Abstract Banned markets—long distinguished by relational trade, which reduces risk and helps actors justify participation—are disembedded by economic tools, practices and logics. This claim is supported by evidence from the making and transformation of the darknet economy in the early 2010s. Archival data document how a market designer fostered adoption of a system for impersonal ecommerce by cultivating community support for it. But that early social engagement gradually declined relative to commercial transactions—evidenced by analyses of 3.1 million messages and 1.6 million transactions from four markets that dominated the period 2012–2015. Some mixing of conversation and trade remained, but qualitative evidence shows that this sociability did not resist trade disembedding, but rather facilitated it by mitigating market problems.
Isak Ladegaard (Sun,) studied this question.