Joshuah Bearman on The Rise and Fall of Silk Road

It is, in a way, a techno noir, right?

Because it's this crime story with all these twists

and turns, all these unreliable narrators

in this unusual setting, online.

I'm Josh Bearman and I wrote a two part series

about the Silk Road and it's this story about this

illegal clandestine drug bazaar.

Well, it was interesting, Ross Ulbricht who started the site

was a scientist because he got interested in libertarian

economics and wanted to sort of program this experiment.

In a sense, Silk Road was a disruption idea

because Ross used Tor, a protocol that allows you to

basically visit and run a site anonymously,

it was sort of like a hidden Amazon.

It wasn't really hidden, anybody could use it,

but the government couldn't track who was using it

or find it, so you could buy heroin or cocaine

and all the vendors, you could see like

the transaction ratings, like it actually was

a very efficient system, it worked very well.

And I was very sympathetic to Ross when I was writing

and think about what he started, you know,

the promise of youth and the big idea,

like you could see it being very exciting.

You know, it sort of curdled into something else

and also became about ego.

If it wasn't for the murder stuff, I think a lot of people

would be very sympathetic.

It sounds great until you want to put the revolution

into practice, and then all of a sudden, you know,

you're like my idea is so good, I have to kill you, right?

Well, this is kind of a crazy story to report.

This is not my usual type of thing,

ongoing criminal investigation, 'cause that's hard, right?

Nobody's supposed to talk to you

and doesn't want to talk to you.

It took a long time to establish trust in the way

that I wanted to tell the story, which was

as this big narrative about identity

and how moral transformations happen that you can see

over time of all the characters.

It just had more, it was a true crime story,

but also this really human story.