Year: 2023

Self hosting solutions

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Describe the problem.

Follow the instructions, jeez.

Learn a totally new syntax to describe the problem again.

Okay, don’t follow those instructions, follow these.

No, you have to do this totally different thing first.

Yeah, it doesn’t work automatically. You have to change it from ‘not working mode’ to ‘working mode’.

Create a new user.

Uninstall it.

Uninstall it properly this time.

Uninstall the other thing stopping it working.

Did you Chown? Really Chown though.

Try downgrading.

Try ChatGPT.

Okay, ignore ChatGPT.

Did I do this before? I’m pretty sure I did this step already.

Am I in The Matrix?

Someone mentioned it in a forum! Change the config.

Where is the config? Found it.

No not that config, the other one.

These instructions work!

Sorry that stopped something else working.

Okay, you got it this time.

So far I have installed self hosting solutions for cloud file storage, photosharing, audio and other media – items I own or have created. Each step in selfhosting is a little step taking back part of my life. My thoughts, my music, my photos, now sitting in a little place of mine, which cannot be held in evidence, cancelled or correlated. A data self that is not owned.

 

 

The contradiction at the heart of higher education: prepare for disappointment

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching
A happy crowd
Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash

We want to be useful to society.

But any attempt to show that or to have it guide us either destroys what we are, or turns us into technical servants or mouthpieces of other peoples’ ends.

If you want to see how that turns out, enjoy listening to Christian Rock. The culture of curiosity and the creativity needed to make it happen has to be independent of the utility, otherwise you create a dangerous feedback loop. It is similar to how AI works well because it is not based on AI. For now.

Or maybe what I have said is smug nonsense. Some great works were created with a purpose in mind such as Marx’s Capital or any artwork produced for the Borgias. In response I say these works all went beyond that limited praise function in some way which is why we remember them. Capitalists can get a lot from reading Capital. You do not have to be a fan of Rodrigo de Borja to like Pinturicchio. The fierce need to make sense of the world that drove Marx and Weber shines beyond the politics of their time and place.

Example: nudge theory is an implementation of behavioural economics that was fashionable in the 2010s and whose influence continues in the form of various behavioural politics that in the UK substitute for innovation. It is why in Scotland we cannot get 2 for 1 offers on alcohol. Nudge was tailor made for impact. Cheap, with an easy to grasp logic and easy to implement, nudge proposes that small changes to the choice architecture – the order choices are presented in, the wording of a question – can have socially beneficial outcomes. A common implementation is changing opt-in solutions to opt-out ones to increase involvement. It matches the design of everyday life to the limitations and naturalised inclinations of the brain revealed by neuroscience and behavioural economics.

Problem? It is either trivial, or it does not work in the terms it claims. For example a case usually quoted is shifting organ donation consent from opt-in to opt-out. The claims made for that skate over problems that we can expect. It is not a morally neutral choice, despite its claims. It only works with a lot of other work going on to support it, so it is not cost free. People adapt to the new environment. It is not a bad thing to remind everybody that solving problems takes work.

The approach also blunts our critical edge. Something sociologists have done is to highlight the irrationalities of apparently rational behaviour and especially of bureaucracies. Behavioural economics attributes irrationality and limited rationality to humans. Humans are construed as being the one kind of actor who is capable of acting against their own interests. However bureaucracies are quite capable of generating, and failing to recognise, massive irrationalities, counterproductive and damaging outcomes – and individuals’ apparently irrational behaviour might be grounded in perfectly comprehensible responses to bureaucratic irrationality.

The excitement of discover means you must prepare for disappointment. That wonderful hypothesis did not work out. But that is okay. Disappointment should be a creative moment, acting like a psychedelic does on the brain, forging new connections. The narrow sense of impact means distressing the data until the convenient answer is given.

Writing a grant? Tell us the stuff

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching
Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@ashenkin?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Alexander Shenkin</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-people-standing-in-a-lush-green-forest-4XEPE6eFiXc?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a>
Photo by Alexander Shenkin on Unsplash

Many grants have I reviewed, grasshopper. This blog post is meant to give some advice on how to frame a grant effectively so it appeals to reviewers.

The first point is to look for what data scientists call “Stop words”. Stop words in data science are terms that are not going to improve the quality of information filtering, and might just involve extra computing power being used to no purpose. Typically, short, common words, such as the or is are stop words. They are not going to tell you very much. We all do this when reading, filtering out the mind clogging fluff that writers insist on putting in there. All of queer theory, for example.

In any review process, stop words are those which cause our brains to malfunction and reject your proposal. ‘Exploratory’ is one. Do not use this word any grant proposal, because it just suggests that you have not really thought out what you are actually going to do. Exploratory is what you do before you begin your proposal. You will explore the context and the data and come up with some hypothesis which can be tested. Words like explore and its equivalents suggest you are asking the reviewer to skip over the fact that you have not really planned what you are going to be doing during the research. It says there is no structure to your investigation.

