf, "Why Craigslist is Such a Mess,” Wired, August 24, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/08/ff-craigslist. Dani Fankhauser, "Why the Web Hasn't Birthed a Prettier Craigslist,” Mashable, February 17, 2013, https://mashable.com/2013/02/17/prettier-craigslist/#pTgshlhJEaq2. 328 Fankhauser, "Why the Web Hasn't Birthed a Prettier Craigslist."

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functionalities that serve the technical foundations of local commerce. Craigslist utilizes

an filtering protocol that prevents the posting of multiple identical advertisements and the

repeated loading of the site (in technical terms, repeated client requests). Site

advertisements are published with a flag functionality, through which users can report

posts that appear suspicious. Advertisements are removed when they accrue a certain

number of flags, although that number is not publicly known. Craigslist refers to the

process of user flagging as "community moderation"329. Craigslist also includes a profile

functionality, and users can only post on the platform after creating a profile — a simple

process that consists of verifying an email, agreeing to terms of use, and setting a

password. Craigslist provides a temporary email account or "mail relay" through which

users can communicate and which services as a relatively anonymous contact method. In

creating a post, users select a category, provide basic information in a text box, indicate a

preferred contact method, and answer a captcha. Neither names nor identifying

documents are necessary to create accounts of post advertisements, making Craigslist

users anonymous by default. Finally, Craigslist features a set of platform documents

related to best practices: a manual for avoiding fraud, a list of banned objects, and

personal safety tips.

eBay

329 "Flags and Community Moderation,” Craigslist, retrieved March 2017, https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/flags_and_community_moderation.

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In 1996, Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar founded

AuctionWeb to exchange some of his collectibles, which he had started to amass as a side

hobby.330 When the site began to attract high levels of internet traffic, especially from

antique dealers accustomed to auction exchange, Omidyar upgraded to his internet

service to a business account in order to accommodate the surge in online activity.331 By

1997, the platform was hosting two million auctions each month, hiring executives and

board members to fill its ranks, accepting seven million dollars in funding from a venture

capital firm, and rebranding itself as eBay — an adaptation of Echo Bay, Omidyar's first

choice for the site name, tabled due to an unavailable domain address. 332 When eBay

went public in September 1998, the company was the over-achieving child of the dot-

com boom — an early tech unicorn that with a userbase of a million and a market

valuation of $1.88 billion.333 Through the 2000s, eBay expanded beyond collectibles and

travel products to include clothing, electronics, sporting goods, and other consumer

durables, as well as cars, for which the company briefly created (and then shuddered) a

separate market in automobiles.334 During this period, eBay also took commercial

330 Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store (Boston: Little Brown & Co, 2002). 331 Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store. 332 Randall Stross, eBoys: The True Story of the Six Tall Men Who Backed eBay and Other Billion-Dollar Start-Ups (New York: Balantine Books, 2000). Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store. Randopl Court, "Online Auction Craze is Going, Going Gaga,” Wired, November 6, 1997, https://www.wired.com/1997/11/online-auction-craze-is-going-going-gaga. 333 CNN Staff, "EBAY: Return of the IPO,” CNN Money, September 42, 1998, http://money.cnn.com/1998/09/24/technology/ebay. Wired News, "Ebay Boosts IPO Share Price,” Wired, September 23, 1998, https://www.wired.com/1998/09/ebay-boosts-ipo-share-price. Jennifer Sullivan, "Investor Frenzy over eBay IPO,” Wired, September 24, 1998. 334 E-Commerce Journal Staff, "Ebay's History,” E-Commerce Journal, March 26, 2008, http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/articles/ebays_history_the_owner_of_paypal.

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advantage of Web 2.0 developments through the acquisition of online auction markets,

such as Up2Sale.com, Half.com, Mercadolibre.com, Lokau.com, Carad.com,

Baazzee.com, Marketplaats.nl, Rent.com, Loquo.com, and Shopping.com; conventional

auction houses, including Butterfield & Butterfield and Alando ; and communication and

payment technologies, such as Skype and Paypal — two of the company's most profitable

investments.335 eBay also took a 28% stake in Craigslist, buying out a shareholder and

former employee in 2004.336 However, the relationship soured by 2008, when eBay sued

Craigslist for diluting its stake in the company to 24%, a move that cost eBay a board seat

and prompted Craigslist to buy back the minority stake.337 In the 2010s, eBay introduced

retail sales to the website, furnishing company-made clothing and home goods to

compete with internet retail giants, such as Amazon.338 This distinguishes eBay from

Craigslist and Silk Road, which rely exclusively on the peer-to-peer commerce of users.

