Sourcing e-reality

Any information found online comes with a level of doubt regarding its credibility. The internet is not only bloated with fake news, but the actual information found is often contradictory and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, capable of firing up endless debates. Depending on the source consulted, things can be good and bad at the same time, criminal and lawful, deviant and/or normal. For example, as noted on the academic blog The Conversation, individuals of various age groups worldwide appear to have been engaging in an obscure practice shared online known as ‘jelqing’, which involves violently rubbing their genitals to increase penis size (Taylor, 2024a). This technique has gained popularity through online sources, although it is not widely recognized by medical professionals due to the potential long-term harm and concrete danger of erectile dysfunction. Despite this, information regarding this practice can be found on numerous medical websites, including the popular (yet reasonably contentious) Healthline (Jewell, 2023).

The Onlife not only highlights the subtle influence of everyday toxic narratives – shaping choices and perceptions of symbols – but also exposes the dangerous misuse of otherwise harmless tools that reinforce these radicalizing narratives (Valentini et al, 2020). Once again, rather than the device in one's hand replicating knowledge, it only increases misunderstanding and a gives a false interpretation of things.

Similarly, while working on this chapter, I happened to be shopping in a major Italian supermarket and was approached by an elderly lady who could not read the symbols on the back of a bag of coffee. Close to my ear, the lady claimed that ‘no matter my beliefs’, I should be wary of the ‘handshaking symbol’ on the back of products.

With the corporate conceptualization of the ‘metaverse’ (Beer, 2022), and the exponential ‘Onlife’ digital existence brought forward by the pandemic, a whole new frontier of ‘meta-crime’ (Lloyd, 2021) has unfolded with the profiling of, and profiteering from, European and global users’ information. This chapter attempts to sketch the connection between data and harm (Redden, 2018) by addressing the issue as an epistemological problem: when considering the word ‘data’ (Latin, datum), it translates into something ‘given’. However, a much better definition is something taken, a captum. The data versus capta dichotomy is not novel in the social sciences (Lanigan, 1994; Chippendale, 2000), however, it lacks sufficient information in this high-tech age, particularly in the field of criminology. By addressing and denouncing the elementary zemiology of the capta dynamics, the information mining and coaxing out of Onlife users’ data turns from the digital world's tolerated currency of ‘no-free-lunch’ into a semantically abusive and controversial tool of harm and deviance. This chapter looks at the precedents and implications of this different wording and considers the modes in which capta analysis may be considered and addressed, not only in forming a specific and novel interpretation of meta-crime within a captaverse but as a new way of doing research altogether.

Terms of data collection

A central dilemma posed by this book concerns the method by which data are gathered, and how the word ‘data’ has, in the context of this work, become almost a misnomer – implying something that is not given, but taken.

Culture of observation

In the so-called age of Big Data, all aspects of the everyday become significant elements for monetization. The issue of privacy breaches is still an ongoing concern, but the criminology of this matter can shed light on the secret ways in which the digital world can be utilized to quietly examine and analyse the everyday aspects of individuals.

Already in 2002, Andrejevic defined the concept of ‘lateral surveillance’, involving a unilateral aspect of peer-to-peer monitoring to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. Andrejevic's work on peer-to-peer surveillance introduced the concept of ‘DIY’ surveillance, where individuals actively engage in monitoring others, often facilitated by online resources. This practice has become especially prevalent in investigating current, potential, or past partners, using spyware integrated into various overt and covert activities. With the false presumption of privacy, the distribution of images and content is universal and ubiquitous, as in Anita Lavorgna et al's study on the criminological harms involved in ‘sharenting’ practices (2022), where parents share and distribute images of their children online, be it on social media or via instant messaging chats. On the one side, we have the menace of ‘paedophilistic’ prey, who may unknowingly collect and share pictures and information about minors.

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).

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.