Cultural Politics, Reciprocal Relations, and Operational Agility in Online Drug Markets

Continuity and Change in Darknet Marketplaces: Uberisation, McDonaldisation and eBayisation

Darknet marketplaces or cryptomarkets have been defined as

a marketplace that hosts multiple sellers or ‘vendors’, provides participants with anonymity via its location on the hidden web and use of cryptocurrencies for payment, and aggregates and displays customer feedback ratings and comments. (Barratt and Aldridge, 2016, p. 1)

The darknet or dark web is the part of the Internet that can only be accessed through encryption software. The most popular software used is The Onion Router (Tor), originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory to provide a secure communication tool and now made available by a non-profit organisation, partially funded by civil liberties groups, the US government, and contributions from millions of Internet users – varying from IT professionals, military personnel, bloggers, journalists, law enforcement, whistle-blowers, and activists to day-to-day users – who wish to enhance their online security and browse securely and anonymously (Tor Project, 2019). Tor and the so-called ‘dark’ web are not inherently ‘criminal’ software and online mediums. They have been created and are being employed for a variety of reasons and purposes by a diverse range of users. However, in 2011, one particular entrepreneur (Chen, 2011) realised that this environment, together with the newly available cryptocurrency Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008; Rauchs and Hileman, 2017), could provide just the right affordances (Hutchby, 2001) to create an online platform where buyers and sellers of illegal goods could run their activities with a minimised risk of detection or intrusion.

The two key underpinnings of cryptomarkets, Tor and Bitcoin, are politically strongly related to both libertarian and anti-establishment ideas. They enable the circumvention of oversight by state and legal institutions (government, law enforcement, banks) and (ideally) transfer power to the Internet user (or the citizen). According to several studies, the Silk Road, the first cryptomarket, was clearly tied to such political aims and to a libertarian ideology. Maddox et al. (2016), in their ethnography of the Silk Road and several other darknet platforms, have argued that for website users, what was being made available was not only a virtual place to trade drugs but an experience of shared personal freedom and exposure to a libertarian political outlook and framework. In a practical sense, users could also share knowledge about drug use and cryptography. Thus, what was – or is – on offer is a world ‘not yet’ made, promising the possibility of a different ‘reality’, but also the means to confront the way in which existing political and social reality works (Maddox et al., 2016).

Munksgaard and Demant’s (2016) quantitative study, which used topic modelling to identify the political discourse on multiple cryptomarket forum posts from 2011 to 2015, has shown similar results. The prevalence of the political libertarian discourse increased from 2011 until the end of the Silk Road in 2013, which was then followed by an abrupt change in the discourse. Therefore, it is arguable that even if the first major law enforcement operation against the biggest cryptomarket at the time did not have a major effect on the sustainability of the economy of cryptomarkets, it did seem to have a dampening effect on the political sentiments of users.

If the political ideology behind any given cryptomarket is put aside, however, the elements which comprise a cryptomarket will still have an instrumental role. For example, the success of a cryptomarket is dependent on customers, so feedback ratings and comments that build a reputation are important. These elements create a system of trust (see Moeller, this volume) which gives potential buyers and sellers reassurance about doing business with each other without being afraid of losing their money or product (Tzanetakis, 2018b; Tzanetakis et al., 2016). The need to maintain reputation and trust motivates the seller to conduct business professionally but, given the competitive nature of the market, these characteristics may not be enough to generate high returns (Tzanetakis, 2018a). The competition also drives the selling of reliable quality products that can be marketed or branded as high purity and high strength (Caudevilla et al., 2016; van der Gouwe et al., 2017).

However, it is also the case that purity does not necessarily mean quality, especially in the case of substances that may have the potential to cause harm. The concept of drug quality in this context has been explored by Bancroft and Scott Reid (2016) in their qualitative study of cryptomarket users which showed how users create an online culture of consumer quality evaluation by sharing their experiences and feedback on forums, creating an environment where drug safety and harm reduction are being discussed and assessed openly and freely.

According to Aldridge et al. (2018), cryptomarkets are increasing the amount, the range, and the purity of drugs being sold, which could increase their potential harm, although, at the same time, most cryptomarkets and their associated forums provide information on drug safety, customer reviews of drugs from different vendors, and other advice. Thus, one argument could be that cryptomarket vendors and users share a commitment to increasing drugs availability and to reducing harm, which could lead to less drug-related harm arising from cryptomarkets than from traditional street markets. In support of this, Martin (2018) argues that cryptomarkets take drug sales to a level of ‘gentrification’, displacing the potentially violent norms of traditional markets with friendly and professional relationships between online market actors, thereby further reducing harm. This points towards a drug market population that is rather more concerned about the quality and the safety of drug use than the more instrumental, financial side of the market, such as the maximisation of profit from a user or a seller point of view. A significantly lower risk of victimisation by violence (although there is evidence of online-specific violent behaviour, such as scams, threats, or doxing; see Moeller et al., 2017) and an increase in the transparency of vendor-buyer relations and the quality of the products being sold make this virtual environment a more appealing one for certain drug buyers.

