The City of Black Fog: A Decade of Black Business on the Chinese Internet (Early 2000s - 2000s)

The City of Black Fog: A Decade of Black Business on the Chinese Internet (Early 2000s - 2000s)

In the early 2000s, the Chinese Internet space was immature in terms of both institutions and surveillance, and anonymity and freedom encouraged the creativity of young people. Early hackers, known as "black customers," found pure joy in learning and experimenting with technology, and used Internet cafes as a base to hone their skills. At the time, information was open and cyberspace, with its blurred boundaries, was growing as a new cultural sphere.

Ten years later, however, that space took on a completely different form. The explosion of Internet penetration, inadequate personal information management, vulnerability of corporate servers, and lagging IT education combined to create a rapidly growing cybercrime market. Black market transactions such as bank account "laundering," trading of SNS accounts, trafficking of corporate data, and distribution of fraudulent tools have covered the Internet, and the once free playground has sunk into the black fog of profit-seeking.

Old-line hackers lament the loss of the culture of talking about technology itself, calling it a loss of spirit. For them, technology was a symbol of pride, but for the succeeding generation, hacking has been transformed into a means of profit, and ethics and principles have receded into the background. The state and the market have not been able to halt this transformation, and it is said that the delay in the legal system and the social climate of disregard for security have allowed the pollution to spread.

As the Baidu and Tsinghua University surveys show, the illegal market was expanding at an extremely rapid pace at the time, and the Chinese Internet formed a dark ecosystem that has been described as the City of Black Mist. The decade in which a culture that began as a pure pursuit was swallowed up by the black market was also a symbolic fault line of the era, created by the institutional vacuum created by a rapidly growing society.