Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/ES Cyberama/Rape in Cyberspace

Internet Message Format | 1994-01-05 | 49KB

From: [e-mail] Mon, 03 Jan 1994 02:32:28 EST
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 02:21:42 -0500 (EST)
Subject: please read this - even though its long...


From the December 21, 1993 _Village Voice_
by Julian Dibbell



A Rape in Cyberspace



They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a
cunning little doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with
the power to make them do whatever he desired. They say that by
manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with him, and
with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to their own
bodies. And though I wasnt there that night, I think I can assure
you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in
the living room - right there amid the well-stocked bookcases
and the sofas and the fireplace - of a house Ive come to think
of as my second home.

Call me Dr. Bombay. Some months ago - lets say about halfway
between the first time you heard the words _information
superhighway_ and the first time you wished you never had - I
found myself tripping with compulsive regularity down the
well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very
large and very busy rustic chateau built entirely of words.
Nightly, I typed the commands that called those words onto my
computer screen, dropping me with what seemed a warm electric
thud inside the mansions darkened coat closet, where I checked
my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and appearance
of a minor character from a long-gone television sitcom, and
stepped out into the glaring chatter of the crowded living room.
Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I emerged as a dolphin
instead.

I wont say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stevenss
outlandish cousin, or as the dolphin, or what exactly led me to
my mild but so-far incurable addiction to the semifictional
digital otherworlds known around the Internet as multi-user
dimensions, or MUDs. This isnt my story, after all. Its the
story of a man named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual
violence he committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most
importantly of the ways his violence and his victims challenged
the 1500 and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested
mansion to become, finally, the community so many of them
already believed they were.

That I was myself one of those residents has little direct
bearing on the storys events. I mention it only as a warning
that my own perspective is perhaps too steeped in the surreality
and magic of the place to serve as an entirely reliable guide.
For the Bungle Affair raises questions that - here on the brink
of a future in which human life may find itself as tightly
enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the
architectural kind - demand a clear-eyed, sober, and
unmystified consideration. It asks us to shut our ears
momentarily to the techno-utopian ecstasies of West Coast
cyberhyppies and look without illusion upon the present
possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world,
societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and
concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies
awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers,
and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially
meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical
ones. And most forthrightly it asks us to wrap our late-modern
ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense
around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll - and to try
not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.

In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to explain it to you without
resort to dimestore mysticisms, and I fear I may have
shape-shifted by the digital moonlight one too many times to be
quite up to the task. But I will do what I can, and can do no
better I suppose than to lead with the facts. For if nothing
else about Mr. Bungles case is unambiguous, the facts at least
are crystal clear.

The facts begin (as they often do) with a time and a place. The
time was a Monday night in March, and the place, as Ive said,
was the living room - which, due to the inviting warmth of its
decor, is so invariably packed with chitchatters as to be
roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party. So strong,
indeed, is the sense of convivial common ground invested in the
living room that a cruel mind could hardly imagine a better place
in which to stage a violation of LambdaMOOs communal spirit. And
there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle
presented to the virtual world at the time - he was a fat,
oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in a cum- stained
harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt
whose buckle bore the quaint inscription *KISS ME UNDER THIS,
BITCH!* But whether cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene
is not among the established facts of the case. It is a fact
only that he did choose the living room.

The remaining facts tell us a bit more about the inner world of
Mr. Bungle, though only perhaps that it couldnt have been a very
comfortable place. They tell us that he commenced his assault
entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the rooms
occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less
conventional ways. That this victim was legba, a Haitian
trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and
wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses.
That legba heaped vicious imprecations on him all the while and
that he was soon ejected bodily from the room. That he hid
himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the
mansion grounds and continued the attacks without interruption,
since the voodoo doll worked just as well at a distance as in
proximity. That he turned his attentions now to Starsinger, a
rather pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and
brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other
individuals present in the room, among them legba, Bakunin (the
well-known radical), and Juniper (the squirrel). That his
actions grew progressively violent. That he mad legba eat
his/her own pubic hair. That he caused Starsinger to violate
herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery. That his distant
laughter echoed evilly in the living room with every successive
outrage. That he could not be stopped until at last someone
summoned Zippy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought with
him of near wizardly powers, a gun that didnt kill but enveloped
its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo dolls powers.
That Zippy fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at
last and silencing the evil, distant laughter.

