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After breakfast each morning, while René and Selena sauntered off to work, their new roommate,
Ross, would wave good-bye and wander down the street to a nearby coffee shop to oversee his drug
empire.
The safest place he had found to work was a small café on Laguna Street called Momi Toby’s,
which was conveniently located a block from René’s apartment on Hickory Street. Momi Toby’s
(pronounced “mow-mee toe-bees”) resembled a French bistro with small tables and chairs outside.
Inside, the Wi-Fi was free, and lots of seating allowed Ross to have his back against the wall so no
one could see his computer screen, and subsequently the Silk Road.
As the weeks went on, Ross made new friends in the city, which carried some stress. While he
couldn’t talk to them about what he did for work, he could discuss what inspired him to do it. After
all, in San Francisco the mentality of using technology to try to disrupt a broken system wasn’t a
strange way of thinking but rather the norm. In so many ways, the programmers and entrepreneurs
Ross met were just like him.
They looked at the world around them and saw that the government was a ball of wasteful red
tape; that the taxi industry treated customers like shit; hotels overcharged and overtaxed; health care
was a sham, driven by the needs of the insurance agencies, not the sick; oil-dependent cars had helped
to justify an eternal war in the Middle East; and illegal drugs were only illegal because the
government wanted to control the people. And all of these issues were a result of the previous
generations’ mistakes. Their parents had inextricably fucked up the world we lived in, and it was the
people in San Francisco—those just like Ross—who were going to use technology to fix it all.
You’re fucking welcome!
He was also invigorated by the manifestation of the libertarian ideals around him that the startups
were employing. And here was Ross, doing the exact same thing, but instead of taxis or hotels,
health care or gas-guzzling cars, he was trying to defeat the U.S. government and its pathetic,
destructive war on drugs.
The CEOs of these other start-ups were no different from Ross, either. They had all read the
same Ayn Rand books. These chief executives shared the same quotes on Facebook as he did: “The
question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” The leaders of these companies
all preached the same verbiage as the Dread Pirate Roberts too, on their blogs and in their press
releases: “Let the market decide; not the government.” “Let the people determine who should win; not
the politicians.” “We’re changing the world and making it a better place.”
Most of all, the new friendships he was making were the perfect antidote to the problems he was
now experiencing on the Silk Road. Sadly, his closest confidant was starting to rub him the wrong
way. Not only was Variety Jones not okay with selling H, which went against Ross’s entire libertarian
philosophy behind the Silk Road, but VJ also proclaimed that sure, while he was there to help Dread
free people from the clutches of government, they were still, at the end of the day, drug dealers.
Ross vehemently disagreed. “As long as we don’t cross [a] line in our pursuit,” DPR wrote to
Variety Jones, “then we are only doing good.”
“Ha, dude, we’re criminal drug dealers,” VJ responded. “What line shouldn’t we cross?”
“Murder, theft, cheating, lying; hurting people,” DPR replied, resentful of the question. “That
line. We are drawing a new line I guess you could say. According to that line, we aren’t criminals.”
This discussion echoed another suggestion from VJ, that Ross should put a powerful lawyer on
the payroll. “You need to pick a top man, a top man in his field, with top man contacts,” Jones wrote.