Other stop words are more specific to how they are used. There are a number of overused but under specified terms kicking around the social sciences. Intersectional is one. If you tell me you’re going to be doing intersectional research, I instantly look for what exactly you are going to be doing. Often people say they are doing intersectional research, but do not really say what that is going to involve beyond, say, looking at gender, race and social class in the same data space. ‘Intersectional’ implies more than that. It implies some kind of understanding of how these different dimensions work together in some way beyond the empirical. And this is the core issue. To be plausible that needs to be shown. If a grant is going to be intersectional then that has to be built into its purpose. Analogous problems arise with ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ and especially ‘evidence led’.

The next point is more of the same. What we are looking for is how each element of the proposal works together. Theory, method, data and the team. This is the “show not tell” part. People spend a lot of time justifying why this topic matters. They then skimp over what the activity will be. Sometimes a method is named and described. But saying you are going to apply a method is not enough. What we need to know is how that method is going to be applied and how that will lead to some really nice, relevant findings. That is the “stuff”.

Think of this as all the activity that is not just taking place in your head. That is what is worth paying you for. You are a clever person and a scholar. You can do lots of work in your head. The work that is worth paying more for or paying someone else to do on your behalf such as a research assistant is what we are going to be looking for. What specific activity is going to be done in the field or with the data that relates to your driving research, puzzle or hypothesis? What constructs are going to be developed and tested? How will you know that what you are looking at is what you are looking for? What conversations are taking place about this in different venues or to different audiences? How does that help develop and elaborate on your purpose?

There are lots of ways in which that can happen. It does not have to be specifically empirical. And in fact, another error is the opposite one to what I have described above. It is an over specified grant which is just going to show what it is going to show and nothing more. The intellectual buzz is missing. Theorising, conceptual work, definitional work, examining the terms of particular disputes, this is all part of the fun. It can be outlined in a well specified way that still needs lots of room for the intellectual creativity that you want. To help with that come back to what you add as a scholar with particular ways of thinking about the issues which bring insight.

The step from looking at to looking for is what takes us from. “I am going to sit around and cogitate” to “this work will have specific direction and purpose”. That direction and purpose is key to a really compelling proposal that I am going to love. It is really effective when that excitement is coming off the page. When you give the reviewer a sense that you cannot wait to start work on this topic.

As as an example here is a grant that I produced with my colleague Irene Rafanell. We started with the purpose:

Relevance: This project examines the structuring of cybercrime as a set of knowledgeable, interactional enterprises using data collected from darknet cryptomarkets, which are sites for the sale of illicit goods and services, largely illicit drugs. It combines the fields of big data analytics, social theory and digital sociology. This is a growing area for research as crime continues to shift to online environments. Developing expertise and applicable, high impact findings in this area will demonstrate Scotland’s academic leadership in the field and contribute to the development of further research in this area.

It was for Carnegie hence the strategic “Scotland” thrown into the mix.

Then we went into the background. That took one paragraph. We then showed aims and questions:

Aims:
1. Understand the structure of interaction and knowledge exchange in a set of illicit online marketplaces.
2. Develop a theoretical framework which can be applied to different online criminal marketplaces.
3. Produce several journal articles covering the theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the project.
Questions:
1. How do individuals engaged in illegal activity develop their own practices, beliefs and behaviour in and through online information exchanges.
2. What co-operative dynamics are present and created via interactive online exchanges.
3. What etiquettes typify these exchanges such as ‘chatiquete’ and rules of online communication.
4. How are norms and sanctioning of norm-violation maintained and enforced

Then we went very quickly into what that would actually be done (mostly Irene here).

A framework for interaction analysis would be developed using the following coding themes:
Structuring – investigating the claims that group members make on ‘outsiders’ and the extent to which group formation may be a response to ‘pressure’ from outsiders; Investigating the communication interaction – frequent or infrequent interactions, who becomes legitimised, praised, silenced, ostracised, etc.; investigating what aspects constitute the ‘shared’ culture that facilitate such interactions.
Sanctioning – investigating how the individuals of the group sanction each other and what conditions favour such activity – that is, responses from others to individual posts; Investigating the existence of clear ‘evaluations’ to fellow members and the rejection of the ‘good’ opinions of outsiders as a signifiers of group membership.
Norming – Investigating the formation of distinctive ‘life-styles’ (shared or distinctive language which confines communicative interaction to group members sharing such ‘life-styles’) investigating if there exist, and how it emerges, a sense of members granting of ‘special’ honour of being a member of the group (status group membership granted via ‘codes of status’ in relation to attitudes, practices and knowledge about drugs intake and harm reduction practices.
And so on. I think it was this sense of a confined but achievable project that won the day. Looking back on it what was fruitful was that the method was clearly in service of our thinking. The reason I chose this project is that it stems from a theoretical purpose, drawing on interactional sociology. And also because I happen to love it and so the project has led to many interesting further works, such as an article examining emotional regulation in cybercrime communities.

