Community and/or commotion?

Today's Onlife engagement provides unprecedented levels of communication between otherwise unconnected users. Social media has effectively provided concrete instances of moral panic that underscore the delicate balance of online discussions and their impact on everyday life. Already well-known on the anonymous image-board platform 4chan (Threadgold, 2019; Ball, 2023) hybrid forms of mass raids have gained global attention. These incidents often involve groups of youths, dressed in dark hoods, storming popular shops to steal goods in a swift, coordinated manner – a trend widely reported across the UK in recent years. Similar tactics have also been observed in the US and Brazil, where social media has played a key role in mobilizing pro-Trump supporters (Klein, 2023) and pro-Bolsonaro groups (Malleret et al, 2023), amplifying and organizing such actions. More subtly, social media platforms foster environments where toxic elements mirror traits associated with the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of personality – narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism (Craker and March, 2016). These traits are not only visible in the toxic gendered communities of spaces like the so-called ‘manosphere’ or ‘femcels’ but they also serve to ignite and spread harmful ideologies and behaviours that cross races, gender, and the political spectrum (Johanssen and Kay, 2024), with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots only making the matter more complex and harder to reason with (Alegre, 2024). Despite the damaging nature of toxic communities, intervention by platform moderators often comes too late – banning content and users only after significant harm has already been done (Hoffman et al, 2020; Ball, 2023).

Encrypted barriers

Control of information has become a central element of the everyday use of smart devices. Users consult devices accessible only through strictly individualized biometric features, such as face recognition and fingerprints, inserting keys and opening new screens that unfold our intimate space. They store an increasing amount of information at the tip of our fingers, which includes both vital and trivial matters, from work-related to anything intimate. The content of the device is personal, and the information is not simply private, but secret. By this means, secrecy has for evermore become a key dimension of modern life. It is a pervasive aspect of our technologies and is particularly embraced within smart features and devices (see Knight and Saxby, 2014; Knights and Morris, 2015) To hide is an action perpetually suggested to the user, and they need to constantly generate hidden content. But more than that, our text messages and chats appear to be ‘secret’, protected by encrypted technologies, yet such protection is flawed: we can easily screen-shot conversations and share them online – with serious criminological implications (Lavorgna et al, 2022). Such conditions are in no way marginal, nor marginated.

This chapter looks at technological innovation replicating elements of harm and criminality on a structural and corporal level – with direct effects on users, consumers, and producers. It offers an analysis of profit-based Big Tech misconduct, with particular emphasis on Amazon's web-based dynamics of control over consumers and staff; gig economy abuse (Uber and the like); technological planned obsolescence; and environmental harms and green criminology perspectives.

Criminology of the hyperconnected life

The ambiguity of contemporary life constantly tackles the existence of ‘reality’ and the multiple dimensions of its ‘essence’. Our Globalized technocracies are fundamentally shared within an online, internet-induced, digital, and, especially ‘virtual’ world, combined with concrete, ‘in real life’ (IRL), away-from-keyboard (AFK), and ‘meatspace’ existence. Mireille Hildebrandt's work emphasizes that our real lives are neither solely online nor offline, highlighting a blended existence that we are still in the process of understanding (Hildebrandt, 2015: 42). Hildebrandt asserts that we are transitioning from an information society to a data-driven society, which has significant implications for the world we rely on, underscoring the extensive use of machine-learning technologies that drive data-driven agency, posing threats to privacy, identity, autonomy, non-discrimination, due process, and the presumption of innocence. For Luciano Floridi, hyperconnected human societies are becoming more and more similar to ‘mangroves growing in brackish water’ (Floridi, 2020: 1). This is the fundamental basis of the Onlife Manifesto, edited by Floridi in 2015, and is a central reference of this book. As coined by Floridi, the term ‘Onlife’ is a blending of the words ‘online’ and ‘life’, implying ‘the new experience of a hyperconnected reality within which it is no longer sensible to ask whether one may be online or offline’ (Floridi, 2015: 1). Floridi and his colleagues drew inspiration from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) to explore how information and communication technologies (ICTs) interact with public spaces and contemporary life (Simon and Ess, 2015).

