Category: Research

Trump is a turf warrior: crypto as a digital territory.

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

Nobody talks much about capillary power these days. Probably because we have too many lessons in actual power. This was a predominant concept for many decades in social theory. Derived from Michel Foucault who held that power was not held by individuals or organizations, but spread through society. Every act of definition creates it. Every act of resistance renews it. It is hard to say as Foucault did, ‘Power is everywhere and nowhere’ when you can easily point to where power actually is. It is a pity as the persistent performance of power can bind us to its more subtle features. We can see is how much power is mythical, performative, rhetorical and psychological. Tone and texture matter. The  main problem I have with the idea of disciplinary power is that often what he is describing is not power. It is more like bureaucratic busywork. What we are seeing is power becoming more personal and ‘hot’, losing its bloodlessness and focus on the normal in favour of the pathological. The world is re-enchanted.

As with his origin story in Manhattan real estate, Trump thinks in terms of turf, as in controllable territory. Turf is a common concept in organized crime. In Mexico it is called plaza. The dense network of relationships that matter. Controlling the political power in a territory is more important than having formal ownership. Turf is the thicket of political, familial, clannish and neighbourhood relationships that make power happen. Organized crime is a frequent mediator of this relationship. Turf also needs some measure of consent.Just as the British police often say they’re policing by consent, so organised crime also often does crime with consent. Or at least acquiescence.

One area where turf wars had become less consequential is face-to-face drug dealing. The popularity of the mobile phone seriously reduced turf conflicts (Edlund and Machado 2019). However, this belongs to an older era of digital life. Increasingly, we see digital space and resources foreclosed. The digital is a much more territorial space and has become like a limited territorial resource. The growing interest of organized crime in crypto is part of that. They do not have a lot of interest in resources that are widely networked and easily accessed. Their interest lies in resources where they can control and limit access and charge significant rents.

This also explains Trump’s approach to politics, finance, and the digital sphere shows that his most recent embrace of crypto is significant here. Crypto is by design a digital turf. By that I mean it is deliberately a restricted resource that cannot be scaled and instead must be controlled.

 

 

A positive case for AI from the perspective of being disabled.

Angus Bancroft/ / A life with motor neuron disease., Research, turbulence

AI has become something of a bogeyman and it is not helpful to view the technology in this way. It is indeed often hyped up junk, as when Apple’s AI helpfully prioritizes spam email as ‘urgent’ for me. Yet as with any other technology it brings change and benefits and problems. I use AI-enabled tools every day. It concerns me that a negative narrative has emerged, which purely focuses on AI as a threat to individual human creativity and to the environment. This is a one-sided and rather  hoary and dated critique that rests largely on an assumption that we cannot possibly integrate these technologies into our lives.Techno fear is as bad as techno hype and just because it feels good doesn’t mean you should do it.

My existence would be much diminished without AI tools. I am unable to use a keyboard or other input device. Most of my voice has gone. The only dictation support that works is an AI driven one called MacWhisper, which uses the Whisper LLM. This is the only transcription software that can make sense of my much diminished voice. It is far superior to the solutions offered by others. And to be clear, it is actually the commercial software that is best.You know that horrible integration that Apple does and that the EU wants to end and loads of tech critics complain about. The one where everything works together. Well, it’s the best thing I can have. Using macOS and an iPhone, I can take advantage of my existing contacts and software and integrate accessible workarounds and solutions into my existing workflow. I can use iPhone mirroring to access my phone directly from the desktop.This means I can continue to work and communicate with friends in a more seamless way.

This is far better than the clunky, awkward and disheartening solutions offered as part of specialist support for the disabled. On the one hand you need to have reliable solutions which necessarily are not going to be as pretty. On the other these all kind of assume that you’ve already given up on life. As an example, there is a system that will allow me to make calls using a head mouse tracker. But, you have to type in each phone number manually, like it was 1998 or something. I literally cannot remember the last time I manually entered a phone number. There is no possibility of integration with my existing, well, existence, my existing way of working, communicating with friends and loved ones. It’s just one example. The other solutions being offered are much the same. I can laboriously type out an email in a Windows pad. Or I can use my existing computer, which I can use a head tracking mouse with, and use voice control and dictation to send an email that way, in a way that I need to because I’m a professional still. This means I can continue to work and communicate in a seamless way. I can also control my phone directly from the desktop. Despite my situation, I am still writing books and papers. I am still making plans with friends and family.