Radicalisation or self discovery? Desire in a turbulent world

Angus Bancroft/ / turbulence

There has been a lot of recent conversation about radicalisation through different forms. Mumsnet has been blamed for radicalising its participants. There is an implied theory of change here. It is that radicalisation works something like environmental exposure. Radicalisation is like pollution in the info sphere. Exposure to small doses leads to exposure much bigger doses. I am cagey about this, because when you strip out the content, a lot of the concern aboutlooks like concerns about communist influence in the Cold War era. We would recognise that people involved in the communist parties in Europe were often motivated by socially desirable goals, even as they support a totalitarian movement set on destroying everything we hold dear.

There are some well rehearsed problems with that. For one, it tends to downplay agency. Another is that it is content free in theory, but not in practice. So, in theory, it does not consider what attracts people in, or why they might consider the particular goals of the radicalised movement to be ones that speak to them. In practice, however when we look at what topics are focused on as problems of radicalisation it is clear we are being very selective about them. I do not think that is entirely helpful because we really need to be explicit about the qualities that we are concerned about. We also need to understand a lot more about what motivates people and what they think they are doing when they participate in radicalised activity. Writing it off as “hate“ does not really grasp what is going on.

There are some background assumptions that people who supporting populist movements or disappear into conspiracies, are clearly wrong. So obviously wrong that we do not really need to talk about the content of what they believe. We should be doing that even from as simple idea sphere perspective. We would want to examine how these‘s ideas, evolve and are coherent in some sense. and we should examine if they are true, or reasonable. Now fair enough, I do not think that Donald Trump is really fighting a paedophile conspiracy. But I do think is a reasonable question to ask if Covid lockdowns were a proportionate response, and if they were successful in their own terms.

The point being, you’re not going to oppose these ideas very well if you do not recognise their nature. What I want to say, here is that radicalisation is an aspect of quite a natural process of self development. You see something wrong with an idea. No one in your tribe or team is talking about it. So you look elsewhere for people who are doing that. When you join them, what they are saying, makes more sense than others. I would call that self-discovery or evolution not radicalisation. A QAnon person is moving into a new state of being. The attraction is that you think they have the goods on everyone else. That justifies the frequent isolation that is involved, and which causes distress to their loved ones. What follows from that is radicalisation is about desire. As MacDougall (2018) shows, a burning need for justice and sensitivity to injustice and status can drive people forward. As we would recognise from long experience with various social movements, people can use it desire for social justice as a way of obtaining personal status.

Macdougall, Alex I., et al. “Different strokes for different folks: The role of psychological needs and other risk factors in early radicalisation.” International Journal of Developmental Science12.1-2 (2018): 37-50.

AI assumptions to be wary of

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

Tech doesn’t kill people, over capitalised techbros kill people.

We are in the tail end of the AI hype/panic cycle. We are all well beyond noting that LLMs can reproduce human failings. It is vital that if we are to use  a tool like ChatGPT or any generative AI to note some assumptions or myths that go along with it. These are:

The assumption of neutrality (responses do not reflect an identifiable ideology)

The assumption of ethics (response are tailored to do no harm, for example, not affirming suicidal ideation)

The assumption of stability (answers are consistent)

The assumption of competence and understanding (responses draw on a curated store of human knowledge and it will not for example misadvise on an interlocutor’s rights and liabilities)

The conversational assumption (interactions are private and responsive).

Underlying that is an anthropomorphic bias. On both sides, techno panic and technical love, there is a tendency to impute anthropomorphised qualities or to get frustrated when those qualities are not there. When the machine reveals itself as it is, not as we were all like it. Personally I prefer it when the machine is clearly a machine, clearly a tool that I can use. What I mean by a tool is a system with clearly defined characteristics that are reasonably predictable. I found it much better to use AI as a device in that way. So even if I use it as my robot companion at least I know what it is being used for. If I use it to create a digest of reports on a topic and I know its limits and that is an effective use case. Any critical perspective on technology is going to have to interrogate these assumptions. But that also means interrogating the reverse. For example any assumption that particular technology is inherently harmful.

Critical thinking, what even is that? Advice from Thanos

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching, turbulence

That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ question. What is Marvel Studios? It is in a basic sense just a successful film and TV production studio with some really good IP. Simple. But that does not explain its dominance and reach. I hope I am not being unfair when I say that impacts can not be justified by the artistic quality of the work. I enjoyed many of the films and TV shows, however a fair assessment would be that their succession depends on qualities beyond artistic elan and the craftsmanship on display.

Why do I say that harsh thing? I feel I am justified because the most critically well received elements of the MCU are not necessarily its most commercially successful. So we have a puzzle. Maybe the critics are wrong and they miss the appeal. Or, the audience is wrong. Am I out of touch? No: it’s the public who are at fault. Or, we have to look at other qualities that drive the success of the MCU. Critical and commercial success could be not only decoupled, but in opposition. Many commentators have made the point I’m going to make.