Just as I thought to write these lines, a one-line programming error has frozen many airlines, banks, hospitals, video-streaming services, point-of-sales terminals and websites. The CrowdStrike code expected 21 values in an array, but received 20. Only 8.5 million computers were affected on 19 July 2024, but they were cloud/data centre-based servers running the Microsoft platforms for enterprise-critical services. The event has been termed the largest IT fail ever. The Microsoft Corporation blames the CrowdStrike event on the European Union and its anti-monopoly regulations.

Much of this book was written with a large language model constantly nudging me to accept line completions (GitHub 2023). I redacted almost all content suggestions as uninteresting. For instance, it suggests right now, having observed what I wrote in the paragraph above, that ‘the Crowdstrike event was a “wake-up call” for the world. It wasn’t. It was a one-line programming error. It was a wake-up call for the people who wrote the code’. The model making this suggestion, however, was itself trained to more or less write code for people, so that wake-up call might be hard to respond to. Who or what is being called by whom or what is not clear.

When readers meet passages of code in the book, they should be awake to the writing of the code. I have often supplicated generative AI platforms to write code (e.g. write Python code to demonstrate the basic operation of an endpoint detection response system such as CrowdStrike. Please provide comments.). Their facility in writing it attests to the sometimes startling predictability of coding.

There is a doorway on the southern wall of a large church in Venice, the basilica known as the Frari. The complex geometry of the Baroque-style doorway commemorates Giovanni Pesaro, 103th Doge of Venice (1658– 1659). Much disliked, Pesaro died suddenly in his first year as Doge. In 2024, the main resonance of the word ‘Doge’ is probably Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency first started with satirical intent but persistently traded on exchanges alongside the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Luckycoin and Litecoin in almost ten years of speculation.

The heavily ornate doorway (see Figure II.1) has the Doge seated on one of several platforms under a gold-tasselled canopy, flanked by a variety of martial, judicial, scholarly and artistic figures, as well as some quasi-mythical animals and angels. Above the Doge, close to the ceiling of the building, two small angels hover, holding an unfurled scroll, presumably inscribed with either the laws of Venice or the Doge's achievements. Pesaro and various attendants occupy niches separated by black marble columns. Two mythical creatures sit at his feet. The niches and columns stand on a thick plinth borne, along with heavy sacks of grain, on the shoulders of four black-marble figures clothed in torn fabric, slaves brought from Venice's colonies, themselves standing on four pedestals. A door to the piazza outside stands in the centre. At the base, and almost at the floor level where visitors and tourists go in and out in droves, skeletal corpse-like naked figures hold gold-lettered eulogies.

Platform edges are hard to locate. Power-laden like a city-state, vertiginous like a ten-metre diving platform, lifted-up like a concert stage, replete with technicalities like a geometrical proof, and as niche-rich as coastal rocks, platform edges run between inside and outside, core and periphery, on and off.

It may be that platform edges run along tangled lines of code and devices, through interfaces, networks, sensors, chips and screens. Inhabited in practice yet difficult to perceive or untangle, people step into these entanglements every time they open and close documents across different devices and platforms. Sometimes not knowing where the document is stored, they pause to ask: ‘Where is that file?’ They negotiate uncertain boundaries and thresholds between what belongs to them and what belongs to others, what is part of their work and what is not, or where their work takes place given the complete mixing of platforms into work, education, home life and government. Their work, their time with family and friends, their finances, health, education and leisure, increasingly run into platform edges guarded by requests for user names and authentication or ‘use Google/Facebook/Apple to login’ requests. They encounter limits in storage on their devices or in cloud data stores and wonder whether to copy everything somewhere else, or buy more space. They lose or find themselves using apps chosen from tens of thousands on offer in app stores such as GooglePlay and Apple Corporation's App Store.

This book anticipates re-grounded worlds in which platforms have become less consolidated as speaking positions, less encroaching along their edges and more seamful in their composition. In their gathering and alignments of devices, numberings, sensings, and closures or captures, platforms pre-figure what they are but cannot affirm: ensembles and their vibratory sensings.

