Informated Crime: Computer Crimes as Intellective Labor

• In Event: Roundtable: Crime Refracted?: Online Deviance in the New Platform Ecosystem

Abstract

While online marketplaces, social media, and other forms of online infrastructure have had radical effects on human behavior and organization, there is a tendency to overemphasize what computers and the internet do to human behavior and organization. Instead, it is important to consider how humans use and engage with these technologies as actors. Drawing from Shoshanna Zuboff’s work on “informating,” this presentation approaches crime and deviance as forms of labor shaped the varying amounts of “intellective skills” actors may bring to bear in their enterprise. This approach bears implications for fundamental criminological issues including criminal organization, the social learning of crime and deviance, criminal motivation, and the intersection of crime and victimization.

Author

• Kevin Steinmetz, Kansas State University