I believe that the impact of it relies on its very successful integration of storied IP, regular pace of output, and output tailored to the widest demographic, which produces an unrivalled capacity to shape its own audience and taste culture. When you look at how it works though, it is really a massive and well honed content generation system. We can pull out the significant qualities here. One that is integrated across different media – TV, games, other tie-ins. That explains a lot about the content producers. The films have to make a lot of money back. So we have to appeal to an audience beyond fans of the comic characters.

Whenever I watch one I’m always confused about who is doing what. Why is Thanos angry? The films are designed so that does not matter so much. You can still enjoy Thor or Wonder Woman without knowing very much about the backstory. Good guy/gal thumps bad guy, but in a knowing way. They also include enough so that if you do care about the backstory you will enjoy the fan service going on. Some of the TV shows are meant to be more niche. If you care about Loki then you will be satisfied with his own spinoff show. That is why the films always full of supporting characters and jokes regularly every few minutes. They are entertainment, of a particular type.

Maybe I am wrong about that and in fact once you reach a certain level of a success the product is so much in the cultural atmosphere that you do not have to worry about backstory. I think that the interesting question is how did we get from a situation where comic books and Spider-Man and so on were seen as rather childish, nerdy and a bit weird. Consider the character of Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons. We are meant to find his obsessions a bit sad and funny. Now they are accepted as part of the culture. They are cultural events in themselves. They are so accepted that to look down on them is seen as a dreadful faux pas.

It is notable that this is very different in terms of cultural product from those examined by Bourdieu in his work on taste. There is little in the way of class distinction or self positioning to be drawn by liking or not liking The Avengers. The CGI-led films are well beyond such considerations. And if you critique the current content of one you are pretty much critiquing the content of all of them. It explains why for example the gender politics of them are rather bland and agreeable, and why there is little geopolitical content.

Compare the 1990s films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those films were heavily invested in the geopolitical context of the time. They featured Middle Eastern terrorists, and a genuine clear sense of what masculinity was in opposition to feminine qualities. Non-American characters tended to appear only as sweaty-ass terrorists. I mean literally. They were always covered in sweat to make them look more shifty. As if the filmmakers were not confident that we might as an audience get the sense that they were bad guys just because they were terrorists and needed extra guidance in that.

Why does the MCU not do the same thing and have The Avengers solving the Middle East crisis or bumping Putin on the head?

The reason is that if you take sides in any sense in these contemporary conflicts you’re losing your audience. And also the audience does not really want to be reminded of these intractable and difficult human conflicts. The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it count on us quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it can’t always quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films have a raised eyebrow and self-awareness. Perhaps for the same reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons the MCU does. I want to say here there appears to be an inverse relationship between artistic quality and scale. My very favourite Schwarzenegger film is The Terminator, a fairly small budget and quite dark film about a robot assassin and a feature apocalypse. Terminator 2: This Time It’s CGI is a much bigger film and was rather more cheery about the future, and also please to a wider demographic. The first film was very adult, the second much more youth and child or young adult focused.

We have established that Hollywood studios productions relates to the cultural moment and the audience. However the MCU is a good study because it does not just reach its demographic, it shapes and moulds it. The MCU generates taste. It does not simply respond to them out, it makes it. Some of that is in a very straightforward material way. Ensuring most cinema screens are booked out for your big launch means there isn’t much else to say. Another is creating an identity for you audience. When the Terminator was released there was no concept of a young adult audience. Now however there are films, books and much more aimed at a young adult audience. The Hunger Games is a fantastic example of what that is like when it’s very successful in its own terms. There might be another argument related to the turbulent times we live in. And it is that this is what audiences want. Perhaps a break from intractable political polarisation into a self-contained universe where the baddies get repeatedly punched in the face, but not too seriously, is very very welcome. And I can hardly blame anyone for that.

A further critical point that we can draw on here is about how academics talk about consumption of culture we tend to look at why culture is consumed, but not the content. Which is maybe a bit strange. We act as if distinction and other judgements are content independent. So say the audience that consumes opera could just as easily be concerning basketball. I do not think that is true. The MCU is a great example of how cultural functions and taste culture and content work together.

 

Institutions have duties beyond themselves and the cultural moment

Angus Bancroft/ / turbulence

… Otherwise they would not actually be institutions at all. That is basically what an institution is, as opposed to a temporary association or social movement.

I was trying to think through some irritation at the tendency of leaderships to just make changes that are very in the moment and focused on firefighting political controversies. I work in an ancient Scottish university and feel we have obligations to preserve the spirit and sacred traditions handed down to us, those of the Scottish Enlightenment. So I wanted to work through my sense of why this is an issue for me.

There has been a tendency recently for institutions to simply respond to the cultural moment rather than look beyond it. To some extent this is quite natural because, as I keep trying to remind everyone, institutions are just people. When people complain about the media or about social media or about Westminster or Hollyrood or the university it is good to bear that in mind. The University is just us. Elites are just folk, but with special, lizardy qualities.