Ankurt Chauan, "The Brand That Auctioned the www,” Finance India, March 24, 2009http://finance.indiainfo.com/2009/04/24/0904241614 _the_brand_that_auctioned_the_www. Crunchbase Staff, "eBay Acquisitions,” Crunchbase, last updated February 2018, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ebay/acquisitions/acquisitions_list#section-acquisitions. Jonathan Chew, "PayPal Returns Today With a Market Cap Larger than eBay,” Fortune, July 20, 2015. Jean-Louis Gassée, "Why Did MicroSoft Spend $8.5bn on Skype?” The Guardian, May 16, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/16/ballmer-microsoft-skype. 335 E-Commerce Journal Staff, "Ebay's History.” Crunchbase Staff, "eBay Acquisitions.” 336 E-Commerce Journal Staff, "Ebay's History.” Crunchbase Staff, "eBay Acquisitions.” 337 Ryan Mac, "eBay Ends Ties With Craigslist, Sells Minority Stake Back To Craigslist," Forbes, June 19, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/06/19/ebay-ends-ties-with-craigslist-sells-minority-stake-back-to-craigslist. 338 Jeff Himmelman, "EBay's Stragey for Taking On Amazon,” The New York Times, December 19, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/ebays-strategy-for-taking-on-amazon.

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eBay culture reflects the history of the platform and the transactional form of the

auction. In consumer culture, eBay is considered a place to find rare or unexpected items.

In 1999, someone tried to auction off a kidney on the platform.339 A 2001 episode of the

television series Will & Grace featured a fierce bidding war between characters over a

pair of Britney Spears' sneakers. In 2015, to commemorate the platform's twenty-year

anniversary, Time magazine published a list of "The 20 Weirdest Things Ever Sold on

eBay"340. An Instagram account with forty-five thousand followers "finds the weirdest

shit on eBay so you don't have to"341, posting screenshots of disfigured dolls, Versace

jump ropes, and other detritus from the open auction market. Here, eBay is a source of

consumer goods that are rare or eclectic, not necessarily valuable but not necessarily

worthless. Further, as the Will & Grace example illustrates, eBay culture is also an

auction culture that features the competitive economic practices proper to sale by bid.

These practices include: bidding wars, in which buyers aim to out-bid each other on

objects before the auction timer runs out; sniping, in which buyers wait until the very last

minute to post a high offer that will secure them the item; and shill bidding, in which

sellers bid on their own products in order to drive up the bidding prices among

customers.342 Auction culture blends into antique culture, another crucial dimension of

339 Amy Harmon, "Auction for a Kidney Pops Up on eBay,” The New York Times, September 3, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/03/us/auction-for-a-kidney-pops-up-on-ebay-s-site. 340 Samantha Grossman, "The 20 Weirdest Things Ever Sold on eBay,” Time, September 2, 2015, "The 20 Weirdest Things Ever Sold on eBay.” 341 Tish Weinstock, "This Instagram Account Finds the Weidest Shit on eBay So You Don't Have To,” Vice, May 21, 2018, https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/pavpmz/this-instagram-account-finds-the-weirdest-shit-on-ebay-so-you-dont-have-to. "ebaybae,” Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/ebaybae. 342 Ken Steiglitz, Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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eBay, as both view the exchange of goods as a competitive practice, or, at least, high-

stakes practice that can turn into a lucrative investment or a missed opportunity. As an

antique venue, eBay is part of a vast economic landscape in collectibles — retail venues,

auction houses, yard sales, and flea markets. The foundational role of antique dealers in

the early days of the online auction market means that eBay culture is also antique

culture: the platform generally follows the representational conventions of collectibles

exchange, even when other objects are offered for sale.

On a technical level, eBay has a unique interface and runs on a series of protocols

and functionalities. The current platform interface features a standardized scheme of

bright colors, bold black text in Arial font, and multiple banners that direct users to

different parts of the site. As on Craigslist, there is a discussion board that is not

moderated by the platform, allowing users to freely discuss their concerns without

penalty or censorship. Auction page are uniformly formatted, with a product photo on the

left, real-time auction information on the right, and product description below. Still,

auction pages enjoy a high level of customization: there are few limits on the length and

the format of product descriptions, and some vendors create their own formatting

templates to standardize their offerings.

eBay also features several protocols that are important to market operations.