These particulars, as I said, are unambiguous. But they are far
from simple, for the simple reason that every set of facts in
virtual reality (or VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed
by a second, complicating set: the *real-life* facts. And while
a certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard,
prosaic RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR counterparts,
the dissonance in the Bungle case is striking. No hideous clowns
or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident,
no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL
court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were
university students for the most part, and they sat rather
undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their
only actions a spidery flitting of fingers a cross standard
QWERTY keyboards. No bodies touched. Whatever physical
interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic
signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and
Sydney, Australia. Those signals met in LambdaMOO, certainly,
just as the hideous clown and the living room party did, but
what was LambdaMOO after all? Not an enchanted mansion or
anything of the sort - just a middlingly complex database,
maintained for experimental purposes inside a Xerox Corporation
research computer in Palo Alto and open to public access via the
Internet.

To be more precise about it, LambdaMOO, was a MUD. Or to be yet
more precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which
is short for *MUD, Object-Oriented.* All of which means that it
was a kind of database especially designed to give users the
vivid impression of moving through physical space that in
reality exists only as descriptive data filed away on a hard
drive. When users dial into LambdaMOO, for instance, the program
immediately presents them with a brief textual description of one
of the rooms of the databases fictional mansion (the coat
closet, say). If the user wants to leave this room, she can
enter a command to move in a particular direction and the
database will replace the original description with a new one
corresponding to the room located in the direction she chose.
When the new description scrolls across the users screen it
lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its
contents at that moment - including things (tools, toys,
weapons) and other users (each represented as a *character* over
which he or she has sole control).

As far as the database program is concerned, all of these
entities - rooms, things, characters - are just different
subprograms that the program allows to interact according to
rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world.
Characters may not leave a room in a given direction, for
instance, unless the room subprogram contains an *exit* at that
compass point. And if a character *says* or *does* something (as
directed by its user-owner), then only the users whose
characters are also located in that room will see the output
describing the statement or action. Aside from such basic
constraints, however, LambdaMOOers are allowed a broad freedom
to create - they can describe their characters any way they
like, they can make rooms of their own and decorate them to
taste, and they can build new objects almost at will. The
combinations of all this busy user activity with the hard physics
of this database can certainly induce a lucid illusion of
presence - but when all is said and done the only thing you
_really_ see when you visit LambdaMOO is a kind of slow- crawling
script, lines of dialogue and stage direction creeping steadily
up your computer screen.

Which is all just to say that, to the extent that Mr. Bungles
assault happened in real life at all, it happened as a sort of
Punch-and-Judy show, in which the puppets and the scenery were
made of nothing more substantial than digital code and snipits
of creative writing. The puppeteer behind Bungle, as it
happened, was a young man logging in to the MOO from a New York
University computer. He could have been Al Gore for all any of
the others knew, however, and he could have written Bungles
script that night any way he chose. He could have sent a command
to print the message *Mr. Bungle, smiling a saintly smile,
floats angelic near the ceiling of the living room, showering
joy and candy kisses down upon the heads of all below* - and
everyone then receiving output from the databases subprogram #17
(a/k/a the *living room*) would have seen that sentence on their
screens.

Instead, he entered sadistic fantasies into the *voodoo doll,* a
subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of
attributing actions to other characters that their users did not
actually write. And thus a woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania,
whose account on the MOO attached her to a character she called
Starsinger, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the
words *As if against her will, Starsinger jabs a steak knife up
her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr. Bungle laughing
evilly in the distance.* And thus a woman in Seattle who had
written herself the character of legba, with a view perhaps to
tasting in imagination a deitys freedom from the burdens of the
gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in
which legba, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and
communications, suffered a brand of degradation
all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female.

*Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing,* wrote legba on the evening
after Bungles rampage, posting a public statement to the widely
read in-MOO mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for
debate on matters of import to the entire populace. *And mostly
I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more
trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was
being a vicious, vile fuckhead and I . . . want his sorry ass
scattered from [num]17 to the Cinder Pile. Im not calling for
policies, trials, or better jails. Im not sure what Im calling
for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type
of thing]

doesnt happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldnt happen
to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some
veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass.*

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as
she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down
her face - a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that
the words emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise
tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage
and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that
neither the RL nor the VL facts alone can quite account for.
Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe
that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own
living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a
breach of *civility.* Where real life, on the other hand, insists
the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of
Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and
at no point threatening any players life, limb, or material
well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved ad
heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungles dismemberment. Ludicrously
excessive by RLs lights, woefully understated by VRs, the tone of
legbas response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap
between them.

