Just like his previous film (Downloaded), Alex Winter creates a whole narrative stitching himself into the characters he's connecting. First, it paints an image of The Silk Road as a community whose main goal was to decrease the level of violence involved in drug-related transactions, to benefit the buyers (that rated both sellers and their products) thus creating an utopian libertarian free market experience. Second, it follows the case of the government and law enforcement agencies, their efforts to shutdown TSR and the ultimate futility of them, as several dozen drug markets appeared in the Deep Web as soon as TSR went offline. Third, it creates an analogy between the War On Drugs that has been going on worldwide for the past 40 years (to negligible effect) and how moving it into the DW will prove useless, given the vastness of the realm and new crypto technology that will arise from those angry against the US agencies involved into hacking a foreign server without a warrant, literally with nobody bating an eye. Lastly, it gives depth to Ross Ulbricht as both a gentle person and a free spirited thinker who was a believer of applying free market rules and 21th century economics into the drug trade. The toll on his person, his family and friends is felt in the last part of the film, humanising Ross and those around him. Ross Ulbricht was a very, very naive fool?... most likely. As a physician who has seen first hand the long terms effects of recreational drugs on patients, and its deadly outcome in many cases, I can't condone or offer any sympathy to Ross as a Deep Web drug concierge. He's a criminal who happens to be a nice guy. However, I'm very much against the way the government built its case, essentially breaking international law and precipitating a whole new level of drug trade that won't be excised by shutting down one of thousands of drug markets that have appeared with the demise of Ross Ulbricht. Nobody wins. Nobody.

I knew what to expect from the first minute after a speach about 'a fuck you to the system' and 'the tools of power'. That's all good, but the government actually made the deep web. There is no fuck you. They have as full an access as possible. They're ain't nothing happening there that they're not allowing. The first page created by Tor was the hidden wiki, which is basically a source of black markets and some sick stuff. Who made the first illegal pages? Seems to me that the whole point of a deep web is for the government to control black markets. But this documentary glamorises the cyber punk stuff, and that's what people want to hear. Just like the hollywood like story of Bitcoin creation. This documentary say bitcoin is free of banks. I know the federal reserve was very interested in digital currency in the 90's, so I wouldnt be quite sure of Bitcoin. Sure it probaboy was the cypher punks lf the 90s. There are just too many unknowns in the whole story. Anyway, this documentary focuses on the Silk Road story and anonymity. The guy running Silk Road is see as some anarchist freedom fighter, but didn't he just sell drugs, to kids sometimes, and capitalised.
The documentary becomes about feeing the poor drug dealer.
Anonymity has become a distorted subject. People talk about it like we lost it, but we never had it. Do you need 100% anominity when looking at a few pages? Im against spying, malware , but if you want true privacy, maybe you should turn off the computers. When you take away the glossy anarchist skin, what kind of society does a deep web actually help create? There is so much to discuss and talk about yet this documentary focuses on one man.