Cents and Sociability: The Digital Disembedding of Illegal Markets

• In Event: Governance, Markets, and Innovation

Abstract

Banned markets—long distinguished by relational trade, which reduces risk and helps actors justify participation—are disembedded by economic tools, practices, and logic. The claim is supported by evidence from the making and transformation of the darknet economy, which emerged in the early 2010s. Archival data detail how a market designer cultivated community support for a new system for impersonal ecommerce. Analyses of 3.1 million messages and 1.6 million transactions from four markets that dominated the economy’s formative years (2012–2015) show that social engagement declined sharply relative to commercial transactions. Qualitative evidence explains that the sparse mixing of conversation and trade that remained did not resist trade disembedding, but facilitated it, by mitigating residual market problems.

Author

• Isak Ladegaard, University of Hong Kong