There is a filter protocol that removes advertisements for banned items. Once an

advertisement passes through the filter, it moves through the auction protocol, where

vendors are prompted to set for the auction a timeframe (ranging from days to weeks), a

reserve price (minimal acceptable bid), and a Buy it Now price (price that secures the

item and thus ends the auction). In the case of a successful bid, the buyer pays the vendor

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through a payment protocol, Paypal, which places electronically transferred money in a

temporary escrow before delivering it to the receiver. This protocol, through which every

transaction must pass, allows the platform to collect a commission on each transaction,

ranging from ten to twenty percent of the selling price. Further, eBay features a

reputation protocol, which allows buyers to rate sellers after a purchase. There, buyers are

to evaluate the accuracy of product description and the quality of customer service

offered by sellers. eBay also maintains a dispute resolution center to resolve contested

transactions, including claims of fraud. Outside of protocols, eBay includes a copyright

functionality, which allows companies to request item removal if the item is a suspected

counterfeit. Profile creation is a simple process that consists of email verification and

password creation. Seller fees and credit card numbers accompany vendor profiles, which

have access to the post functionality but may be financially penalized in cases of

contested dispute.

Silk Road

Silk Road was a market on the dark web. The dark web is an amorphous

collection of internet sites that run on darknets, or overlay networks that employ non-

standard communication protocols in order to encrypt and anonymize information.343 The

343 Typically, a domain name is translated into a corresponding IP address through the Domain Name System (DNS). Once the address has been located, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) enables a connection between two hosts, who are then able to exchange information. TCP/IP refers to this suite of standard communication protocol. Instead of having a standard top-level domain (such as .com) and a corresponding IP address that can be translated by DNS, dark web sites employ a non-standard top-level domain (.onion) that can only be accessed through private overlay networks, such as The Onion Router (Tor) and Invisible Internet Project (I2P). Moreover, rather than connect through the conventional Internet port, dark web sites use alternative ports, of which there are

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term "darknet" was initially coined in the 1970s to designate networks insulated from

ARPANET. Only in the early 2000s did the term gain relative purchase, following a

conference publication by Microsoft employees on digital piracy344 and topical articles in

Wired345. The phrase "dark web" likely developed contemporaneously within hacker

circles as an idiomatic reference to darknet-accessible websites. Despite some

terminological confusion in the popular press, the dark web is not equivalent to the deep

web, or the assortment of websites, mostly databases, that have not been indexed by

traditional search engines.346 The dark web does not include file-sharing websites, such as

Kazaa, as these utilize standard internet protocols, nor does it include military networks,

such as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, as these are structurally detached

from the public internet.347 Dark web sites are published and maintained primarily

through Tor Hidden Services, which conceal user identities and hide server locations.348

over sixty thousand on any computer. Between the non-standard IP address, the absence of DNS entry, and the unusual port configuration, dark web users are highly difficult to trace. Cath Everett, "Moving Across to the Dark Side,” Network Security (September 2009): 10-13. Nichols Christin, "Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace.” 344 Peter Biddle et al., "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution" (paper presentation, Digital Rights Management Conference, Washington, DC, 2002). 345 Wired Staff, "Dark Netizen,” Wired. August 1, 2004, https://www.wired.com/2004/08/dark-netizen. Jeff Howe, "The Shadow Internet,” Wired, January 1, 2005, https://www.wired.com/ 2005/01/topsite. 346 Michael Bergman, "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value,” Bright Planet, published online 2001, https://brightplanet.com/2012/06/the-deep-web-surfacing-hidden-value. 347 Steve Mansfield-Devine, "Going Over to the Dark Side,” Network Security (December 2009): 4-6. Cath Everett, "Moving Across to the Dark Side.” 348 When computers connect to the internet, they each are assigned a unique IP address. A computer's IP address corresponds to its internet service provider, IP host name, and geospatial location. IP addresses consequently permit the tracking of internet-connected computers. In order to prevent tracking, private overlay networks (such as Tor) relay users through a series of servers before connection, so their IP addresses correspond to a

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They predominately function as underground marketplaces for the exchange of illegal or

highly regulated goods: fake identification and passports, stolen credit cards and

identities, hacker services and manuals, pirated media and electronic goods, human slaves

and escorts, guns and ammunition, and street and pharmaceutical drugs. The dark web

also hosts social networking sites for criminal and radical groups, including terrorist

organizations349 and hacker collectives350.

