"guy behind the computer"? Watching a Let's Play of a video game makes you a "guy behind a computer". This dude was responsible for one of the biggest online drug trafficking sites in the world.

Do you think that Foghorn Leghorn or somebody is the one growing the poppy seeds that became the Heroin sold on Silk Road? No, systems like cartels grow it. And they inflict massive amounts of violence in order to do so. People in parts of places like Mexico are getting eaten alive by that violence due the heroin epidemic in the US fueling the illegal drug trade even further. Try telling victims of the drug trade that the people running and profiting on that epidemic are "just guys behind computers".

Does Ross Ulbricht deserve a life sentence? I don't really think so, but it sure as hell isn't because he's some angel "behind a computer". But because criminal justice should be rehabilitative and protective, not massively punitive and destructive of the lives it governs. Taking away someone's whole life is a serious matter.

Is Ross Ulbricht responsible for people in general doing drugs? No, and people will do them regardless of the law. But that also doesn't give Ulbricht a free pass for engaging in the act of trading drugs, taking part in the drug trade, a trade which is largely violent in many ways today and hurts people. (And no, it is not non-violent because your weed dealer grows 3 plants in his room and gives you sweet deals on it. There are consequences to the entire system of illegal drug trafficking.) No more than you have a free pass to take advantage of the mentally ill or a child, simply because there's a buck to be made from them. The solution to the violence of the drug trade isn't "let's monetize it ruthlessly", it's "let's dismantle it by putting people's lives first".

Is Ross Ulbricht absolutely guilty of running a criminal enterprise, and did he knowingly profit off a massively unjust model of business that put his own profit and selfish, misguided values ("nobody was getting hurt!") above the lives of people who suffer at the hands of the drug trade? Did he externalize the human consequences of his poor lil' business in order to profit? You bet your ass he did.

Call a spade a goddamn spade. Why so many dorks come out of the woodwock on this website in order to identify with Ulbricht, I'll never know. He's a gigantic moron (who apparently could not understand the possible implications his own trade could have) and criminal who was caught. Do people also empathize with abusive pimps here too, or did I miss something?

(Perhaps there's something there, about how Ulbricht and his fall fully characterizes the idea of "fuck you, got mine" which is pervasive in the spectacle of Silicon Valley, and the race for funny money. It's so sad Ulbricht's business failed, think about it! Everything and everything is fair game, and little apps can totally change it all. There was no violence involved at all using drug-trade-dot-com! He was just "disrupting" the good ol' drug trade, and messed up a lil' bit. He didn't "understand" that some living humans would be kidnapped and literally flayed alive, burned into dust and the ashes disposed, in order to intimidate people, so cartels could control production routes. Oops, maybe 2.0 can fix it. I bet if his last name was "Rodriguez" or something and he wasn't a huge nerd who knew how to use SSH, we'd be seeing some different tunes in here, too.)