Anyone can be Creative


Steve Jobs famously commented about creativity:
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Sure, we applaud creativity in the “good guys”. But whether we like it or not, bad guys can be creative too. Take Ross Ulbricht. As Nick Bilton explains in American Kingpin, Ulbricht put multiple existing technologies in a whole new combination to create his site:
1)      The Dark Web and Tor: The Dark Web is the parallel Internet where you can’t be tracked. Not by Google or Facebook or (critically) any government agency. To swim in this parallel Internet, you need a special browser called Tor.
2)     Bitcoins: Paying by cash or credit cards leaves a trail. But with the advent of Bitcoins, payments could be anonymized:
“It was like buying coins at a video arcade. You exchanged your cash for tokens, and then you got to play. Just as at an arcade, at the end of the day, no one knew who had used those tokens, because they all looked the same.”
3)     Rating systems: Ok, but if nobody could be tracked, why would anyone buy anything in the Dark Web? What if the seller absconded or shipped poor quality stuff? He couldn’t be traced, so how could the seller be trusted?
“Ross built a ratings system on the Silk Road where sellers were given “karma” points, which acted like positive or negative reviews, just as on eBay or Amazon.”
By combining all of the above, Ulbricht was able to build an “anonymous online store”, Silk Roads. To sell drugs initially, eventually expanding into everything from guns to contract killings.

If you read the book, you can’t but see the parallel to the protagonist (Walter White) of the hit serial, Breaking Bad:
“Walter White found in drugs the best way to express his technical brilliance as a chemist and businessperson. What he did may have been terrible and destructive, but he did it with such beauty and so adroitly that, to him at least, the very sin was absolved by the manner in which it was carried out.”
Oh c’mon, can you honestly say that you didn’t admire the genius of the great villains of screen and books? Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Kaiser Soze/Verbal Kent in The Usual Suspects, John Travolta in Face Off and Broken Arrow, Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones… Be honest.

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