Precarious Futures, 2024
Crime, Technology and the Web

Precarious Futures explores the evolving and emerging relationship between crime and technology in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, along with its implications for new perceptions of crime and deviance. It evaluates the rise of the World Wide Web and the model of cybercrime, questions whether existing criminological thought offers relevance and efficacy in current circumstances, conditions and future predictions, and revisits the concept of Relative Deprivation and the underpinning social psychological and socio-political foundations of it. It argues that Relative Deprivation allied to post-industrial precarity provides a central platform for understanding crime and deviance in a hyper-connected and hyper-commercial neoliberal world. The book develops to explore current criminological and security conceptions of artificial intelligence, big data, crime and social control, as well as hacktivism, and how opportunities for crime have become?democratised? and expanded through the Web. Drawing on empirical data, theoretical narratives and a review of the state of crime now and in a speculative near future, Hamerton and Webber discuss some potential directions for a new transdisciplinary critical criminology. Precarious Futures speaks to criminologists, sociologists and social theory scholars and students, as well as academics and professionals in associated technological fields such as cyber-security, computer science and web science.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Beyond the Contrivance of Cybercriminality, The Rise of the Web and the Emergence of Web Science as Discipline.- Chapter 2: Traditional Perspectives on Universal Social Problems: interrogating the Criminological Imagination of the Past.- Chapter 3: Relative Deprivation in the Twenty-First Century: Precarity and the Emergent Missing Links.- Chapter 4: Socio-political Perspectives: Horizon Scanning, Magic Bullets and the ‘Prediction Fallacy’.- Chapter 5: Mystification and the Dark Web: Sticky Identity and the Never Forgotten Self.- Chapter 6: No Longer Anonymous: The Politics of Hacktivism.- Chapter 7: Pandora’s Box, Osmosis or a World of Opportunity: The Reinvention of Organised, Collaborative and Democratised Crime and Deviance.- Chapter 8: Conclusions and Prospects: Does Criminology have a Precarious Future?.

Christopher Hamerton is Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice Research at the University of Southampton, UK.

Craig Webber is Head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton, UK.

Sets out to critically examine the future of criminology in an era of rapid technological advancement Addresses important theoretical debates about modern living, crime and deviance, politics, identity, and social control Rediscovers and re-evaluates the concept of Relative Deprivation as a tool of current criminological discourse