The power of digital platforms: What do darknet drug platforms have in common with platform giants?

Digital technologies are changing the way supply and demand are socially organised on illicit markets. Illicit drug platforms on the darknet offer the infrastructure to connect sellers and customers across time and space; they also use encryption software to discourage law enforcement interventions. While economic sociology has recently started to investigate the social organisation of illegal markets, it has largely overlooked the operation of illicit online markets. What existing research on illicit online markets there is has focused on harm-reduction practices and market efficiency. We compare the socio-technical organisation of illicit online markets with legal tech platforms to argue that both use their emancipatory potential to drive the accumulation of behavioural surplus and thereby reproduce social structures of power. We use the analytical method of dialectics to explore the ideological contrasts of platform capitalism in relation to the phenomenon of darknet drug platforms. Both are based on a new economic order that claims social interactions in the form of data as a resource that is extracted, analysed and sold profitably. Our contribution demonstrates the importance of exploring socio-technical arenas of exchange that are not law-abiding by nature, and thereby extends the field of economic sociology.