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, China's Internet space was still a rough but transparent frontier. Internet cafes became a new community for young people, and early hackers, known as "black customers," enjoyed pure intellectual games through technical exploration and free interaction. State surveillance was not as strong as it is today, the legal system had not caught up, and anonymity encouraged curiosity and creativity. They had their fingers on the pulse of the world and sought to shape themselves through technology itself.

However, this atmosphere took a completely different turn in just a decade. Around 2000, a combination of social factors, including the rapid spread of the Internet, massive amounts of undeveloped personal information, weak corporate servers, and lagging IT education, transformed the Internet space into a huge black market swirling with backroom deals and personal information trading. The ideals set forth by the black marketeers, such as bank account laundering, mass trafficking of SNS accounts, the rise of spammers, and trafficking of corporate information ......, have been swallowed up by criminal organizations that aim to make huge profits.

The old hackers called this a loss of spirit. In their time, technical skill was a mark of pride, and the success or failure of a break-in was a symbol of skill. For subsequent generations, however, hacking became a means to make money, and the culture of talking about the technology itself rapidly faded. Neither the state nor the market stopped this transformation. Rather, the immaturity of the legal system and the social climate of disregard for security allowed malicious intent to spread easily.

As Baidu's past reports and Tsinghua University's research show, the scale of the illegal trading market exploded during this period, turning the Chinese Internet into a city of black fog. The decade that passed before a culture that began as a pure pursuit was swallowed up by an immense darkness was also a testament to the fallout from an era of rapid social growth and underdeveloped institutions.