Aldridge and Décary-Hétu (2014) have argued that, at least on the Silk Road, many transactions seemed to be ‘business-to-business’ given the volume of drugs being sold, and therefore cryptomarkets may be servicing a shift in criminal innovation that could re-shape the market by eliminating the need for ‘middle’ level drug dealing, connecting the upper with the retail level dealers, the cryptomarket itself acting as a ‘middle’ level. Thus, the type of ‘subcultural capital’ (Sandberg, 2008) required to deal drugs may be different in traditional markets compared to cryptomarkets. This strengthens the ‘gentrification hypothesis’, considering that the violence that was necessary to gain market share, protect territory, and resolve conflicts required in the offline world (Sandberg, 2008) is replaced in online marketplaces by a need to demonstrate good customer service and satisfy the needs of customers (Martin, 2023, chapter 9).

Smaller ‘retailers’ can enter the market to sell, and socially based buyer groups can enter to purchase and distribute. Arguably, the trading position and practice of both groups reflect a process of ‘Uberisation’ in the digital market. For example, in their discussion of the growth of the European cocaine trade, the EMCDDA (2019) observes that:

Smaller groups have been able to enter the market by using a range of information technology like encryption, darknet market places, social media for dealing and cryptocurrencies. Entrepreneurship in the competitive cocaine market is evident from innovative distribution strategies […]. These new methods appear to reflect to some extent the type of disruption seen in other areas facilitated by the common use of smartphones – a potential ‘Uberisation’ of the cocaine trade – a competitive market in which sellers compete by offering additional services such as fast and flexible delivery options. (p. 14)

Warren and Ryan (2023, chapter 4) agree that

dark web markets are a form of ‘Uberisation’ of drug distribution that simply speeds up the communication process between willing consumers and suppliers, while utilising rather crude methods of transportation through conventional mail systems.

This may have inappropriate consequences in terms of criminal justice attention in the same way that ‘social supply’ has often been policed and prosecuted as if it entailed organised crime (Coomber et al., 2016, p. 263). As Warren and Ryan observe,

many relatively innocuous forms of low-level drug trafficking service small markets of friends and risk becoming labelled by law enforcement as highly serious because they utilise the dark web for transnational drug distribution.

In this version of the markets of the dark web, forms of social supply have gone online, becoming a digital extension of the underpinnings of ‘normalisation’ that Parker et al. (1995, p. 25) described as the supply of drugs among friends and acquaintances in which drugs had ‘become products which are grown, manufactured, packaged and marketed through an enterprise culture whereby the legitimate and illicit markets have merged’. In this context, digital markets are appealing because there has been an increase in the acceptability of recreational drug use and of social supply, and of the exchange of drugs on a scale different from financially motivated drug dealing. The person ordering drugs online may just be the ‘designated buyer’ for a group, reflecting the continuity of a social practice noted in many studies over the decades (Blum et al., 1972; Coomber et al., 2016; Murphy et al., 1990) where, once an individual became known as someone who potentially had access to drugs, they swiftly became the main point of supply. With requests from friends to ‘get in on the deal’, it ‘made sense’ for everyone (economically) that social suppliers should purchase for them at the same time (Coomber et al., 2016, p. 6). Masson and Bancroft (2018, p. 81) have discussed social supply and sharing in relation to both online as well as offline markets, and report that ‘our findings call on us to rethink how significant non-commercial supply is even in a vaunted fully capitalist market’. Within networks of illicit drug distribution, friendship or acquaintance groups arrange distribution among themselves for low or no profit via social supply and minimal commercial distribution (Coomber et al., 2016). According to Masson and Bancroft (2018, p. 81), this kind of distribution is also characteristic of cryptomarkets, involving knowledge transfer and a ‘form of sharing’ that ‘becomes transformative in this context’, meaning that when a

cryptomarket buyer shares his or her wares with … friends, it is not a gift per se. It is part risk-management and part deal. Sharing has a role in the construction and maintenance of social order.