As a researcher and a teacher, I have a complex workflow built up over many years that uses customised tools and complex data sets. I need these kind of data, this kind of information, this kind of multiple tools at my fingertips in a way I can use for my work and in fact for my pleasure. It is absolutely infuriating to be told that I can switch on my TV with the system as if that’s all I should have as a disabled person. My lot in life is just to sit in front of the telly all day. Well I can already put my Apple TV on with my Apple computer or my Apple iPad and using that I can watch all kinds of TV from around the world which is what I do. Everything about these tools is focused on the lowest common denominator passive consumer. That’s not who I am, or anyone is. We are still in our lives.

If we do not highlight these positive use cases for AI, then they will be regulated out of existence or their development will be limited and I will be a lot worse off and my life will be much reduced. Likewise, a new era of domestic robotics cannot come soon enough.

More generally, I find the way that AI is used as this kind of scare figure quite frustrating. It blocks analysis and evaluation. For example, the University proposes for its ethical investment strategy it will not invest in companies that produce AI-enabled weaponry, As if this is somehow more nefarious than just plain old artillery shells and such. No explanation is given as to why AI weaponry is so much worse than just lobbing a RPG at someone.. If an ally like Ukraine is using AI to target incoming missiles to support its air defence and for its own targeting, why is that a bad thing? It might actually save lives if it improves their air defence capability and makes their targeting more effective. It might shorten the war and in any case allies should have access to the means to defend themselves against one of the greatest threats to civilization of our time. If Ukraine is able to use autonomous weaponry to make up for its manpower deficiencies, then I do not see that as being a problem.

The distinction between AI and non-AI is dissolving anyway. For example, artillery shells can be networked to work cooperatively.

That does not mean that AI is always the right solution or even a working solution. It still needs to be treated with critical reasoning. There are plenty of sins to recount. It continues to occupy the place that ‘data’ did about ten years ago in the minds of venture capitalists, as some magic dust to sprinkle upon a business plan. It will never understand irony, which makes parsing British communications very difficult. A lot of these sins, however, lie in the credulity of the beholder. For me, the bigger problem lies in the human willingness to give up our autonomy, to the group or to a convenient technology or to the state, an NGO or trade union. AI is just one insidious way in which this can happen, and people can farm out significant choices to a system that allows them to pretend they have no choice at all. But there are many other systems that do that, that we need to be alert to.

The compliance script in hybrid fraud

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

It helps a scammer if the victim thinks they would never be the kind of person who falls for scams. Successful fraud depends on the fraudster generating compliance by imposing their definition of the situation on their target. Erving Goffman (1952) outlines the process of ‘cooling the mark out’ – ensuring the mark finds it harder to say ‘no’. He used the case of the fixed game. The mark is convinced that his new friends have developed a way of rigging betting odds in their favour. They might do this for example by saying they have advanced information of the winner of the horse race. Bets can be placed before others know.

The mark is convinced by placing a few low stakes beats and winning. He then has the opportunity to make a bigger investment. At which point the system no longer works. There might be a further attempt where the con artists convince him that he can win the money back with a further large investment. At this point the mark can be convinced of his need to recover his social status. He wants to recover not just his money but his sense that he is an individual who would not be victimised in this way. Goffman shows the ceremonial aspect of the final blow off: ‘An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is cooled out, given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.’ (Goffman, 1952). As Goffman portrays it, the fraud is aspirational. The mark is suckered in because he now has a chance to show his true inner self, to match his being to his self-concept.

