Beyond Cybercriminality
The criminological nuances of the Onlife – our blended digital and physical existence – focus on how everyday life is increasingly shaped and steered within a hyperconnected world. The term ‘Onlife’, initially proposed by philosopher Luciano Floridi, appears to create a meaning beyond the cyber- suffix, much used to describe ‘digital crimes’. Instead, the boundary between online and offline crime is becoming blurred. People commit harm across both a screen and away-from-keyboards (AFK), but within the Onlife, these actions are deeply intertwined and driven by constant connectivity. Hyperconnectivity not only becomes a means of increasing access to information, but also provides tools for modern surveillance regimes, social control, technological determinism and the subtle, often overlooked forms of resistance to this overarching scenario. Onlife is not just a phase or trend; it is a complex and holistic structure in which information and users are directed, monitored and shaped over time. The ‘information highways’ envisioned by Bill Gates in the mid 1990s have expanded into totalising systems: not merely pipelines of data, but infrastructures for the biopolitical management of human existence that are only becoming more open and ubiquitous with new automated technologies and the upcoming EU Data Act.
Surveillance, control and the algorithmic gaze in the Onlife era
Yes, the internet has provided instant and largely unrestricted access to knowledge. But it has also enabled unprecedented access to people’s lives. The Nietzschean metaphor of the abyss looking back at us, once observed too intensively, takes a new shape: the digital abyss stares with data-hungry precision, measuring and responding to our every move.
Governments and state agencies have eagerly appropriated these digital infrastructures to enhance bureaucratic functions, policy making and border patrolling, with staggering reach and efficiency. What once seemed a chaotic and uncontrollable network of anonymous global users now presents a very different picture: increasingly ordered, surveilled, structured and socially sorted.
The famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon ‘On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’ was reimagined 20 years later with a more ironic tone: ‘Remember when, on the Internet, nobody knew who you were?’ Today, the joke is on us. In the hyperconnected reality of Onlife, interactions are increasingly vulnerable to external influence, control and imposition, with hidden dynamics of harm.
Digital harm and hidden crimes: The challenges of hyperconnectivity
Global access to smart devices and reliable internet remains uneven, and digital life is not yet trivial or ubiquitous. However, trends in more affordable processors, satellite internet and international tech investment are rapidly narrowing those gaps. Depending on the political regime, Onlife interactions increasingly mediate ideology, finances, interests, movements and even internal thoughts – not always with ease, but certainly with systematicity.
It’s easy to see how the Onlife leaves us with few real alternatives – once we’re part of it, it becomes almost impossible to live outside its influence, an imbalance that both corporations and governments fully understand and exploit, even in its most remote outputs, as recently revealed by smuggled smartphones from North Korea, with automated censorship of text and timed screengrabs embedded in the operating system.
Yes, privacy notions and laws exist. However, the promise of user protection is undermined by the opaque, offshore and constantly shifting reality of cloud storage and user profiling, prompting the need for new ways to ‘be left alone’ as a means to build more systematic and effective methods to gain knowledge and power over our lives.
From empowerment to exploitation: The paradox of life in a hyperconnected world
Along the way, and while we are reading this, the self-proclaimed ‘world’s coolest dictator’, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, is framing speculative cryptocurrency solutions as a path to financial autonomy and decolonisation. Yet these digital policies often introduce new vulnerabilities. Citizens exchange one form of domination for another – more technical, less visible, but equally coercive.
Instead, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ becomes a surreally dismissed mantra of our hyperconnected age: as we consolidate our lives into a single hyperconnected device, our agency becomes increasingly politicised, entrusted within encrypted strings of data whose precise location is unknown, as is what they are used for and how they can be used against us. The Onlife becomes not just our daily life, but a life tethered to connection, signal and battery autonomy. Smartwatches, Bluetooth earphones, e-bikes and electric vehicles promise the freedom of clean and flexible movement, while craving our data and consuming the planet’s resources – the more powerful the computing, the greater the energy drain. As Spain’s and Portugal’s recent outages have shown, our pursuit of autonomy via solar panels and renewable energy is still ultimately governed by centralised infrastructure and state control.
Users, seduced by narratives of empowerment and informed choice that carry a utopian ‘cyberspace’ narrative, may feel in control of their information flows. But these flows are just as well channelled: sponsored, nudged and framed with invisible algorithms. Whether we are aware of it or not, digital systems continuously capture and consume the Onlife user. A stroll down any high street becomes data for surveillance, our very footfall (Fit? Drunk? Disorderly?) and psychological traits (Sad? Angry? Terrorist?) a means of social control metrics. Reality is filtered, platformed and sometimes entirely machine-generated – hyper-shared, intensively accessed and consumed with the greater brute force of AI hallucinations and conspiracy mindsets, with greater storage centres to keep track of it all, and perhaps indefinitely.
As such, being online and part of the Onlife inevitably presents an open channel to all sorts of influences, some of which self-evidently leak back and forth between reality and delusion. Conspiracy thinking, violent metaphors and toxic narratives fill the web and influence political results, tighten security checks and exacerbate hatred and distrust towards institutions. To date, we have found no clear deradicalisation tools, neither through de-platforming, nor plain banning or traditional policing. Rather, all of this hatred, violence and toxicity fosters more clicks, more views, greater polarisation and instability within a system of social media overload and confusion that is, in itself, part of the design of our hypermediated existences.
Resistance or deviance? The criminalisation of dissent in the Onlife world
Thus, the Onlife appears to be a polished, titanium cage – the same material used in many of our sleekest new devices. It’s appealing. It’s modern. But it’s also difficult to escape. Yes, means of resistance exist. However, they often appear in criminalised or marginalised forms, such as through the so-called ‘dark web’, hacker collectives, the TOR browser or Pirate Bay communities. These aren’t just technical alternatives, they’re criminological signposts, revealing how dissent is reframed as deviance.
In sum, what the criminology of the Onlife implies is as straightforward as troubling: to live within the Onlife is to be a subject. To resist it is to be a deviant. Somewhere in between lies the space for discussion.
Janos Mark Szakolczai is Sociology Lecturer in Criminology and Digital Societies at the University of Glasgow.
Onlife Criminology by Janos Szakolczai is available on Bristol University Press. Order here for £80.00.
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