If these trends are in part a reflection of the recent market model of Uberisation, only made possible by technology, they are also traceable to an earlier model of innovation and change in business operations – McDonaldisation. This was based on the application of principles of efficiency, calculability, control, and predictability to a fast-food franchise business that permeated popular culture and was easily reproducible. As Ritzer (2019, p. 67) notes, in the earliest forms of McDonaldisation, bureaucracy, industrial organisation, and the assembly line were common characteristics – and these were extended and refined in the case of his classic example of fast-food restaurants. The impact of the model has been profound, and over time, the business operations of the offline world have changed as agility and technology influenced organisational shape. For the new online world, success was also built on being able to avoid some of the constraints of a physical business operation – although as Collier et al. (2021) point out, the burden of actually doing mundane and boring work remains a necessity in the digital as much as the physical world, as the case of Amazon would demonstrate. Indeed, as Ritzer (2019, p. 55) observes, regardless of changes to operations, people ‘still exist in and on these settings’ as ‘consumers (or customers, clients) and producers (or workers)’, although ‘it is important to note that people as exclusively producers are of declining importance in material sites and virtually non-existent on digital sites’ as the provision of services and related administration have become dominant economic activities. Nonetheless, the point is that the platform economy is a perfect base from which to launch and run enterprises that are employee- and asset-light, and, says Ritzer, it is this ‘lightness’ in both paid employees and assets that allows Internet sites to reach new heights of McDonaldization and with ‘relatively few employees and minimal material assets, Internet sites are freed to maximize the process of McDonaldization’. Of course, online markets characterised by an ideology rather antithetical to corporate McDonaldisation may also seem to have something in common with the eBay phenomenon which, as Ahuvia and Izberg-Belkin (2011, p. 374) suggest, thrives on ‘individuation’ and ‘self-assertion’ by

creating experiential and interactive platforms that bring together a zealous community of buyers and sellers, where an endless variety of products and props are offered to consumers busy scripting their own characters.

While drawing on certain features of a McDonaldised operation to present a reliable menu (of drugs) with efficiency and guarantee of predictable quality, drugs cryptomarkets also seem to reflect some characteristics of the eBay market place as a

consumption playground […] allowing consumers to devise products, create original commercial narratives, pursue ideological agendas, and make artistic statements while feeling empowered through the process. (Ahuvia and Izberg-Belkin, 2011, p. 374)

Drug Cultures, Social Motives, and Reciprocal Relations

Studies of cryptomarkets may reflect various disciplinary or theoretical orientations that are not primarily concerned with the cultural features of markets but are nonetheless illuminating because of the light they shed on matters such as learning, choice, politics, and motivation. The experiences of buyers and sellers; the influence of libertarian politics; the choice to favour online markets to avoid violence and law enforcement operations; and the commitment to harm reduction and drug safety, quality, and sharing of information all point towards cryptomarket users as having cultural capital (Whenua, 2017), being less likely to belong to the culture of the street (Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017) but having instead an affinity with a culture of commitment to availability and use of drugs.

To take an illustrative study, Sandberg (2012) describes the differing cultural backgrounds of cannabis dealers based on the type of market they are selling in: public, semi-public, or private. In the public market, products are being sold in public spaces, parks, or streets; in the semi-public market in clubs, cafes, or pubs, while in the private market, the selling takes place behind closed doors (e.g. where the dealer lives). Actors from the public market are profit-driven, belonged to the street culture before getting involved in cannabis selling, and are more likely to scam customers based on their knowledge of the products and markets (Jacques et al., 2014). In the private market, on other hand, profit making is frowned upon, and the dealers belonged to the cannabis culture before getting involved in selling it, which means they have an ideological commitment to the culture as part of their reasons for selling cannabis. The semi-public market is more or less a combination of the two, where even if actors are seeking profit, they generally build a connexion or reciprocal relationship with the buyers, either through common cultural knowledge or by sharing anecdotes in a social context (Sandberg, 2012). These market actors are bringing their cultural capital to the market they belong to and are selling their products with an accompanying symbolic meaning which is being both ideologically ‘bought into’ and transactionally bought by their clients. Similar actors and motives can be found in Dorn and South’s (1990) categorisation of types of drug distributors which includes ‘opportunistic irregulars’ (individuals or small groups that get involved in a variety of activities in the irregular economy, including drug dealing), ‘mutual societies’ (friendship networks of user–dealers who support each other, buying, selling, and sharing drugs in a reciprocal manner), and ‘trading charities’ (enterprises involved in the drug trade because of their ideological commitments to certain drugs, as well as the profit). Sandberg’s (2012) private market actors would easily fit in the category of mutual societies or trading charities. In the case of cryptomarkets, Demant et al. (2018) argued that, based on their observed demand for drugs (measured in terms of reviews on two of the marketplaces that followed Silk Road – Silk Road 2 and Agora), most of the drug deals taking place were for personal use or social drug deals, supporting the proposition that middle-level drug dealing was giving way to the operation of cryptomarkets (see also Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014) but also pointing towards the fact that a proportion of cryptomarket buyers would belong to ‘trading charities’ as the amounts purchased were more in line with social supply drug deals. Indeed, in the case of cannabis, Demant et al. (2018) have seen a significant tendency towards larger purchases, which could mean that a significant number of the buyers are actors from the private cannabis market similar to Sandberg’s (2012) sample – not aiming for profit but for effective distribution of something they see as (literally) a consumer ‘good’.