The need to preserve one’s self-concept can be turned against the victim. A hybrid fraud is one that combines in person and remote elements. Charlotte Cowles (2024) recounts a victimisation that began one day with a call purporting to be from Amazon informing her of misuse of her account and ended with her throwing a shoebox containing $50,000 – most of her savings – into the back of an anonymous SUV. The scam used a compelling narrative to convince her she was the victim of identity theft and that as a result there were warrants out for her arrest. The only way for her to protect herself and her family was to comply. One of the scammers, claiming to be a CIA agent named ‘Michael Sarano’, told her ‘“If you talk to an attorney, I cannot help you anymore … You will be considered noncooperative. Your home will be raided, and your assets will be seized. You may be arrested. It’s your choice.” (Cowles, 2024). This was the only way to predict her money. Where Goffman’s scammers convinced the mark they were doing a lucrative wrong thing, these fraudsters convinced Cowles she was doing a protective right thing.

The hybrid fraud is hybrid in another sense. Goffman differentiated the con from white collar crime. A white collar criminal abuses position of trust. The conman is entirely invested in developing bonds with other people solely for misuse. The hybrid fraud combines elements of these two. It does not depend on the victim’s greed, put on their fear of status loss. This includes loss their freedom, as Cowles was threatened with.

If you are a victim of a complex fraud as Cowles was it might feel like it was a one off, custom designed for you. Typically though these are gangs running many attempts simultaneously. They use well-developed scripts which are designed to funnel potential marks into a fewer viable targets that can be worked on more intensely. Each contact point is a compliance moment. Accepting the initial call from ‘Amazon’, calling the person claiming to be from the FTC back. These are key moments where the person themselves is exercising their agency or feel themselves to be doing that. These are designed to ensure they think they are in charge.

The techniques Cowles were subject to are well familiar from studies of fraud scripts. In many ways they share a lot in common with abuse tactics. They make sure the target is isolated. In Cowles’ case she was alone at home, having dropped her young child at school. This also restricts their freedom. She can just walk away when she had someone to care for.

There is also gaslighting. The fraud creates a sense of unreality were the victim adopts the reality defined by the attacker. “It didn’t really feel like he was asking” as Cowles recounts. There is a process of boiling the frog slowly. Each step the victim takes move them into the world as defined by the fraud. Because of that they can end up doing something like hunting over a very large sum of money in cash all the oven in the world to complete stranger by the end of the day, something they would never do proposed without this intense psychological work being applied for in advance. A sense of crisis is created to lock the victim into handing their money over.

Goffman suggested part of the reason people comply is they are committed to repair work. We might not think of ourselves as they kind of people who are victimised in this way. We have a commitment to maintaining the situation, repairing our sense of self. Once the victim has outlived their usefulness, or has got wise to the scam, they are left to do this repair alone. The ceremonial element Goffman emphasised is gone. Sometimes the repair work sets them up for the next scam. Rather like how people respond to their interests being betrayed by a powerful figure they trust.

Cowles, Charlotte. 2024. ‘How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000’. New York Magazine.

Goffman, Erving. 1952. ‘On Cooling the Mark out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure’. Psychiatry 15(4):451–63.

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.

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.

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.

Martin, James. 2018. ‘Cryptomarkets, Systemic Violence and the’gentrification Hypothesis’’. Addiction 113(5):797–98.

Meland, Per Håkon, Yara Fareed Fahmy Bayoumy, and Guttorm Sindre. 2020. ‘The Ransomware-as-a-Service Economy within the Darknet’. Computers & Security 92:101762. doi: 10.1016/j.cose.2020.101762.

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

Moeller, Kim, Rasmus Munksgaard, and Jakob Demant. 2017. ‘Flow My FE the Vendor Said: Exploring Violent and Fraudulent Resource Exchanges on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs’. American Behavioral Scientist early online(v). doi: 10.1177/0002764217734269.

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.

Offei, Martin, Francis Kofi Andoh-Baidoo, Emmanuel W. Ayaburi, and David Asamoah. 2022. ‘How Do Individuals Justify and Rationalize Their Criminal Behaviors in Online Romance Fraud?’ Information Systems Frontiers 24(2):475–91. doi: 10.1007/s10796-020-10051-2.

