I had to come back to Julian Dibbell’s article several times before I decided to read it all the way through. My reluctance probably stemmed from the aversion I felt while reading the first paragraphs of the text: “this is supposed to be a key work on cyberculture, new media and the digital universe in general?”. What put me off was the flowery language and the, at first sight, overblown literary diction of the text. After all, even great literature can be written in clean and straightforward language, hats off to you, Mr Kafka. A few days ago, though, I said to myself, all right, I have to read the text, it is bound to come up at the final state exams, who knows. Besides, the topic of the text seems controversial enough, and therefore important. Especially today, when virtual reality is creeping unchecked into our homes, connecting our old, analogue senses with the more than exciting set of new sensations that the digital world offers.
The article, however, is not about the hyper-realistic VR simulations of 2016, such as the current Oculus system or Microsoft’s HoloLens, but rather about the online community LambdaMOO, which came into being around 1991. The article was published in 1993, but even two years on LambdaMOO was still an online community where all communication and interaction between players “ran” in text mode. Old-timers may thus recall a number of so-called interactive fictions, which held the place of the first computer games of the role-playing genre, or they may remember their offline model, the Czech tabletop game Dračí doupě. What LambdaMOO and the examples mentioned have in common is that the game itself is created in the interpretation of words and sentences, which the player then translates, according to his own imagination, into a virtual world that is not so much in the computer or on paper, but rather, I dare to claim, in the minds of the players. That, however, is a point I will come back to. The suffix “MOO” in the name of the online community means that the players of this text-based online virtual reality could extend the content of the game by means of object-oriented programming (hence OO, object-oriented; the M in the name refers to MUD, Multi-User Dungeon), which in practice meant that players created their own chat rooms, to which they gave an atmosphere by describing in detail what was in the room; and they also created objects with diverse properties. Let us recall the first part of the Matrix trilogy, where towards the end of the film Neo gains abilities that allow him to manipulate, or rather reprogram, reality, whereby he de facto becomes a demigod. In the ability to reprogram (virtual) realities lies power. And one of the players decided to abuse it.
A player with the nickname Mr. Bungle entered, in the world of LambdaMOO, one of the rooms that was teeming with players. For his deed he chose and wrote a voodoo doll subprogram, with which he took control of the characters of several other players. Out of nowhere, these players began to write and describe obscene sexual acts under their own names. Mr. Bungle himself commented on these acts and added his laughter after every sentence. One of the sentences read:
“As if against her will, Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. In the distance you hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly.”
It is obvious that this is a stupid and infantile sentence, but to judge this act objectively one has to put oneself in the situation where something like this suddenly appeared in front of dozens of people with whom you had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in the world of LambdaMOO. It seems to me that, transposed into today’s context of social networks, a fitting analogy could be found on Facebook; how would we feel if somebody wrote similar things on our “wall”?
Of course, our reactions would differ and would be to a great extent influenced both by how much of our time and social capital we invest in Facebook and by whom we have as friends on Facebook. The fact is that one user at whom this attack was aimed confided that she suffered post-traumatic shock and that tears ran down her cheeks.
Besides those affected by this act, other users who were present during the attack also immediately demanded that Mr. Bungle be punished, for something like this was unacceptable (not only) in the community of LambdaMOO players. A long discussion started in the chat room about how exactly this punishment should be carried out. The next day the affected user herself proposed that Mr. Bungle be “toaded”. In English “toad” means both a wretch and a toad, and it was precisely a toad, or rather a purely ritual metamorphosis into a toad, and finally the deletion of the user account, that the debaters proposed Mr. Bungle deserved.
Although the decision at first seemed unanimous, the debate gradually revealed several problems. The first problem was that a few weeks before the incident the Wizards had decided that they would no longer intervene in the social life of the community; they would be merely technical administrators carrying out the will of the “people”. But that meant that the community of players had to transform itself quickly into something resembling a society as we know it in the real world “out there”.
And so the second problem was political. Some of the users claimed that they were clearly in favour of punishment, but since there were no laws by which the community was officially governed, it was not possible to appeal to any law, and consequently not to any punishment either. Others claimed that Mr. Bungle’s account had to be deleted immediately, so the administrators (they were called Wizards), who alone had the power to delete an account, should act. And then there were the so-called techno-libertarians, as the author of the article called them, who argued that it is practically impossible to prevent people who want to cause trouble from showing up on the server. They therefore proposed that the solution be of a technical nature: for example, introducing a new command that would filter out and not display the text from a chosen user.
Since the author of the article was “physically” present in the chat room where this discussion took place, he was able to describe in more detail what went on in it. For me personally, this evolution from anarchy to the call for some kind of political, indeed even legal, system was an accelerated historical excursion into how ideas about the ideal arrangement of a community of people developed. In other words, people turn up their noses at government and law until something happens to them; then they call on them again like a teenager calling his parents after overdoing it with alcohol in some out-of-the-way club.
