“Question for you,” one of his employees had asked at the time. “Do we allow selling kidneys and livers?”
Well, that was something Ross had never imagined people might want to hawk on the Silk Road. “Is it listed?” he replied. “Or someone wants to sell?”
The employee then forwarded an e-mail that had come into the Silk Road’s support page from someone who said they wanted to sell kidneys, livers, and other body parts; according to the anonymous sender, the sales of these internal organs would “all be consensual” between the sellers and the buyers.
On the black market a person’s kidney could sell for more than $260,000 (though a kidney from a Chinese man or woman would go for only $60,000), and a good liver was $150,000. Almost every part of a person’s body was for sale, and for a hefty profit. Bone marrow, for example, sold for as much as $23,000 a gram (compared with $60 a gram for cocaine). A family who couldn’t get that for their dying son in the broken U.S. health-care system would happily pay for it on the Dark Web.
“Yes, if the source consents then it is ok,” DPR wrote, then noted to his employee that “morals are easy when you understand the non-aggression principle,” citing the same libertarian argument he had used so many times in his debates at Penn State. Anything goes in a free market, the principle states, as long as you’re not violent toward anyone else without cause. (If someone tries to harm you, then you have every right to defend yourself and your personal property, Dread explained. An eye for an eye was the way of the libertarian world.) Selling a liver or spleen on a Web site was entirely moral and just, he noted.
In addition to allowing organs on the site, the Dread Pirate Roberts had also recently approved the sale of poisons on the Silk Road.
“So uhh we have a vendor selling cyanide,” wrote another of Dread’s employees. “Not sure where we stand on this, he’s not listing it as a poison, but its only the most well known assassination and suicide poison out there.” The employee followed up with “lol.”
DPR asked for a link to the sales page. The listing pointed out that while cyanide could be used to kill yourself (in about seven to nine seconds)—the person selling the acid had noted that with each order they were including a free copy of the e-book The Final Exit, which was a how-to guide for suicides. Cyanide did also have some legitimate uses, the seller pointed out, like cleaning gold and silver, and was “the perfect medicine to treat leprosy.”
After a couple of minutes deliberating, DPR said to the employee, “I think we’ll allow it.” And then he reiterated the site’s mantra: “It’s a substance, and we want to err on the side of not restricting things.”
The Silk Road, after all, was just the platform—no different from Facebook or Twitter or eBay—on which users communicated and exchanged ideas and currency. So who was DPR to err on the side of anything but yes? It wasn’t as if Twitter dictated what kind of opinions people could and could not write in the little box at the top of the screen. If you wanted to spew brilliance or idiocy in 140 characters, then so be it. It was your God-given right to say what you wanted on the Internet, in the same way it was your God-given right to buy or sell whatever you wanted and put it into your body—if you chose.
That had been Ross’s goal with weapons too when he started the Armory, though he recently had been forced to shut that site down because it had proven too difficult to get guns through the U.S. Postal Service. As a result, not enough people were willing to buy weapons on the site, so he reinstated the sale of these arms on the Silk Road (as a temporary solution) while he explored new ways to help people traffic them back and forth anonymously. To the Dread Pirate Roberts, whether the merchandise was guns, drugs, poisons, or body parts, it was the people’s right to buy and sell it.
“Absolutely,” the employee replied in agreement. “This is the black market after all :).”
“It is,” Ross responded, “and we are bringing order and civility to it.”
While these decisions were still difficult for Ross to make, the line where Ross ended and DPR began was beginning to blur. And just like other ambitious CEOs who ran other start-ups around San Francisco, he was unable to see how a single decision, made from behind a computer, could trickle down and affect an untold number of real, living human beings.
I think we’ll allow it.
Back in that metal box at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, René began speaking again, looking at his friend Ross and noting that in San Francisco, “it feels like we’re caught up in a moment.”
Ross, returning from another one of his daydreams, agreed. “I get that feeling as well,” he said. “I feel like the world is in flux.” It was, and in many ways the people around them were causing all of the changes.
For the next thirty minutes the conversation between Ross and René bounced from family and friends to drugs (and how much Ross had loved them as a teen). Then Ross talked about his almost-fiancée from Texas, and how the experience of her cheating had battered him emotionally.
“Are you at all jaded?” René asked.
“Oh yeah,” Ross replied. “Big time.”
René then went on to explain that he had experienced an epiphany of late, that we all work so hard in our jobs, and for what? “There is no level of success that would make me feel happy all the time,” he reflected. “Those little achievements are little fleeting moments.”
Ross scratched his beard, seemingly disagreeing with his friend. “I imagine there is some silver lining to . . . pushing yourself to the limit,” Ross said. “I’ve had similar experiences with my work, where that becomes everything, more important than anything.”
They then started to wrap up their recording. But first, before they said good-bye, René asked his friend where he would like to be twenty years from now.
“I want to have had a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by that time,” Ross remarked.
Then René asked, “Do you think you’re going to live forever?”
“I think it’s a possibility,” Ross declared into the microphone. “I honestly do; I think I might live forever in some form.”
Chapter 40
THE WHITE HOUSE IN UTAH
The little house on East 600 North Street in Spanish Fork, Utah, had seen better days. The white slats of siding were chipped from years of neglect, as was the wooden fence on the edge of the property. In all directions small white steeples rose into the Utah sky, offering endless places of worship. This was, after all, Mormon country, home of the Latter-day Saints.