Yet institutions are still something more than that, through the processes, cultures and practices that they embed. Many of the people occupying institutions are quite practised and skilled but naturally they are going to have blindspots. We can examine these topics systematically using Weber’s theories of bureaucracy. So although we can say that institutions are composed of people, they are not people who have entirely free latitude to do what ever they wan. Systems are built to create sanctions, rewards and status. We cannot break the rules willy-nilly. When we do as we find out the reasons why people would want it the rules in place. For example consistency could be valued over individual flexibility. One would probably want that in and airline, or an army. Rather more flexibility could be hoped for in a GP. But not too much. We can also point to their problems that we know emerge in any institution. There are problems of perverse incentives, ends-means displacement and other well-known problems of bureaucracies.

The popularity of algorithmic governance has meant that some of these qualities are now universal in the data infrastructure. For example the problem of performativity, where is the model becomes the aim. But this should not be treated as mysterious. In the case of Facebook the problems identified in terms of polarisation are parts of the business model. They are not a great mystery and we can mislead ourselves with an in-the-moment focus on the technology rather than the human-level decisions taken about the business it undergirds.

But the whole reason for being part of an institution is it gives you access to collective resources beyond yourselves. The reason we sometimes get a little bit testy about this tradition is that our traditions and maybe be hidebound and dated, or they may be part of this collective resources. You cannot always tell. Our ability to tell which is which is inversely related to our confidence in the doing that. So we need to have a learning process that is fairly reliable and self-correcting. Otherwise another problem sets in, that of path dependence. When you start going in one direction it is very hard to turn off.

 

 

Characterising ‘harm’

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

At the current moment there is growing concern about the role of digital systems in creating and furthering ‘harm’ across a range of domains (Powell, Stratton, and Cameron 2018). What harm means is often taken as read, or left to subjective claims. There is, or should be, fundamental disagreement as to what these harms are and how to assess and address them (Aldridge, Stevens, and Barratt 2018; Martin 2018). Often it is taken as read that people reposting COVID origin theories is a harm without showing any harmful effect. The concept has a tendency to expand and it needs to be confined. I characterise it as activity that has an objectively negative effect on human wellbeing and liberty.

There are identifiable vectors. Complex networked systems facilitate existing criminal activity and create new vectors for disinformation and exploitation that are not easily predicted and which do not avail themselves of technologically determined securitised resolutions (Henry and Flynn 2020). Geopolitical turbulence adds to intersecting harms that derive from the coming together of digital systems, online communities and markets, convergences between crime types and criminal actors, extremist ideologies and authoritarian states (Lavorgna 2023; Picarelli 2006).

There is a sense of these developments as having effects beyond the reach of human intention, for example, tendencies built into the digitised illicit drug market system that may mean more risky drug distribution patterns emerge (Bancroft 2023). Along with that we are facing a novel reorganisation of criminal activity along principles in line with the digital economy such as the rise of the ‘crimfluencer’ and the use of app-based data driven labour models by romance fraud organisations, shoplifters and ransomware gangs (Meland, Bayoumy, and Sindre 2020).

Alongside novelty we also see well known human motivations recurring in these spaces, whether status competition (Holt 2020), transgressive thrills (Abbink and Sadrieh 2009), self-justification (Offei et al. 2022) and economic gain (Moeller, Munksgaard, and Demant 2017). Researchers have unprecedented access to internal and external communications (Vu et al. 2021) where they can look in detail at practices such as altercasting or identity imposition (Dickinson and Wang 2023), governance (Pereda and Décary-Hetu 2023), geographical patterning (Demant et al. 2018), and risk management (Bilgrei 2019), and also apply theoretically informed framings such as gender (Fleetwood, Aldridge, and Chatwin 2020) and low resource bricolage (Rai 2019). Underlying these disparate changes is the concept of the hybrid, used to describe new technosocial formations of criminal activity and governance that combine the human and the non-human (Brown 2006), online and offline action (Roks, Leukfeldt, and Densley 2021), and different technological systems operating on countervailing principles (Moeller 2022; Tzanetakis and South 2023).

The approach I take is interdisciplinary grey zone criminology. My first point is that rather than taking place predominantly in digital ‘black spots’, cybercrime works along with the digital reordering of societies (Smith 2016). The grey zone mixes the self-interested and the ideological, the harmful and the beneficial (Munksgaard and Demant 2016). For example, Telegram is used by the Russian FSB as a mass propaganda vector but also provides valuable space for dissidents and refugees, for harm reduction advice and mutual support (Sawicka, Rafanell, and Bancroft 2022). Second, these times present a challenge for existing criminological frameworks and policing operations. They demand new methodological and theoretical approaches that can integrate insights from zemiology, data science, interactionist sociology, cyberpsychology, design informatics, and other spheres of thought.