Drug Cultures, Representations, and Rituals

Different drugs may belong to different cultural and subcultural moments and movements but not function as defining elements of the subculture itself. Shapiro (1999) points this out in a discussion of the affinities between certain types of drugs and the different musical movements of the twentieth century in the UK and the USA. For example, in the early 1960s, amphetamine was popular amongst the subculture of ‘mods’ and fans of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, and again in the 1970s among punks who copied icons like Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols (his name being attributed to the decayed teeth that result from heavy amphetamine consumption). Around the mid-1960s, cannabis and LSD started to gain popularity as well with the rise of psychedelia, accompanied by outdoor festivals and the counter-cultural movement. The 1980s saw a rise in the consumption of a new amphetamine relative, MDMA, at the same time as the house and garage music were emerging from the USA and Ibiza. All of these subcultural movements, while having certain types of drugs associated with them, do not necessarily represent the context in which these particular drugs are always consumed, and, of course, Shapiro’s focus on transatlantic cultural exchanges and influences may now seem limited in a world so dominated by web and social media connectivity. This has implications for how we should think of ‘sub’ cultures, where their genesis and characteristics may no longer be as localised or related to lack of capital as in the past. Reputation and symbols, messages, and beliefs are now so easily shared on a wide scale, and this could apply to those who use drugs cryptomarkets.

The context of consumption also changes the meaning. Collins (2011) argues that a theory of interaction ritual(s) has the potential to explain whether and why psychoactive substances might be accepted and regarded as legitimate (e.g. caffeine), contested by opposing ideologies and/or rival movements (e.g. alcohol prohibition), or subject to taboo and popular scorn (p. 114). This approach sees drug subcultures as rich repositories of ‘rituals, stories and symbols’ and might be applied to the analysis of the branding and marketing of the wide variety of substances sold by darknet vendors, to the contexts of consumption they are ‘recommending’ through their advertising, and to the exploration of social situations in which substances are ingested. A study by Cunliffe et al. (2019) on non-medical prescription psychiatric drugs and their availability on cryptomarkets explores some aspects of this approach. Their analysis shows that alprazolam (commercially known as Xanax) is the best-selling benzodiazepine anti-anxiety product in the USA and is showing sales growth in the UK and Australia. This popularity rests on an established reputation, with use dating back to the early 1980s, but Cunliffe et al. also argue that there are powerful cultural amplifiers of reputation, such as significant mentions of Xanax in the US rap scene (e.g. related to it being the cause of death of rapper Lil Peep; the musician Lil Xan who discusses his struggle with Xanax addiction yet retains a stage name based on the drug). Moreover, the level of cultural transmission between these countries could also help to explain the rise in online demand in the UK and Australia. The importance of online channels of transmission of reputation has affected, as Ilan (2020, p. 997) notes, ‘many spheres of social life’, including forms of ‘street culture’ which have responded to ‘the advent of digital media and social networks’ with ‘[q]uestions of identity and reputation […] now negotiated within a framework of omnipresent digital recording devices and all-saturating social media platforms’. The world of online, digital, and social media has transformed the ‘interaction markets’ and ‘material markets’ that Collins (2004, pp. 141–182) first examined in terms of interaction ritual theory and forms of cultural capital. In terms of chains of interaction rituals, individuals are drawn to cultural and material encounters that will be most emotionally and socially rewarding. So to return to the case of Xanax, through forms of cultural reputational amplification via music, Xanax may be perceived as reaching new levels of appeal in terms of style or aestheticism in combination with the clearly antinomian association it already has. As the rap – or drill and grime (Fatsis, 2019; Ilan, 2020, p. 995) or other – music movements win audiences and affiliations, so will substances associated with them, as has happened before in the cultural construction of other musical scenes and their associated rituals and paraphernalia (Shapiro, 1999; South, 1999b).

Drug consumption, besides being a practice undertaken under the umbrella of drug subcultures, is also a practice that represents ideas (discourses, fashions, etc.) in the culture of consumerism in which people engage daily. Consumption of products conveys symbolic meaning, and group identities are created based on their meaning and the norms and values we do or do not want to be associated with (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 2017). Identity has become a reflection of ‘lifestyles’ closely associated with commercial brands and the commodities they are labelling, as well as the context in which we purchase and consume them (Brisman and South, 2014). Therefore, the interaction rituals of drug consumption (Collins, 2011), what we choose to consume, and the way we consume it all represent our own interpretations of ‘self’ and of the social categories that we feel we belong to, based on consumption goods that symbolise the values we identify with.