Pereda, Valentin, and David Décary-Hetu. 2023. ‘Illegal Market Governance and Organized Crime Groups’ Resilience: A Study of The Sinaloa Cartel’. The British Journal of Criminology azad027. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azad027.

Picarelli, John T. 2006. ‘The Turbulent Nexus Of Transnational Organised Crime And Terrorism: A Theory of Malevolent International Relations’. Global Crime 7(1):1–24. doi: 10.1080/17440570600650125.

Powell, Anastasia, Gregory Stratton, and Robin Cameron. 2018. Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society. Routledge.

Rai, Amit S. 2019. Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. Duke University Press.

Roks, Robert A., E. Rutger Leukfeldt, and James A. Densley. 2021. ‘The Hybridization of Street Offending in the Netherlands’. The British Journal of Criminology 61(4):926–45. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azaa091.

Sawicka, Maja, Irene Rafanell, and Angus Bancroft. 2022. ‘Digital Localisation in an Illicit Market Space: Interactional Creation of a Psychedelic Assemblage in a Darknet Community of Exchange’. International Journal of Drug Policy 100:103514. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103514.

Smith, Benjamin T. 2016. ‘Public Drug Policy and Grey Zone Pacts in Mexico, 1920–1980’. Pp. 33–51 in Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in the Americas, edited by B. C. Labate, C. Cavnar, and T. Rodrigues. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Stevens, Alex. 2020. ‘Critical Realism and the “Ontological Politics of Drug Policy”’. International Journal of Drug Policy 102723. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102723.

Tzanetakis, Meropi, and Nigel South. 2023. ‘Introduction: The Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets as a Process of Reconfiguration and Continuity’. Pp. 1–12 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.

Vu, Anh V., Lydia Wilson, Yi Ting Chua, Ilia Shumailov, and Ross Anderson. 2021. ‘ExtremeBB: Enabling Large-Scale Research into Extremism, the Manosphere and Their Correlation by Online Forum Data’. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:2111.04479. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2111.04479.

Wood, Mark A. 2021. ‘Rethinking How Technologies Harm’. The British Journal of Criminology 61(3):627–47. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azaa074.

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.

Is crime still seductive when it is rationalised? The return of the early modern gang to the crime labour process

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Is crime in competition with being law abiding? For rational choice theorists the answer is mostly yes. The decision to commit crime is a calculated judgement based on self interest. There is nothing particularly special about criminals or crime. In contrast both deviance theory and bio-psychological criminology say there is something distinct about both. Bio-psychological theories examine criminal motive in terms of personal development traits: how do criminals depart from the normal. No need to explain the costs of compliance. Deviance or cultural criminology also says crime could be attractive in itself, as a separate state of transgression. Katz (1988) identified the thrill of deviance in immediate acquisitive crimes like shoplifting and Goldsmith and Wall (2022) highlight the life stage attractions of some types of cyber scalliness.

I am attracted to this approach but slightly wary of the background assumption that thrills are what characterises these types of crime. Apparently thrill seeking crimes might provide emotional satisfaction in other ways. Some apparently thrill seeking crimes require working at and cooperation. We can understand more about behaviour such as trolling through the attractions of cooperation to attack a target. This is all good but sets us up for a hypothesis. As crime is becoming more rationalised, are these seductions lost. If the controller of your shoplifting gang is expecting you to turn round £1000 of shoplifted goods a day, the motivation and experience is likely to be very different from thrill driven shoplifting.

Given how organised and systematised shoplifting is now we can hypothesise that the attraction of transgression is less significant as a motive. Shoplifting becomes more like the piece work that was the labour process in early modern factories, organised in labour gangs that were often also kinship groups. We also should change our understanding of what gangs are. These gangs are more mobile and adaptable, and less focused on territory, than the classic modern and post-industrial gang that characterised criminal life in Glasgow, Los Angeles and other places.

Goldsmith A and Wall DS (2022) The seductions of cybercrime: Adolescence and the thrills of digital transgression. European Journal of Criminology 19(1). SAGE Publications: 98–117. DOI: 10.1177/1477370819887305.
Katz J (1988) Seductions Of Crime: Moral And Sensual Attractions In Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.