But I have strayed from the main topic, which was rape. In the real world, a person convicted of rape serves a few years in prison. Was it possible to demand that Mr. Bungle meet the same fate, that he should go to a real prison for several years? If not, we must be consistent and say that the incident was not real rape, but something else. After all, it all took place in virtual space, and in 1993 to boot, when virtual space mostly consisted of white letters on a black background. But how do we explain that an act in the virtual world had real consequences, namely post-traumatic stress, in the real world? Can someone rape with words? As far as I know, the activity called “sexting” often leads to climax on the other, more positive side of the sexual spectrum. And there, too, only words and imagination are used.
On the other hand, someone might object that the user could simply have left the whole conversation, and immediately at that, since all she had to do was close the black window on her computer in which the whole text-based virtual reality was taking place. The question is whether by this step we would not be giving Mr. Bungle and those like him a signal that his behaviour is fine, that nothing threatens him if he spreads these obscenities in the world. In the virtual one. If it had all happened in the real world, whether in a park or at a workplace, Bungle would quickly have stopped laughing. But in the real world he would not have done anything of the sort. To be precise, they. Because it turned out that behind the Mr. Bungle account were several university students from New York, who were allegedly competing over who could come up with worse and nastier images of sexual acts.
After careful consideration, one of the Wizards took the whole incident upon his own shoulders and deleted Bungle’s account. Quietly, without any unnecessary fuss. The others first learned about it when they used one of the available commands, @who username, which returned information about where the user in question was. In Bungle’s case the command returned that the username could not be found in the database.
In my opinion, that was exactly the punishment Mr. Bungle deserved. Although I think his behaviour was inappropriate, I cannot imagine agreeing that he should serve several years. Not because rape should not be punished, but because this was not rape as we all understand it and have a good definition for.
Words are not harmless, which is why in many countries around the world there are laws penalising so-called “hate speech”, racism, professing allegiance to Nazi Germany or, as for example in the Czech Republic, denial of the Holocaust and of the crimes committed by representatives of the communist regime. Personally, I have mixed feelings about these laws. Not that I would in any way support these acts, but in this case I stand on the side of people like Salman Rushdie or Noam Chomsky, who declare, and I am paraphrasing now, that evil will never disappear, however hard we try, so it is better to have this evil right under our noses, to see it, to have a light shone on it, rather than to let it grow secretly in the dark. People are always more afraid of what cannot be seen. At the same time, we in a way turn the convicted into martyrs, who then become role models and a boost for their followers, for in their eyes we thereby validate their view that the world has conspired against them and their truth and will not even let them voice their ideas publicly.
Can the same argument perhaps be used in the online world as well? I would say yes, and even somewhat more effectively, because closing one window of an operating system is easier than getting rid of an aggressive person in the street.
Current law, however, disagrees, and prohibits and punishes the verbal acts mentioned above. Fine, but that is the real, physical world, whose mechanisms and rules cannot simply be carried over online one to one. In circles of experts and laypeople alike, the whole infrastructure of the Internet, from digital code through cables to websites, is called the New Medium. And that is not for lack of linguistic invention, but precisely because this New Medium represents something entirely revolutionary: a system or a world where much of our physical world does not apply. The New Medium knows no laws of physics.
In it, a person can fly, be a butterfly, men do not forget their partners’ birthdays, and the partners, for a change, are attracted by a naked man in socks. Imagination knows no bounds. That is not a worn-out phrase, but rather a theoretical insight that the New Medium theoretically makes possible
everything the human mind can imagine. It just has to be able to imagine it. Theoretically, mind you.
For the New Medium, like technology as such, is not outside society, but is an inseparable part of it. That is why, in practice, it is to a great extent up to people what relationship they will have to technology. It is entirely conceivable that in a few years we will decide democratically that the maximum of the laws of the physical world shall apply to this New Medium, if technology allows it. Here, however, I see a contradiction. The New Medium is new as long as it has enough radically different properties. The more we want to apply the customs of the physical world to it, the more of this New Medium we will lose. In support of this idea one can also mention a purely technical argument, which has been used many times: implementing all the constraints of the physical world in the digital world, that is, in the world of new media, is technically very difficult to achieve, mostly at the cost of an enormous reduction of the whole essence of this new-media world and of the possibilities it offers.
The unwritten rules of the LambdaMOO community were clear: we are all reasonable people here, so we will not insult each other or otherwise make a nuisance of ourselves. But unwritten rules work only as long as everyone involved observes them. As soon as someone breaks them significantly, the others begin to demand that they be officially codified, for only then can they be enforced. Yet the charm of unwritten rules lies precisely in their being unwritten, which perhaps sounds like circular reasoning, but I did not want to say anything other than that if we are to write something down that should make sense and have logical consistency, it requires a detailed analysis and, in the case of law, clear requirements as to what is actually wanted of the law.
I fear that no law worth anything could at that time have clearly determined what to do with Mr. Bungle. Law, of course, responds to social changes and new technologies. But that is a process that takes time. If we encounter a radically new situation, such as sexual harassment in a text-based virtual reality, it may happen that nobody provides an unambiguous answer, because there is no such unambiguous answer.