Which is to say it made the only kind of sense that _can_ be made
of MUDly phenomena. For while the _facts_ attached to any event
born of a MUDs strange, ethereal universe may march in straight,
tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual and the real, its
meaning lies always in that gap. You learn this axiom early in
your life as a player, and its of no small relevance to the
Bungle case that you usually learn it between the sheets, so to
speak. Netsex, tiny-sex, virtual sex - however you name it, in
real-life reality its nothing more than a 900-line encounter
stripped even of the vestigial physicality of the voice. And yet
as any but the most inhibited of newbies can tell you, its
possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs
has to offer. Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described
caresses, signs, and penetrations, the glands do engage, and
often throbingly as they would in a real-life assignation -
sometimes even more so, given the combined power of anonymity and
textual suggestiveness to unshackle deepseated fantasies. And if
the virtual setting and the interplayer vibe are right, who
knows? The heart may engage as well, stirring up passions as
strong as many that bind lovers who observe the formality of
trysting in the flesh.

To participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of lifes
most body-centered activity is to risk the realization that when
it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the
physical one at all, but its psychic double, the bodylike
self-representation we carry around in our heads. I know, I know,
 youve read Foucault and your mind is not quite blown by the
notion that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as it is
an exchange of signs. But trust your friend Dr. Bombay, its one
thing to grasp the notion intellectually and quite another to
feel it coursing through your veins amid the virtual steam of
hot net-nookie. And its a whole other mind blowing trip
altogether to encounter it thus as a college frosh, new to the
net and still in the grip of hormonal hurricanes ad high-school
sexual mythologies. The shock can easily reverberate throughout
an entire young worldview. Small wonder, then, that a newbies
first taste of MUD sex is often also the first time she or he
surrenders wholly to the slippery terms of MUDish ontology,
recognizing in a full-bodied way that what happens inside a
MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe,
but profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally meaningful.

And small wonder indeed that the sexual nature of Mr. Bungles
crime provoked such powerful feelings, and not just in legba
(who, be it noted, was in real life a theory-savvy doctoral
candidate and a longtime MOOer, but just as baffled and
overwhelmed by the force of her own reaction, she would later
attest, as any panting undergrad might have been). Even players
who had never experienced MUD rape (the vast majority of
male-presenting characters, but not as large a majority of the
female-presenting as might be hoped) immediately appreciated its
gravity and were moved to condemnation of the perp. legbas
missive to *social-issues followed a strongly worded one from
Zippy (*Well, well,* it began, *no matter what else happens on
Lambda, I can always be sure that some jerk is going to
reinforce my low opinion of humanity*) and was itself followed
by others from Moriah, Raccoon, Crawfish, and evangeline.
Starsinger also let her feelings (*pissed*) be known. And even
Jander, the clueless Samaritan who had responded to Bungles cries
for help and uncaged him shortly after the incident, expressed
his regret once apprised of Bungles deeds, which he allowed to
be *despicable.*

A sense was brewing that something needed to be done - done
soon and in something like an organized fashion - about Mr.
Bungle, in particular, and about MUD rape, in general. Regarding
the general problem, evangeline, who identified herself of both
virtual rape (*many times over*) and real-life sexual assault,
floated a cautious proposal for a MOO-wide powwow on the subject
of virtual sex offenses and what mechanisms might be put in place
to deal with their future occurrence. As for the specific
problem, the answer no doubt seemed obvious to many. But it
wasnt until the evening of the second day after the incident
that legba, finally and rather solemnly, gave it voice:

*I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Starsinger
and I. I have never done this before and have thought about it
for days. He hurt us both.*

That was all. Three simple sentences posted to *social. Reading
them, an outsider might never guess that they were an
application for a death warrant. Even an outsider familiar with
other MUDs might not guess it, since in many of them *toading*
still refers to a command that, true to MUDdings origins in the
world of sword-and-sorcery role-playing games, simply turns a
player into a toad, wiping the players description and
attributes and replacing them with those of the slimy amphibian.
Bad luck for sure, but not quite as bad as what happens when the
same command is invoked in the MOOish strains of MUD: not only
are the description and attributes of the toaded player erased,
but the account itself goes too. The annihilation of the
character, thus, is total.

