Urbanity, Transgressive Digitality, and COVID-19: Hierarchical Cybercrime(s) and the Subaltern Nigerian Urban Youth in a Global Pandemic

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, among other things, has shown how the contemporary global community is inescapably wired to a virtual existentiality for continued human relations and correspondence. This human–digital relationship however spiked an unprecedented wave of global cybercrime during the pandemic’s 2020 upsurge. Reflecting on its (trans)national/situational peculiarities, I argue that Nigerian COVID-19 cybercrime uniquely revealed a heightened feature of deviant urban-youth subculture interrogating the dominant systemic neglect of the youth in Nigeria and its link to European colonialism/contemporary Western neoliberalism. The paper proposes that redressing Nigerian cybercrime would require (among other things) concerted global efforts to reintegrate the urban-youth.