There is something at once deeply theoretically and empirically disconcerting about re-working platforms as ensembles.

On the one hand, the ensemble concept developed in this book can draw on some fairly strong philosophical support. A high-level support comes from Gilles Deleuze's account of Ideas in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2001). Ideas are ensembles. Ensembles gather ‘differential relations and singular points’, they ‘begin with the inessential’, and their ‘essences’ are constructed ‘in the form of centres of envelopment around singularities’ (Deleuze 2001, 264). Ideas in this sense gather presentiments of divergences, approximations, and movements of ground and earth found in ensembles. Some instances of singularities or inessential points found in the platform world are terminals, chips, hashing, instruction sets, plugs, and floating point arithmetic. As starting points, they promise little, but much unfolds from them.

On the other hand, anticipating something by doing experimental ontology, and experimenting with such inessential and localized points of departure, seems to avoid central problems and controversies that affect all of us, and that many people suffer from greatly.

At base, Euclidean space has little concern with coordinates and numbers but much concern with figures and containers. In Euclid's Elements, the primary geometry textbook for engineering sciences, the definition of a figure makes no mention of dimensions or the coordinates that Descartes instrumented as Euclidean space. Euclid defines a figure as ‘that which is contained by any boundary or boundaries’ (Euclid 2012, 1). A figure could be a circle, a square, a triangle, and so on, but not a line or a surface extended indefinitely, since those have no endpoints or extremities. This definition relies on preceding ones, many of which rely on even more elementary propositions and line-drawing; for example, ‘Definition 2: A surface is that which has length and breadth only’ (Euclid 2012, 1).

Figures in Euclid's Elements are, broadly speaking, containers to be mixed together to construct new containers. The propositions of the Elements are, in practice, instructions on how to use the definitions, postulates and previous propositions in combination to make figures (such as Figure III.1): ‘Proposition 1: On a given finite straight line to construct an equilateral triangle’ (Euclid 2012, 3). The propositions are figurative in Euclid's sense of the figure in that they are constructed using a compass and ruler to draw figures. The propositions, even those concerning number rather than geometry, are figured out using lines as boundaries. For Euclid, figures contain other figures or containers.

What does experimental ontology do with devices? Implicitly posed in many places. It's a comfortable hotel, warm and well-lit, in the Lake District, north-west England, February 2016. The fields, hedges and woodland outside are snow-covered, sloping down towards the slate-grey waters of the lake. The meeting room is muted. Soft carpets, plush drapes, ergonomic seats and a continuous flow of fresh baked goods and locally sourced hot drinks cushion the participants. In the meeting room, computer scientists, a scattering of health and environmental scientists, statisticians, health and educational researchers chat around the table, waiting for the opening talk.

We wait to hear about the micro:bit, a BBC-sponsored device whose purpose in life is to usher youth and geeks in the UK and elsewhere into the world of embedded devices, and the more networky version known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The main speaker, a designer from the BBC, is passionate about the history of microcomputers and the BBC, narrating the story of a microcomputer, the BBC Micro, that transformed UK popular culture in the 1980s because of the amateur tinkering and hacking it facilitated. The micro:bit, a £10 piece of hardware, aims to re-capture and update some of the glowing meaningfulness of those days. The update for the internet-enabled post-platform economy is neatly symbolized by ‘:’. The BBC and the Micro:bit Foundation is just about to deliver hundreds of thousands of the devices to UK schools. Every 11-year-old will have one.

A guide to the coastal ecology of New South Wales from the 1940s praises the many rock platforms found along the shorelines of eastern Australia:

The coastlines in question intersperse beaches and rock platforms. These platforms biogeochemically mix sediment, the remains of hard-shelled creatures, microbes and minerals, and the veins and dykes of igneous rock such as quartz intruding from beneath the crust. The rock platforms unfold complicated edges of varying shape and thickness. Actually, not just on rock platforms, but along edges of many different kinds – between shadow and sunlight, between air and soil, between hard and soft, hot and cold or moist and dry – lives diversify.