And nothing less than total annihilation, it seemed, would do to
settle LambdaMOOs accounts with Mr. Bungle. Within minutes of
the posting of legbas appeal SamlAm, the Australian Deleuzean,
who had witnessed much of the attack from the back room of his
suburban Sydney home, seconded the motion with a brief message
crisply entitled *Toad the fukr.* SamlAms posting was seconded
almost as quickly by that of Bakunin, co-victim of Mr. Bungle and
 well-known radical, who in real life happened also to be married
to the real-life legba. And over the course of the next 24 hours
as many as 50 players made it known, on *social and in a variety
of other forms and forums, that they would be pleased to see Mr.
Bungle erased from the face of the MOO. With dissent so far
confined to a dozen or so antitoading hardliners, the numbers
suggested that the citizenry was indeed moving towards a resolve
to have Bungles virtual head.

There was one small but stubborn obstacle in the way of this
resolve, however, and that was a curious state of social affairs
known in some quarters of the MOO as the New Direction. It was
all very fine, you see, for the LambdaMOO rabble to get it in
their heads to liquidate one of their peers. but when the time
came to actually do the deed it would require the services of a
nobler class of character. It would require a wizard,
Master-programmers of the MOO, spelunkers of the databases
deepest code-structures and custodians of its day-to-day
administrative trivia, wizards are also the only players
empowered to issue the toad command, a feature maintained on
nearly all MUDs as a quick-and-dirty means of social control.
But the wizards of LambdaMOO, after years of adjudicating all
manner of interplayer disputes with little to show for it but
their own weariness and the smoldering resentment of the general
populace had decided theyd had enough of the social sphere. And
so, four months before the Bungle incident, the archwizard
Haakon (known in RL as Pavel Curtis, Xerox researcher and
LambdaMOOs principal architect) formalized this decision in a
document called *LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,* which was
placed in the living room for all to see. 1n it. Haakon announced
that the wizards from that day forth were pure technicians. From
then on, they would make no decisions affecting the social life
of the MOO but only implement whatever decisions the community
as a whole directed them to. From then on, it was decreed,
LambdaMOO would just have to grow up and solve its problems on
its own.

Faced with the task of inventing its own self-governance from
scratch, the LambdaMOO population had so far done what any other
loose, amorphous agglomeration of individuals would have done:
theyd let it slide. But now the task took on new urgency. Since
getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle (or to toad the likes of
him in the future) required a convincing case that the cry for
his head came from the community at large, then the community
itself would have to be defined; and if the community was to be
convincingly defined, then some form of social organization, no
matter how rudimentary, would have to be settled on. And thus,
as if against its will, the question of what to do about Mr.
Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the
political future of the MOO. Arguments stood on Lambda-MOO
crazy-quilty political map. Parliamentarian legalist types
argued that unfortunately Bungle could not legitimately be
toaded at all, since there were no explicit MOO rules against
rape, or against just about anything else and the sooner such
rules were established, they added, and maybe even a full-blown
judiciary system complete with elected officials and prisons to
enforce those rules, the better. Others, with a royalist streak
in them, seemed to feel that Bungles as-yet- unpunished outrage
only proved this New Direction silliness had gone on long
enough, and that it was high time the wizardocracy returned to
the position of swift and decisive leadership their player class
was born to.

And then there were what Ill call the technolibertarians. For
them, MUD rapists were of course assholes, but the presence of
assholes on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise
on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive
social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment
of defensive software tools. Some asshole blasting violent,
graphic language at you? Dont whine to the authorities about it -
hit the @gag command and the assholes statements will be
blocked from your screen (and only yours). Its simple, its
effective, and it censors no one.


But the Bungle case was rather hard on such arguments. For one
thing, the extremely public nature of the living room meant that
gagging would spare the victims only from witnessing their own
violation, but not from having others witness it. You might want
to argue that what those victims didnt directly experience
couldnt hurt them, but consider how that wisdom would sound to a
woman whod been, say fondled by strangers while passed out drunk
and you have a rough idea how it might go over with a crowd of
hard-core MOOers. Consider, for another thing, that many of the
biologically female participants in the Bungle debate had been
around long enough to grow lethally weary of the
gag-and-get-over-it school of virtual rape counseling, with its
fine line between empowering victims and holding them responsible
for their own suffering, and it shrugging indifference to the
window of pain between the moment the rape-text starts flowing
and the moment a gag shuts it off. From the outset it was clear
that the technolibertarians were going to have to tiptoe through
this issue with care, and for the most part they did.

