International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 43

International Journal on Criminology
sciences, cryptography, the audit and security of the technical aspects of information
and communication processes, information management and security, IT
security protocols, and so on. Who is the (digital) enemy? Where are they? What
are they doing today, and what will they be doing tomorrow? There is nothing on
this, nothing of substance on the hackers, the spies, or the saboteurs. We are fighting
thin air.
This study does not overlook this enemy. Adopting a battle cry of “back to
the things themselves!” (à la Edmund Husserl), let us head into enemy territory.
Prologue: Silicon Valley Man, How Fragile Thou Art 2
“No countries, no borders”: an unexpected reprise of the Comintern
dream. In the post-hippy Californian kaleidoscope of Silicon Valley,
the good life comes with no ties. It is mobile, flexible, and fluid. It
is Ayn Rand-style egotistical anarchism for rich kids, the libertarian myth of the
transitory, of mobility, of the absolute ME. It is a puerile dream: never get bored,
escape from routine, do whatever you want, go and live in a tribe, as a neo-huntergatherer;
six months in a shared office in Berlin ... spend the summer (which one?)
in a caravan in Chile ... the rest of the time at a start-up incubator in New York. Today,
designing software for a bank in Myanmar, tomorrow launching a new brand
in Saudi Arabia. Are these international globe-trotting entrepreneurs inhabiting a
new kingdom of the chosen? In reality, they are ideal targets for criminal networks,
hackers, and providers of special services, intent on looting their lovely digital
world, championed by blind “snowflakes,” all eternally adolescent Peter Pan clones.
The Evils and the Wonders of Silicon Valley
An opening statement: anyone who has managed to escape from what is
known in phenomenology as “the sphere of common knowledge” will be
anything but surprised at the domination of the “tech titans” depicted below.
Decidedly the opposite, in fact, particularly if they have read the following
prophetic statement from 1966, just over half a century ago:
At present, we reflect on the phenomenon of steering. This phenomenon
has today, in the age of cybernetics, become so fundamental
that it occupies and determines the whole of natural science
and the behavior of humans [ ... ] That natural science and our life
today become ruled by cybernetics in increasing measure is not accidental;
rather, it is foreshadowed in the historical origin of modern
knowledge and technology. (Heidegger and Fink 1979, 12)
2 I urge you to read Alastair Bonnett's splendid Beyond the Map: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places,
Emerging Lands, and Our Search for New Utopias (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
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