I want to take these threats seriously but move us past the current tendency to discursive doomscrolling, and provide a framework for analysing them in human scale terms, drawing on a range of work that has sought to reframe technologically enabled harms as having a complex multi-layered reality that involves but is not reducible to specific system affordances (Wood 2021).  I propose the following features are significant in these systems, which I set out here. First, they have scaleability. Digital systems allow for a rapid growth in numbers and lower barriers to new entrants, for example, through crime as a service and the use of AI (Kramer et al. 2023). They have transferability and reciprocity between zones, for example, white supremacist ideologies are in fact highly adaptable discursive constructs which are easily transferred to local geopolitical contexts (Allchorn 2020). They have mutually reinforcing effects – systems encourage, legitimate and reward harmful action through methods such as meme cultures and celebration of particular cases (Kingdon 2021). Finally they are tangible – digital ubiquity means this activity involves and effects people in their homes, at work, and at play.

Readings

Abbink, Klaus, and Abdolkarim Sadrieh. 2009. ‘The Pleasure of Being Nasty’. Economics Letters 105(3):306–8.

Aldridge, Judith, Alex Stevens, and Monica J. Barratt. 2018. ‘Will Growth in Cryptomarket Drug Buying Increase the Harms of Illicit Drugs?’ Addiction 113(5):789–96. doi: 10.1111/add.13899.

Allchorn, William. 2020. ‘Cumulative Extremism and the Online Space: Reciprocal Radicalisation Effects Between the Extreme Right and Radical Islamists in the UK’. Pp. 37–62 in Digital Extremisms: Readings in Violence, Radicalisation and Extremism in the Online Space, Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity, edited by M. Littler and B. Lee. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Bancroft, Angus. 2019a. ‘Research in Fractured Digital Spaces’. International Journal of Drug Policy 73:288–92. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.05.007.

Bancroft, Angus. 2019b. The Darknet and Smarter Crime: Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy. Springer Nature.

Bancroft, Angus. 2023. ‘“Waiting for the Delivery Man”: Temporalities of Addiction, Withdrawal, and the Pleasures of Drug Time in a Darknet Cryptomarket’. Pp. 61–72 in Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity, Emerald Studies in Death and Culture, edited by M. Tzanetakis and N. South. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Bilgrei, Ola Røed. 2019. ‘Community-Consumerism: Negotiating Risk in Online Drug Communities’. Sociology of Health & Illness 41(5):852–66. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12864.

Brown, Sheila. 2006. ‘The Criminology of Hybrids: Rethinking Crime and Law in Technosocial Networks’. Theoretical Criminology 10(2):223–44. doi: 10.1177/1362480606063140.

Demant, Jakob, Rasmus Munksgaard, David Décary-Hétu, and Judith Aldridge. 2018. ‘Going Local on a Global Platform: A Critical Analysis of the Transformative Potential of Cryptomarkets for Organized Illicit Drug Crime’. International Criminal Justice Review 28(3):255–74. doi: 10.1177/1057567718769719.

Dickinson, Timothy, and Fangzhou Wang. 2023. ‘Neutralizations, Altercasting, and Online Romance Fraud Victimizations’. CrimRxiv.

Fleetwood, Jennifer, Judith Aldridge, and Caroline Chatwin. 2020. ‘Gendering Research on Online Illegal Drug Markets’. Addiction Research & Theory 28(6):457–66. doi: 10.1080/16066359.2020.1722806.

Henry, Nicola, and Asher Flynn. 2020. ‘Image-Based Sexual Abuse: A Feminist Criminological Approach’. Pp. 1109–30 in The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance, edited by T. J. Holt and A. M. Bossler. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Holt, Thomas J. 2020. ‘Computer Hacking and the Hacker Subculture’. Pp. 725–42 in The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance, edited by T. J. Holt and A. M. Bossler. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Kingdon, Ashton. 2021. ‘The Meme Is the Method: Examining the Power of the Image Within Extremist Propaganda’. Pp. 301–22 in Researching Cybercrimes: Methodologies, Ethics, and Critical Approaches, edited by A. Lavorgna and T. J. Holt. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Kramer, Jo-Anne, Arjan A. J. Blokland, Edward R. Kleemans, and Melvin R. J. Soudijn. 2023. ‘Money Laundering as a Service: Investigating Business-like Behavior in Money Laundering Networks in the Netherlands’. Trends in Organized Crime. doi: 10.1007/s12117-022-09475-w.

Lavorgna, Anita. 2023. ‘Unpacking the Political-Criminal Nexus in State-Cybercrimes: A Macro-Level Typology’. Trends in Organized Crime. doi: 10.1007/s12117-023-09486-1.

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Moeller, Kim. 2022. ‘Hybrid Governance in Online Drug Distribution’. Contemporary Drug Problems 49(4):491–504. doi: 10.1177/00914509221101212.

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Munksgaard, Rasmus, and Jakob Demant. 2016. ‘Mixing Politics and Crime–the Prevalence and Decline of Political Discourse on the Cryptomarket’. International Journal of Drug Policy 35:77–83. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.021.

