4 From Agorism to OPSEC: Dark Web Markets and a Shifting Relationship to the State

“Everywhere I looked I saw the State.” —Dread Pirate Roberts Perhaps the most infamous Dark Web site was the original Silk Road drug market, hosted as a Tor hidden service. From its beginning in early 2011 to its seizure by law enforcement in late 2013, the Silk Road was arguably more than a market. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht, conceptualized Silk Road as a sociotechnical implementation of agorism, a radical market libertarian philosophy. Echoing Weberian theories of state legitimacy (as discussed in chapter 2), agorism holds that the state is indeed the sole source of coercion and violence in contemporary society. Rather than accepting this dominance as “legitimate,” however, agorists argue that the state is illegitimate precisely because of its monopoly on violence. For agorists, free markets offer a new model for social organizing that does not rely on coercion, violence, or state power, where exchanges, not law enforcement, could be the glue that holds society together. Ulbricht argued that every sale on Silk Road was not just a means for drug dealers to satisfy the desires of drug consumers but a blow to the concept of the state itself.