Alex Winters' feature documentary, Deep Web, premiered yesterday at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) multimedia festival in Austin, Texas. It features Keanu Reeves himself as the narrator of the picture. The film tries to analyze the emerging phenomenon of the new, decentralized and cryptographic Internet; sometimes a mysterious, often dangerous world that escapes contemporary justice. More often, however, it is a place of new perspectives, new and revolutionary ideas, and a zone of free and unhindered information flow. Deep Web also questions the image that the authorities present to us in the case of Ross Ulbricht - the alleged head of what was once the largest online black market on Silk Road, which offered all sorts of widely recognized "illegal" goods and services - from drugs and other narcotics, to secret information, documents, weapons, and the possibility to order murder. It turns out that Ulbricht is not necessarily the man that a New York court found him to be at the end of his trial - the "real" Dread Pirate Roberts (as the site's owner and chief executive always called himself). In fact, the people speaking in the film often let us know that there could have been many more DPR's in reality - one of the witnesses mentions three people. On the subject of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism, the broadly defined "cypherpunks" subculture, and what follows a new, increasingly broader view on issues such as the economy, economics and the model of how society works, we hear from writer and activist, Andy Greenberg; renowned programmer and one of Bitcoin's developers, Amir Taaki; activist and crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson; as well as family members of Ulbricht himself. The video also includes a very precise and mostly sympathetic explanation of the nature of Bitcoin itself. At one point, there is also a reference to the nascent decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer online trading exchange, OpenBazaar. The festival premiere of Deep Web received a very large and seemingly mostly positive reception from the audience. The screening took place in a fairly large auditorium, with a capacity of about 500 viewers, yet filled to the brim. After the screening the screenwriter and director, Alex Winters, accompanied by Lyn Ulbricht (Ross Ulbricht's mother) and the aforementioned Cody Wilson and Andi Greenberg entered the stage and for about 20 minutes answered questions from the audience. The film has already been mentioned on such websites and TV stations as Bloomberg, CNN International, Wired, UsaToday, Business Insider, Yahoo!, CNET and The Huffington Post. Any reproduction, distribution, electronic processing or transmission of content from the bitcoin.pl website requires prior permission from the portal. Tags bitcoin Deep Web festival film cryptography cryptocurrencies premiere Ross Ulbricht Silk Road South by Southwest
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