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In order to disrupt criminal organisations, jail innocent people

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

One of the ways in which trust is signalled in criminal groups is the fact of having been in prison. It is a signal that is costly and hard to fake. The better the system is at punishing the guilty, the cleaner the signal. Therefore in order to disrupt the signal, imprisoning innocent people would make criminals unsure of who they could trust. It might occur to you that the criminal justice system does a good job of this already. In Brazil, as in other states, this effect is observable. The more punitive the state, the more efficiently it centralises criminal governance in the prison system itself. It does that by bringing criminals into the prisons where wayward individuals can be controlled by the very gangs who are building their power in there.

The nature of the prison trust signal came up in Lessing and Willis (2019)  fascinating analysis of the criminal governance produced by the Brazilian prison based drug trafficking organisation, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Drug traffickers, once the footloose entrepreneurs of the crime trade, are becoming central to criminal governance. In much the way that mafias used to extend their influence beyond their members to the communities and polities they infest, drug trafficking organisations are now becoming originators and practitioners of governance forms and challenges to state authority. That represents a change in the way the drug trade is run, and a source of innovation in criminal forms. One of the developments that interest us is the growing role of the prison gang.

The PCC’s power is remarkable in terms of its reach. Originating in São Paulo in 1993 in response to a prison massacre the previous year it now commands 29,000 members. It does this without using the typical cartel model which tightly intergrates organisation and turf. Criminal organisations prefer themselves to be the ones wielding violence and the PCC is apparently responsible for a notable decline in homicides in territory it controls. Lessing and Willis draw attention to how successfully the PCC has managed this process. It ensures payments are received, consignments are delivered, competition encouraged and managed, using relatively limited punishment and retaliation. It achieves legitimacy in its sphere of operation. Competition is a core tool to maintain this.

The PCC operates using credit based drug consignments, payment to come after delivery. Profits go into communal benefits for members. Punishments are clearly defined and limiting. Well maintained records and an emphasis on proceder (right conduct) support this rationalist paradigm. While some individual criminal operators and groups rely on a reputation for unpredictability and extremism of their response to generate an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty they exploit, the PCC relits on predictable, recoverable internal ‘justice’ to govern its associates. One of the collective benefits it provides for members is security, within prisons and without. Punishments are in the main stigmatising suspensions from the trade.

Lessing B and Willis GD (2019) Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars. The American Political Science Review 113(2). Washington, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press: 584–606. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055418000928.

Essay questions on criminal markets and organisations: how do students read them?

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching
Sharing some short and long essay questions from my course on illicit markets and criminal organisations particularly for other teachers but also to help students in how they go about selecting a question to answer.
The short essay is either a guided book review, where the student examines the essay question through a book I have suggested, or an invitation to conduct their own analysis of a creative work. The aim is to get them thinking about how different texts are created in relation to the topic and get them used to evaluating theory, method and findings. I found when discussing them with students that the police crime as organised crime sparked a lot of interest but was a big challenge. To answer the question required the student to assimilate a lot of background from that period of critical criminology and almost come up with their own theory. It was a lot to ask in a short essay. The Rahman reading also generated some interest and provided a more contained take for them to dive into.
  1. Discuss the relationship between masculinity and organised crime’s ‘street habitus’ using Rahman M (2019) Homicide and Organised Crime: Ethnographic Narratives of Serious Violence in the Criminal Underworld. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-16253-5. See Chapter 5 for the discussion of habitus.
  2. Discuss the implications of framing organised crime as a ‘political economy’ using Wright A (2005) Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.
  3. Should we consider police crime as organised crime? In what terms? Use Box S (1984) Power, Crime and Mystification. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
  4. Should our research agenda be focused on ‘global crime’ or ‘global harm’? Use Hall T and Scalia V (2019) A Research Agenda for Global Crime. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.
  5. What are the benefits and limits of studing transnational crime in terms of global ‘black spots’? Use Brown SS and Hermann MG (2020) Transnational Crime and Black Spots – Rethinking Sovereignty and the Global Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
  6. How does debt shape people’s involvement in the illicit economy? Use Schuster CE (2015) Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Univ of California Press.
  7. Critically examine the concept of ‘flow’ used in Savona EU, Guerette RT and Aziani A (eds.) (2022) The Evolution of Illicit Flows: Displacement and Convergence among Transnational Crime. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0.
  8. Discuss the problem of ‘concept creep’ in criminological analysis and discourse, using Densley J, McLean R and Brick C (2023) Contesting County Lines: Case Studies in Drug Crime and Deviant Entrepreneurship. Policy Press.
  9. Discuss how organised crime is socially embedded and the uses and limits of the organised crime trope, using Hobbs D (2013) Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  10. Using a theme from the course, write a criminological interpretation of a work of fiction or other type of creative work such as a film, game or television series. For an example of how this could be done see: Ruggiero V (2002) Moby Dick and the Crimes of the Economy. British Journal of Criminology 42(1): 96–108 or Daly SE (ed.) (2021) Theories of Crime Through Popular Culture. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-54434-8.
Long essays are more thematic/research focused, and are intended to encourage a deep dive into a puzzle or problem. There were three broad question types here. First, do we characterise this field in the right way, theoretically? The question on rational actor theory is an example of this. Second, what empirical evidence can we bring to bear on this problem and is in enough? The county lines question invites this approach. Third, here is some data – see what you can do with it. The question on prison markets does that. The intention in each question is to allow students to take risks and also give them some direction or a bit of a safety net.
1. What are the implications and limitations of understanding participants in illicit markets as ‘rational actors’?
2. How has the role of the ‘middleman’ or ‘broker’ evolved and changed within illicit markets and criminal organisations?
  • Kleemans ER, Kruisbergen EW and Kouwenberg RF (2014) Women, brokerage and transnational organized crime. Empirical results from the Dutch Organized Crime Monitor. Trends in Organized Crime 17(1): 16–30. DOI: 10.1007/s12117-013-9203-7.
  • Morselli C (2001) Structuring Mr. Nice: entrepreneurial opportunities and brokerage positioning in the cannabis trade. Crime, Law and Social Change 35(3): 203–244.
  • Pearson G and Hobbs D (2003) King pin? A case study of a middle market drug broker. The howard journal of criminal justice 42(4): 335–347.
3. What is the relationship, if any, between organised crime and cybercrime? What are the benefits and limits of understanding cybercrime in these terms?
4. Does ‘county lines’ represent a new evolution in organised drug crime?
5. How do criminal organizations exercise social control and governance over their members, communities and operational contexts?
6. What are the cultures and politics of technology in digital crime?
7. Using examples, discuss the role of technology in the evolution of illicit markets and/or organised criminal activity
8. How are problems establishing and maintaining trust within illicit markets and organised crime groups resolved?
9. Discuss the benefits and limits of cultural explanations for crime. As part of this, discuss the relationship between organised crime and social taboo.
  • Ferrell J, Hayward K and Young J (2015) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Second Edition. 55 City Road, London. DOI: 10.4135/9781473919969.

