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Chapter 11
THE GAWKER ARTICLE
The Café Grumpy coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looked like every other hipster enclave
in America. Laptop screens glowed while headphones blared silently into people’s ears. The
men and women who sat sipping overpriced coffee wore the uniform of hipster Brooklyn: skintight
jeans and bohemian tattoos that crawled up their arms and across their fingers. Outside was the
industrial wasteland of McGuinness Avenue, the thoroughfare that connected Brooklyn and Queens
above the sewage-laced Newtown Creek. Chop shops and gas stations lined the streets. A few trendy
condos were going up—a sign that this subset of creative types, who huddled around their laptops
each day, were an endangered species too. For now, though, they were the linchpins of the gentrifying
neighborhood, this rump state, and Café Grumpy was its capital.
Most of the people in that coffee shop were writers trying to learn how to blog, or bloggers
trying to learn how to write. A new class of creatives, living their own unique American dream,
freelancing and hoping to be read by someone, somewhere.
Amid these writers sat Adrian Chen, a young Asian man, seemingly lost in his own world at his
laptop as he scrolled through a long discussion on a Web forum. The chatter he was reading, with
skepticism and disbelief, was about a Web site on the Dark Web that was being labeled the “Amazon
for drugs.”
On the forum some people complained that this Web site, called the Silk Road, was dangerous—
that selling heroin on the Internet could kill people who didn’t know how to use “H.” Or that this new
drug bazaar could give the new digital currency, Bitcoin, a bad name—while others contended that
this site might make buying drugs safer and that it perfectly took advantage of online anonymity in a
way that had never been done before.
But Adrian thought something entirely different: This has to be a hoax. After all, he knew the
underbelly of the Internet better than almost any writer alive. He had been a blogger for Gawker, a
New York–based gossip site, for almost two years. While working the weekend and graveyard shifts,
he had become synonymous with finding and writing about trolls and hackers online. He trod through
the dark, dangerous side of the Web and brought back stories of people doing crazy, fucked-up things.
But was anyone really crazy enough to set up a Web site like this? he wondered. Adrian knew
there was only one way to find out. He downloaded Tor and navigated to the Silk Road, and sure