Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In the previous episode, we traced Telegram’s beginnings and discussed how a technology platform grew around ideals of freedom, privacy, and decentralization. We left one question: when a technology has enough room to develop freely, what appears on its other side?

Here we seek an answer through one case.

In 2018, South Korea’s Nth Room case came to light. Criminals used Telegram to establish secret chat rooms where they threatened and coerced large numbers of women—especially minors—into prolonged sexual exploitation, then circulated and traded the resulting criminal images. Several years later, advances in AI deepfake technology brought similar digital sex crimes back in a new form.

Through the Nth Room case, we enter the inner workings of a digital criminal organization: how an ordinary person joins, how the organization makes rules and expands, and how technology continually lowers the threshold for offending. The case also asks us to reconsider how sexual violence is changing in the digital age.

 

- What happened in the Nth Room case

- The organizational structure of the Nth Room

- The investigation and the difficulties of pursuing online crime in the physical world

- Comparing nonfiction accounts to perceive gender differences in authorship

- More than 260,000 participants fundamentally overturned our trust in other people

- From the Nth Room to deepfakes: how does AI “upgrade” sexual crime?

 

- No More Bets (film)

- Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror (documentary)

- Burning Sun: Exposing the Secret K-Pop Chat Groups (documentary)

- Team Flame, Tracking the Nth Room (book)