Platform Criminality and Post-Crime

This book explores how digital crime/cybercrime has been decisively reshaped by the emergence of the digital platform.

Online platforms now constitute so significant a mode of wealth production that many argue a new kind of economic order – ‘platform capitalism’ has emerged. But the platform vehicle has also provided a new organisational dynamic for criminal entrepreneurs, one that significantly adds to other advantages of digital technology exploited by earlier (cyber) criminals such as hyperconnection and capacity augmentation. The book traces the emergence of a shadow digital crime economy which both feeds off and contributes to the way digital societies now produce wealth and explores the role of the platform in underpinning this. It sets out three modalities of platform criminality; the emergence of criminal platforms; the targeting of commercial platforms and the misuse of platform by key institutional agents such as tech companies and the state. By exploring the reciprocal relations between legitimate and illegitimate platforms, it suggests how platforms have not only changed the practice and organisation of cybercrime but have been instrumental in unravelling key elements of civil society, not least the legal consensus upon which democracy depends. It argues that ‘post-truth’ and the crisis of objectivity in which platforms are implicated lead directly into a ‘post-crime’ world, one where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal are becoming increasingly blurred.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of criminology, cybersecurity, technology ethics, and digital economies. It will also appeal to professionals and policymakers engaged with these fields.