The coastal rock platforms are edge-thickening events. Along their many edges, gradients of nutrient, water, air, sunlight, and heat shift with tides, seasons, sea levels and climate. They create the possibility of many niches in the same places. Edges are sites of pluralization and, because of that, are sometimes densely populated. The liveliness of coastal rock platforms owes much to tides, to weathering and sea levels, to processes of weathering and the relative durability or solidity of rock to waves, sand and sun.

The aim of the Dis-Positions book series is to bring together recent work in the emerging intersections of such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, geography, design and philosophy, not least as they bear on the broad field of science and technology studies (STS). Conversely, if STS is undergoing major shifts in how it engages with ‘the social’ and the question of ‘societies’, it raises vital matters of concern for these various disciplines and their inter-connections. Dis-Positions thus provides a platform on which varieties of generative mutualities across these areas of scholarship can be presented.

In this respect, Dis-Positions is undergirded by a desire to promote novel fields of enquiry, adventurous theoretical and empirical projects, and inventive methodological practices. It seeks to encourage authors to address live debates while drawing on and interrogating developments across academic areas, in the process disturbing and repatterning STS. In pursuing this ethos Dis-Positions comprises consolidated, rigorous and proactive space through which new creative and critical perspectives in STS and beyond can find a voice. Under this rubric fall discussions of the post-human, post-colonial, affective and aesthetic; methodological inventions that incorporate speculative, engaged, entangled and socio-material practices; empirical novelty that ranges from emergent technoscientific innovations to reformulations of the ordinary; and conceptually creative and critical developments that capture processual and pluralistic thought, extensions of assemblage and practice theories, and the turns to affect and post-performativity.

Cloud computing platforms rely on what are simply called ‘containers’. Computing platforms are increasingly organized around software ‘containers’ such as Docker (Docker 2022). Would it be possible to better ground platforms in their ensemble-natures by paying attention to containers and their construction? Numbers offer one way of following the container construction.

There are two problems in attending to platform numbers. The first, which I term the numericity problem, concerns the different ways in which platforms gather things through many kinds of calculation, algorithms, addressing techniques and statistical routines such as machine learning and the like. By speaking of ‘numbering’, I hope to resist treating numbers as if I know what they are. If there is any starting point, it is more like differences and their differencing. Numberings differ. They are multiple and they multiply. Numberings twist multiples together in different ways that can be traced through numeric, calculative and computational practices. Numberings occasion a wide variety of relational problems, including who gets to decide what numbering is done, and how that numbering makes worlds. Platforms overflow with numbers organized in lists, arrays, vectors, matrices, tables and parameters.

The second problem-group concerns a few large numbers and their affects on platform plurality. I call this few-many asymmetry the platform-number problem. There are in non-trivial respects few platforms (for example, Meta Platforms Inc, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, TenCent, and so on). These few have ‘big numbers’.

The Christmas concert at Canberra Mini-trains started at 4pm, with a summer heat wave simmering on the former sheep pastures on the south-east edge of the city. The platform, covered in green carpet, was separated from the browning grass and hoof-compacted clay soil of the audience area by a rope with red pendants limp in the still air. On stage, performers in black-tie suits played swing-era arrangements of Christmas carols. A lone raven watched from a fence post. The amplified strains of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ rolled out over the pastures as the carriages of the mini-trains trundled around the track, a few children and their adults on board.

Standing on stage among performers such as musicians, singers, actors, dancers and perhaps politicians fronting an audience is part of what Erving Goffman calls the ‘platform format’. The scene and configuration of this platform, and so many others like it, presents something different to the coastlines, rocks, geometry and churches. As the platform diagrams for the Sydney Opera House drawn by Jörn Utzon in his Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect show (Utzon 1962), platforms stage every level of height. Utzon's ground-plan for the support-substrate of the opera stage is full of steps and stages on a range of scales. The main stages or performance platforms are big steps arranged in front of steps for seating, surrounded by steps for approaching, and standing on wide flat steps. Some platforms do not use elevation for visibility, but sit at the base of a depression. Not all platforms are spaces of performance, but nearly all rely on stages.