Online Criminology: Virtual crimes and real harms
Talk by Dr. Janos Mark Szakolczai, University of Glasgow.
This talk develops the concept of 'Onlife' to describe contemporary social life as a hybrid space where online and offline interactions are inseparable and structured by data infrastructures. In this environment, consent and personal information are not simply given but captured (capta), aggregated, and repurposed, while harm increasingly exceeds traditional legal categories. Drawing on global examples – including Dark Web markets, crypto fraud, deceptive design, social media vigilantism, conspiracy mobilization, and AI-enabled deception – I argue that these instances are expressions of broader harmful platform logics: opacity, “refraction”, extraction, algorithmic ranking, and concentrated corporate power, calling for a systemic understanding of digital harm and asking what a reasonable hyperconnected existence requires.