Time Magazine Reveals Secret Web of 'Drugs, Porn, Murder'!

NEW YORK—Is there something about the word "secret" that the people at Time magazine don't understand? Do they think it means, 'share with everyone,' because that's what they've gone and done with the secret web! Not a secret anymore. Haha. Just kidding. The only secret we can see is when Time will come to grips with the fact that it no longer has any business trying to get people to pay to read anything, especially an expose of something that by definition is not a secret if it is on the cover of Time magazine! Do they not understand that when something appears in their pages, it is already a cliché? We're being hard on Time, but the truth is we won't read all of The Secret Web: Where Drugs, Porn and Murder Live Online. Like most people, we won't pay to access any more than the headline and the few paragraphs that Time gives away for free. It's more than enough. The piece opens with the arrest by the FBI of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who "was the owner and administrator of Silk Road, a wildly successful online bazaar where people bought and sold illegal goods — primarily drugs but also fake IDs, fireworks and hacking software. They could do this without getting caught because Silk Road was located in a little-known region of the Internet called the Deep Web." So, in other words, people were safe in this "little-known region of the Internet" to shop on the "wildly successful online bazaar," because no one but them knew about it and law enforcement was clueless as to its existence. If that makes sense to you, by all means, get a subscription to Time! As silly as all this it, people in the adult entertainment industry will probably be miffed that once again corporate media has put the all-encompassing "porn" label into a headline that really meant to read "child porn," a ploy that is always consciously committed in order to draw the reader's eye, but as insulting a marketing tactic as it may be, porners in general have little to complain about when it comes to engaging in... um ... creative marketing and linguistic flexibilities. If anything, Time's lame attempt at relevance betrays the sad reality that we're all in this together. Porn sells subscriptions to content shot years ago while Time uses porn to try to sell subscriptions to stories that could have been written years ago. It's a bizarrely beautiful  symmetry of sin that does little to obscure the underlying digital dance of death that has all media in its grip.