This chapter discusses the elements of a web-induced digital world where the boundaries between what is concrete and relatable are in perpetual jeopardy, with a constant threat to the distinction between what is real and what is ‘fake’. The advent of deepfake software, which can easily alter faces and manipulate screen interactions, and the implementation of the dark web have given rise to new criminological and zemiological realities. From astroturfing (a deceptive tactic in which organizations or individuals fabricate grassroots support for a cause, product, or idea) and sock-puppets (artificial online identities created by an individual or organization to manipulate discussions, promote products, or influence opinions without disclosing the true source) to catfishing (the act of creating a fake online persona, typically on social media or dating platforms, to deceive another individual), these virtual phenomena gain increasing importance as misinformation proliferates rapidly across the internet. This chapter examines the increasing hijacking of reality, the hyperreal elements within artificial intelligence's (AI’s) potential, and the responsibility of indefinitely altering the ‘Onlife’ dimension.

Creeping abnormalities

Most of this book has been authored by AI. Well, no, it has not. But as a reader, you would not necessarily know that – at least not yet, or in this edition. My ‘name’ is on the cover, and you might assume I conducted most of the work and research. However, that's not necessarily the case. While Leonardo da Vinci's original handwritten notes of his various Codex are accessible, contestable, and comparable, the digital authorship of the very words you are reading – printed, shared, and digitized – is about as anonymous as it gets.

Closing the (first) circle

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel In the First Circle published in 1968 (Solzhenitsyn, 2009), the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature explores the lives of prisoners in a Soviet labour camp during the Stalinist era. Rather than dwelling on the stark horrors of the Siberian nightmare, as Arthur Koestler does in the chilling 1940 novel Midnight at Noon, Solzhenitsyn offers a more nuanced perspective focusing on a softer, quasi-gentle reality, depicted over the course of three days within the ‘sharashka’ section of the Gulag. The ‘sharashka’ is a low-guarded area reserved for scientists and intellectuals who benefit from better conditions than those in the hard-labour camps in exchange for working on experimental and ethically dubious scientific and technical projects for the state.

In contrast to their fellow prisoners in the deadly labour camps, Solzhenitsyn utilizes the metaphor of scientists living in a ‘limbo’ state – like the pagan thinkers in Dante's Inferno. They are decently fed, kept warm, and even allowed an element of romance with their guards. However, the subtle burden of living in an ‘ivory tower’ weighs heavily on the main characters, leading them to question their morality and their sense of freedom, which has been reduced to mere survival within the confines of state-approved silence.

Among the research conducted by the secluded scientists, emphasis is given in the novel to the ‘study’ of the human voice and how an agent may precisely identify and correlate an individual to a specific phone call without reasonable doubt.

Recent years have witnessed a blurring between our day-to-day real-world existence and our online presence. We live our lives both online and offline, switching between the two and often interacting with both at the same time. Talk of a metaverse and an Internet of things further blurs these boundaries. In this way it makes less sense to have a neat divide between what is real and what is virtual. Instead, by drawing on Luciano Floridi and colleagues (2015), we can think in terms of an ‘Onlife’ existence, both online and real life, one impacting the other in a hyperconnected reality. In this important book Janos Mark Szakolczai develops this idea and applies it to criminology. While there have been books on cybercriminology, Janos takes this further by considering the harms and/or crimes that are possible in an Onlife world, in those blurred spaces between real world and online world.

Books in the New Horizons in Criminology series provide concise authoritative texts that reflect cutting-edge thought and theoretical developments in criminology and are international in scope. The aim is for them to be written so that the non-specialist academic, student, or practitioner can understand them by explaining ideas clearly before going deeper into the subject. This is the approach Janos has taken with this book. It starts by looking at the evolution of the internet in Chapter 1, from a utopian space to one where there is control, harm, and criminality.

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).