I am a bit of a Weeb and was just browsing through a thing about news and saw this very interesting video.
It’s a bit long so I’ll put a summary below if you don’t want to watch it. But then I’m going to then go into a little ramble about ‘what’s it all about?’ and that. It’s a bit more serious, but not serious serious, just me thinking about stuff n that.
So a quick summary of the video. The Yakuza in Japan is dying out, because it’s so old and traditional, nobody young wants to join. If you don’t know about the Yakuza it’s not 100 miles from the Italian mafia, including the fact that it has these medieval roots and traditions which mean that to become a proper gangster you have to spend 10 years doing petty crime and errands and so on for the ‘made’ guys, which just doesn’t work now. Like join up when you are 18 and if you survive to 35 you get to be a real gangster, which is still dangerous? That’s worse than a proper job
The Yakuza dying out has seen the rise of this new crime phenomenon which has been called TokuRyu which means ‘liquid and anonymous’ and this is a new kind of crime syndicate where people are drawn into these internet schemes, and given assignments to do usually low level but sometimes very dangerous crimes through these dark web apps.
What is unique about it is that these people don’t know each other they are put into these gangs and coordinated/extorted by these gangsters who they never meet, it’s all done anonymously through the internet and nobody seems to know who is who. Apparently there is even a predictable nostalgia among the normal folk who they victimise for the Yakuza because they had strict rules and codes and so on, whereas TokuRyu are just clueless kids who do not give a shit.
There are a lot of pretty recent articles about it in all of the big papers from this year which I have not researched, so I’m going to get to the musings. I will link a couple of articles at the bottom, but I did not research it properly so they are just newspaper pieces.
Now what struck me, except for ‘cooool’ is how this is, like the title says ‘The Gig Economy’ only for crime, and it’s completely inevitable. I’ve used these apps like UpWork and a couple of online teaching companies, and AI platforms to make pocket money, it is kind of a ripoff, but also convenient as long as you don’t depend on it, but that’s another thing that has been written about loads, but it is inevitable it will go into crime. There’s a very shady line between legal and illegal even in the huge legal internet companies.
My first big musing was more the bit about how the gig economy for crime is so inevitable, and also so reflective of the world we live in. Just like with Amazon or whatever these guys are all offshore and it’s not just the organisation that is fluid and anonymous, apparently the Japanese state just can’t catch these guys.
There was one video that I watched about how the Japanese did catch this one guy who was organising everything called ‘Luffy’ (name of a One Piece character, I’m so old….) who was organising a lot of the operations from the Phillipines, it took them years to extradite him and they did eventually get him back to Japan to put him in prison, but then there is still a Luffy coordinating lots of operations. Now nobody knows if the guy in prison is a fall guy, or are there a load of copycats, does it matter?
Now a bit of full on musing. this gets to the ‘you are the computer’. There is some real philosophical thing about the internet in general, like everything, it’s not new, it’s just been accelerated and supermodified by the internet and capitalism. Like the internet is people but it’s also it’s own thing, so we are all kind of another person whenever we go onto the internet (I was about to say logging on, that’s how old I am), which was interesting 20 years ago, but now we are just all on the internet all of the time, so who are we?
Thinking about it, I’m sure that I read that in university 20 years ago, and there is a word for it.
This leads on to the more important point about the internet, also not new but also something really worth mentioning when you see accelerated culture stuff like this. If we accept the idea that we are in this kind of symbiosis with the internet hive mind (maaaaaaaaaan) , this begs the question ‘how do we control it?’ and of course this is the big question that is never addressed, because we know the answer: Because the internet is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, and we are trained to believe that this is just natural and the only way for the internet to work.
But of course, us oldies remember when the internet was new as a public thing, and there was this whole excitement around the internet and ‘what will it do?’ and ‘can the power structure survive this freedom of information?’
New Labour, in the most New Labour thing ever put these ‘internet cafes’ in all of the cities so that everyone could become smart and get a job in sales after using the internet for 6 months.
Hell even the Arab Spring in 2011 there was all of this serious musing about how everything happened on Twitter and LiveBlog and these old governments had no answers and were doing things like putting out false information on the government TV News and so on.
Of course now we know that the power structure did survive it just looks a bit different now.
This clown guy apparently owns Twitter and he bought it ‘for a laugh’ because he has $500b dollars to his name, in shares in companies that makes really expensive cars, rockets, and other stuff that has a vague point apparently, but you can’t afford.
LiveBlog? is that what it was called? But that’s gone because blogging isn’t really a ‘thing’ anymore, because the equivalent is YouTube videos and streams, owned by Google naturally.
That’s a terribly negative way to end the post, I do think that it’s interesting because there is also a positive aspect. To circle back around to my love of Japan and the TokuRyu who started this whole thought train off. One of the things I love about Japan is the way that the Shinto tradition is one of those things that is programmed in, and a big part of Shinto is the idea of objects having souls or spirits. Of course that is not unique to Japan, I think that’s in most cultures traditionally, but just in Japan it’s very easy to notice if not always understand, even as a westerner.
Now this can be applied to the internet, we see it as a huge capitalism out of control thing, which it is, but then another way to look at it is like a spirit, a manifestation of some thing that we brought into life, or something that was already there that we just saw. Now of course right now it’s pretty ill, but then because it’s made of people, we can care for it and make it better.
Like that does sound like real top rate hippy bollocks to me writing it down, but there is something in it
Oh shit, there was another idea that I had as well that I’ll probably just write about in another ramble next time my mind takes me.
I remember in 2016 I got hopelessly addicted to YouTube and then I just had the thought ‘I’m like when a computer gets a virus and runs slower’ I still think that I have this virus, but it’s an interesting thought, probably true as well. Definitely with porn, like in the 00s if you looked at porn you would have to run a virus checker after you were ‘finished’ cos your computer would have just gotten a load of viruses, I think that was like our brains, something bad went into our brain from using that stuff.
Links to articles
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/as-japan-s-yakuza-weakens-a-new-type-of-criminal-emerges-tokuryu-20240519-p5jer3.html
https://www.kompas.id/baca/english/2024/05/19/en-jaringan-penjahat-gen-z-penggeser-dominasi-yakuza-yang-menua
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/06/japan/crime-legal/tokuryu-explainer/
I didn’t read all of these properly but they all seemed very informative
Leave a Reply