In January of 2011, Ross William Ulbricht, an American man in his thirties,

developed and launched Silk Road as a business venture and an experiment in free

markets.351 After obtaining a hidden server to host Silk Road — named after the

sprawling trade networks of antiquity — Ulbricht advertised the site on drug and

cryptocurrency forums on the clear web, such as Shroomery.org and Bitcointalk.org.352

Living in Colorado at the time, he grew psychedelic mushrooms in his backyard in order

to post them in the market and therefore attest to the legitimacy of the site in the absence

node in another part of the world. This is made possible through a network of six thousand volunteer computers, which function as intermediary nodes. In the case of Tor, these computers range from private desktops to institutional networks, including governmental and university networks, as Tor was originally established to protect political whistleblowers and victims of domestic abuse. Further, the relay system allows users to publish sites without revealing the site's server location Hence, in addition to being navigationally inaccessible through the TCP/IP protocol, dark web sites are grounded in servers that are difficult to physically locate. Digital Citizens Alliance, "Busted, But Not Broken: The State of Silk Road and the Darknet Marketplaces," published online 2014, http://digitalcitizensalliance.org. 349 Steve Mansfield-Devine, "Going Over to the Dark Side.” 350 Robert Gehl, "Power/Freedom on the Dark Web: A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network, New Media & Society (published online October 2014): 1-17, 10.1177/1461444814554900 351 See the discussion of Ulbricht's libertarianism in chapter 1. United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Government Sentencing Submission. 352 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Government Sentencing Submission. "Silk Road Timeline,” Antilop, https://antilop.cc/sr.

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of a user base.353 By October of 2011, Silk Road was facilitating a million dollars worth

of trade each month; Ulbricht was collecting a hundred thousand dollars in commission

as his monthly paycheck; and law enforcement agencies were investigating the platform

after a seller agreed to turn state witness.354 Four months later, in February 2012, Ulbricht

hired programmers to help maintain the site, which was now moving two million dollars

worth of contraband each month.355 Stakes rose in the summer, as Silk Road hit one

hundred million in sales and federal agents went undercover to infiltrate the anonymous

site.356 Ulbricht was unknowingly corresponding with an undercover FBI agents when he

reported the "explosive growth" of Silk Road to the discussion board in November 2012,

and when he hired an assassin to murder a user who was extorting him in January

2013.357 Later that year, the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police (RMP) in Iceland, where Silk

Road's hidden server was located, identified the platforms dark web address, leading the

FBI to search and shut down the domestic servers in Pennsylvania hosting Silk Road

data.358 In order to capture Ulbricht, however, the FBI needed to directly connect the

executive to the platform, a difficult task in the anonymous conditions of the dark web.

Consequently, in October 2013, federal agencies staked out the San Francisco Public

Library, where Ulbricht often worked, until the executive arrived, opened his laptop, and

logged into the Silk Road central administration page.359

353 Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net (New York: Melville House, 2016). 354 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit GX 251. 355 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit GX 251. "Silk Road Timeline,” Antilop, https://antilop.cc/sr. 356 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, Exhibit GX 251. "Silk Road Timeline,” Antilop, https://antilop.cc/sr. 357 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 1523-1557. 358 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 1563-1622. 359 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 140-177.

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From a technical perspective, Silk Road featured a conventional interface and

operated through a set of protocols and functionalities. Visually, the interface resembled

the bare-boned Craigslist system, inflected through hacker aesthetics: product categories

presented in their entirety, advertisements arrayed as thumbnails in lines of three, set

against a white background with dark green Arial text, and the Silk Road logo on the

upper left. It also drew on the internet retail conventions with a shopping cart

functionality, displayed on the top of the interface.

An escrow protocol was key to the site's operation Traders dealt in Bitcoin, a

digital currency that supports verifiable and anonymous transactions without a centralized

third party.360 When purchasing a good on Silk Road, buyers were to place their

payments in a site-supported escrow. Upon receiving the item, the buyer was to inspect

the product and finalize the purchase. Finalization released the funds from escrow to the

vendor. The escrow system was designed to prevent the sale of counterfeit products and

to generate revenue for the site executive. Ulbricht took a commission, ranging from ten

to twenty percent of the selling price, on every trade that passed through Silk Road's

escrow system.361 Silk Road also featured a reputation protocol in the form of a five-star

rating system, which allowed buyers to evaluate vendors. The vendor reputation system

was also designed to encourage competition among sellers, who could strategically brand

themselves claim a small market segment.

360 Bartlett, The Dark Net. 361 United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht, 256-258.

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