THE ROVING PECKER PRESENTS: "The Red Market" by Raincoaster!

Greetings, Manor Hors! Periodically, "The Roving Pecker" presents urgent missives from filthy esteemed guest writers. Today's is from Raincoaster! Enjoy. 

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The "Red Market," it’s called. Like many of the darker places on the internet, it’s not really somewhere you want to end up. Not that you have much say about it by the time you get there: you’ll be dead. You’ll be...inventory. For the Red Market, you see, is the online marketplace in human remains.

For art. For morbid philosophizing. For collecting. But also for birthday gifts. For decor. But most of all, for profit. This is the story of that marketplace, as told in the book These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters from Berghahn Books.

"These were people, once. Now, disarticulated, robbed from their resting place, the remains were relegated to anonymous things, fragments, stripped of their humanity."

Huffer and Graham, These Were People Once

Damien Huffer, a PhD student at the Australian National University, had been called in to assist in a court case about possibly smuggled items. Those items were human beings. The journey from person to mere curio is shockingly less complex than you might imagine, and even drearily quotidian to those who make their living by marketing the dead. Huffer and Shawn Graham of Carleton University have made it their business, their living, to track and observe this sad and gruesome trade, and they’ve laid it out in their book.

"There are more Ikea cabinets filled with the dead than you’d imagine."

Huffer and Graham, These Were People Once

Let’s be clear: this is not the scientifically and ethically sanctioned relocation of donated bodies among accredited institutions. It’s not the harvesting of organs from consenting and deceased donors. And it’s not, as you may imagine, housed in some Stygian corner of the Dark Web, reachable only by VPN and a memorized password from the Necronomicon. No indeed. In fact, it's on Facebook. It's on Instagram. It's on TikTok, above your 11-year-old's best dance moves.

The first known online trade in human remains took place on eBay, around 2002-2003, and eBay eventually banned the practice. Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) do not. The researchers recently reported a skull seller to Facebook, and were notified it's not in violation of the Terms of Service. Presumably it would take down a page that sold living human beings, but once they're dead, they're just more material for Marketplace. Got to feed the algorithm. Chop-chop!

Huffer and Graham have delved deeply into this murky marketplace, looking not for human remains, but for the meaning in the market itself. Because the Internet is forever, there’s a written record of every offer, comment, like, conversation. The pair have sifted through the data to determine what the trade in deceased humans can tell us about the living who participate in the trading and the societies, including ours, which tolerate it. Graham says, “Facebook, Instagram and all the rest work as designed, which is to connect you up with people with similar interests. The algorithm will be the dealer for you.”

"For the last several years, we have been trying to understand why people do this, where and from whom do the remains come or belong to, and how extensive is this trade. Damien is a bioarchaeologist (one who studies primarily ancient or historic-period human remains to understand how lives were lived in the past). Shawn is a digital archaeologist (one who uses digital technologies to ask new questions of the past, and who also thinks about how archaeological methods shed light on our digitally mediated present)."

Together, they undertook a macro as well as micro examination of the Red Market. Following hashtags and relying on algorithms and sock puppet accounts, they trained each platform to show them more and more human remains on offer, and, ever the unquestioning and amoral servants, the algorithms provided. Hundreds of thousands of data points, each one relating to an object which, yes, had once been a person. Using a neural network approach, they were able to follow conversations, map connections, trace influence, and define the online marketplace in ways that some marketers perhaps wish they hadn’t.

As for the trade itself, yes, it’s legal; or more specifically, it’s insufficiently illegal. The laws around the handling of the dead are inconsistent from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and tend not to be applied at all if an object appears sufficiently aged. If tragedy plus time equals comedy, then human beings plus time equal “antiquities.” While laws exist about committing indignities to a corpse, they tend not to be applied by prosecutors once the corpse in question has come to be viewed as just old stuff.

In their book, Graham and Huffer look into the ways in which human remains have been laundered into mere objects, to be treated without regard for the humanity of the person themselves, and without regard for the wishes and customs of their descendants and civilizations. Shockingly but perhaps not surprisingly, groups who are marginalized in life are equally marginalized in death, making up a disproportionate number of the remains traded online.

"The human remains trade—the trading in human materials stripped of their humanity—is like buying and selling the evidence from the broader crimes of structural racism."

Huffer and Graham, These Were People Once

The age of Colonialism was essentially the age of denationalization of foreigners. Victorian life in particular was filled with skeletons obtained by an explorer, abroad, always abroad. To display a mummy, or a shrunken head, or a Hand of Glory picked up during a Grand Tour of the Continent, well that's fashionable. By offshoring the bodies, the Victorians essentially offshored the guilt, since the colonial viewpoint seldom regarded indigenous peoples as people at all. Indeed, going further back, slaves were considered to belong to their masters even after death, and provided medical schools and curio cabinets with material for centuries.

And let’s be clear: anonymity adds value, and sometimes so can fiction. “It's the story that sells the skeleton,” explains Huffer. The process of putting a body on the market requires that the body be stripped of most of its true identity as an individual: it’s literally a process of depersonalization, sometimes including artificially aging the remains, removing clothing and accessories, and otherwise destroying the cultural and human context. 

Tomb raiding destroys the knowledge that archaeologists could have gleaned from the intact remains, and of course it robs the descendants of that person. Graham explains, “For many groups, these are not objects, these are ancestors, and they have power in this world, and they are active agents in this world, but because they're in the trade they suffer another round of dehumanization. There is real harm that this trade causes.”

But science and diligent researchers can, sometimes, re-personalize the antiquities. In one remarkable example, two bodies looted from an ancient burial site in Texas and subsequently traded were traced by DNA to a man still living in the area. That man, Xoxi Nayapiltzin, has this to say about the experience: “Sadly, there was the most horrifying news a grandchild can receive: two of my ancestral grandmothers had been removed from their burial grounds! One is now in an unrelated person’s attic and the other in an institutional laboratory. They do not belong there. They belong in Mother Earth with their family in our homeland.”

Despite the price tags, despite the demand, despite the curiosity, despite the relentless grind to get the attention of the almighty algorithm, it is beginning to seem that what can be undone, a person’s very humanity, can be regained. It remains to be seen if the people themselves can be repatriated.

Photo Credits: Berghahn Books; Reuters; Getty Images,