Episode Transcript: #633 - Alex Winter
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Alex Winter. Alright, we're live. Nice to meet you, man. You too. I knew of you as an actor, and I knew of your work as a director, but I didn't know that you were into serious shit like this deep web documentary. This is really fascinating. I was watching it just before you got here, so it's all fresh and crackling in my mind. Cool. And first of all, how'd you get involved in this?
Well, it was a couple things. First of all, it's great to be on the show. I've been a big fan for a long time. But I got online pretty heavily in the late 80s, early 90s in what was known as the BBS Usenet era.
And in those days, I was really interested in sort of burgeoning online communities, people who were sort of the growth of internet-based communities.
And in those days, you could get on and you would sort of create sort of clubs or groups or rooms, as they were called, with all kinds of like-minded people.
And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on. And it wasn't, by any means, just illegal stuff. It was just sort of rarefied, specialized, whatever, politics, activism, people who are interested in drugs, people who are interested in sort of pushing boundaries in all these different ways.
And at that point, I discovered encryption, people who were using the internet for anonymity and privacy. Some of them were like parts of like, you know, self-help groups or like rape counseling, any number of things.
But it was also people who were selling drugs. So I first encountered the drug, the online drug markets in probably 90, 91.
That's when I first discovered encrypted emails, sort of this whole notion of like people who really were building encryption technologies for a number of reasons.
And so I found that interesting. And I spent some years working on the Napster story. I made a doc about the rise and fall of Napster called Downloaded.
And I met Sean Fanning and Sean Parker back in 2000 when Napster was being decimated, shot at by all sides.
And I set out about telling their story. That took me a while to get done and made.
But I'd met a lot of people in the technology sector working on that movie, both in kind of the public face of technology and the sort of privacy anonymity side, the sort of hackers, activists, cryptographers.
Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the documentary initially is that it wasn't it's Silk Road wasn't necessary.
And for folks who don't know what Silk Road is, Silk Road is this website that was taken down by the government because people were exchanging, buying and selling illegal drugs from it.
And amongst other things that are illegal. But it was more of a community, it seems, than anything.
I've had a message board on my website since 1998 and it's got millions of posts and it's just this weird community of like minded, odd human beings and a lot of really fascinating, intelligent human beings.
And I've had some really great exchanges and interactions with them.
And what I really got from what they were saying in the documentary was like the community that they had created was in many ways like better than any community any of them knew in real life.
So it was much more than just drugs are being sold there and we have to shut it down.
It's like if drugs were being sold there, it was a small part of what that thing was all about.