    Holt TJ (2020) Computer Hacking and the Hacker Subculture. In: Holt TJ and Bossler AM (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 725–742. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78440-3_31.

  • Collier, B., Clayton, R., Thomas, D., Hutchings, A. (2020), Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
10. Discuss the intersection of sociological factors such as gender and race/ethnicity with the lived experience of participants in illicit markets and organised crime.
11. Using examples, critically examine the co-evolution of illicit markets/organisations and crime control
12. Have markets made crime normative?
  • Alalehto T (2010) The wealthy white-collar criminals: corporations as offenders. Journal of Financial Crime 17(3). London, United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 308–320. DOI: 10.1108/13590791011056273.
  • Farrall S and Karstedt S (2020) Respectable Citizens – Shady Practices: The Economic Morality of the Middle Classes / Stephen Farrall and Susanne Karstedt. Clarendon studies in criminology. Oxford: University Press.
  • Garrett BL (2014) Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations. Harvard University Press. DOI: 10.4159/9780674735712.
  • Wingerde K and Lord N (2019) The Elusiveness of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime in a Globalized Economy. In: Rorie ML (ed.) The Handbook of White‐Collar Crime. 1st ed. Wiley, pp. 469–483. DOI: 10.1002/9781118775004.ch29.
13. Using data we have shared in class write a crime script. As part of this discuss the advantages and limits of crime script analysis and the theory behind it, and the implications of the crime script you have designed.
14. Using data from the American Prison Writing archive, discuss how markets operate in prison. What roles are involved, how do goods and services circulate, and how is the market structured.
  • Crewe B (2006) Prison Drug Dealing and the Ethnographic Lens. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 45(4): 347–368. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2006.00428.x.
  • Day MJ (2015) Learning from the Worst: The U.S. Prison System as a University of Destructive Utility. In: Mcelwee G and Smith R (eds.) Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 203–226. DOI: 10.1108/S2040-724620150000005015.
    Gundur, R. V. “The changing social organization of prison protection markets: When prisoners choose to organize horizontally rather than vertically.” Trends in Organized Crime (2018): 1-19.
  • Tompkins, Charlotte NE. ““There’s that many people selling it”: Exploring the nature, organisation and maintenance of prison drug markets in England.” Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy 23.2 (2016): 144-153.
15. Using examples, discuss how the cultural representation of organised crime and illicit markets has shaped policing and policy in this area.
  • Hobbs, Dick, and Georgios A. Antonopoulos. “‘Endemic to the species’: ordering the ‘other’via organised crime.” Global Crime 14.1 (2013): 27-51.
  • Rawlinson, Patricia. “Mafia, media and myth: Representations of Russian organised crime.” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 37.4 (1998): 346-358.