“When I found out about Silk Road, I thought: ‘This is the most amazing thing that has happened in my lifetime.’ I’m sure that’s an overstatement. But I’m baffled by the Internet. It keeps throwing up amazing things,” Alex Oates tells ArsTechnica. His one man play about Silk Road will be performed at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The play is the story of his fictional Silk Road rise from a regular kid into one of the most successful drug dealers on the internet. The play has an anti-Drug War slant to it, as is evident in this excerpt of the script:
Obviously the law wants to close it down; this is global, politicians from every country finish a beer and talk about how to tackle this development in the war on drugs. TV producers and presenters sniff repeatedly and dust the white off their platinum credit cards as they speak with outrage about the bold piracy of it all. Agencies of stressed law enforcers pop prozac, binge beta blockers and benzos as they stab at ways to break it but it is so new that they don’t have a clue.
But this isn’t just a play about the Walter White of the web. Much of the narrative deals with the death of the original site and the aftermath. And Silk Road comes just months before Ross Ulbricht, arrested in association with the real Silk Road, is scheduled to go on trial in New York. Oates received a grant from the Kevin Spacey Foundation and anonymous donations from actual Silk Road users in bitcoin. These donations still only total a fraction of what he needs for the play’s budget, so Oats is hoping to raise enough to continue the show after Fringe Fest ends and potentially bring it to the U.S. in time for Ulbricht’s trial. The play helps to explain the somewhat confusing mechanisms that fueled the site, and its offspring.
It’s instructional… after the play you would have enough knowledge to buy drugs on the Internet. To be clear, I’m not saying you should buy drugs on the Internet, but you can if you want to.
Sounds good to us. Silk Road will be opening at the New Diorama Theater in London on July 27th and is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival July 31st – August 25th.