Yet no position was trickier to maintain than that of the MOOs
resident anarchists. Like the technolibbers, the anarchists
didnt care much for punishments or policies or power elites.
Like them, they hoped the MOO could be a place where people
interacted fulfillingly without the need for such things. But
their high hopes were complicated, in general, by a somewhat less
 thoroughgoing faith in technology (*Even if you cant tear down
the masters house with the masters tools* - read a slogan
written into one anarchist players self-description - *it is a
damned good place to start*). And at present they were
additionally complicated by the fact that the most vocal
anarchists in the discussion were none other than legba,
Bakunin, and SamIAm, who wanted to see Mr. Bungle toaded as
badly as anyone did.

Needless to say, a pro-death penalty platform is not an
especially comfortable one for an anarchist to sit on, so these
particular anarchists were now at great pains to sever the
conceptual ties between toading and capital punishment. Toading,
they insisted (almost convincingly), was much more closely
analogous to banishment; it was a kind of turning of the
communal back on the offending party, a collective action that,
if carried out properly, was entirely consistent with anarchist
models of community. And carrying it out properly meant first
and foremost building a consensus around it - a messy process
for which there were no easy technocratic substitutes. It was
going to take plenty of good old-fashioned, jawbone-intensive
grassroots organizing.

So that when the time came, at 7 p.m. PST on the evening of the
third day after the occurrence in the living room, to gather in
evangelines room for her proposed realtime open conclave,
Bakunin and legba were among the first to arrive. But this was
hardly to be an anarchist-dominated affair, for the room was
crowding rapidly with representatives of all the MOOs political
stripes, and even a few wizards. Hagbard showed up, and Autumn
and Quastro, Puff, Joe Feedback, L-dopa and Bloaf, HerkieCosmo,
Silver Rocket, Karl Porcupine, Matchstick - the names piled up
and the discussion gathered momentum under their weight.
Arguments multiplied and mingled, players talked past and
through each other, the textual clutter of utterances and
gestures filled up the screen like thick cigar smoke. Peaking in
number at around 30, this was one of the largest crowds that
ever gathered in a single LambdaMOO chamber and while evangeline
had given her place a description that made it *infinite in
expanse and fluid in form,* it now seemed anything but roomy. You
could almost feel the claustrophobic air of the place, dank and
overheated by virtual bodies, pressing against your skin.

I know you could because I too was there, making my lone and
insignificant appearance in this story. Completely ignorant of
any of the goings-on that had led to the meeting, I wandered in
purely to see what the crowd was about, and though I observed
the proceedings for a good while, I confess I found it hard to
grasp what was going on. I was still the rankest of newbies then,
my MOO legs still too unsteady to make the leaps of faith,
logic, and empathy required to meet the spectacle on its own
terms. I was fascinated by the concept of virtual rape, but I
couldnt quite take it seriously.

In this, though, I was in a small and mostly silent minority, for
the discussion that raged around me was of an almost unrelieved
earnestness, bent it seemed on examining every last aspect and
implication of Mr. Bungles crime. There were the central
questions, of course: thumbs up or down on Bungles virtual
existence? And if down, how then to insure that his toading was
not just some isolated Iynching but a first step toward shaping
LambdaMOO into a legitimate community? Surrounding these,
however, a tangle of weighty side issues proliferated. What,
some wondered, was the real-life legal status of the offense?
Could Bungles university administrators punish him for sexual
harassment? Could he be prosecuted under California state laws
against obscene phone calls? Little enthusiasm was shown for
pursuing either of these lines of action, which testifies both
to the uniqueness of the crime and to the nimbleness with which
the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncrasies. Many were
the casual references to Bungles deed as simply *rape,* but
these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all
distinctions between the virtual and physical

versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in
the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO
crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the
MOO.

On the other hand, little patience was shown toward any attempts
to downplay the seriousness of what Mr. Bungle had done. When
the affable HerkieCosmo proposed, more in the way of a
hypothesis than an assertion, that *perhaps its better to
release. . . violent tendencies in a virtual environment rather
than in real life,* he was tut-tutted so swiftly and relentlessly
that he withdrew the hypothesis altogether, apologizing humbly
as he did so. Not that the assembly was averse to putting
matters into a more philosophical perspective. *Where does the
body end and the mind begin?* young Quastro asked, amid
recurring attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and
virtual violence. *Is not the mind a part of the body?* *In MOO,
the body Is the mind,* offered HerkieCosmo gamely, and not at
all implausibly, demonstrating the ease with which very knotty
metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR. The not-do-aptly
named Obvious seemed to agree, arriving after deep consideration
of the nature of Bungles crime at the hardly novel yet now
somehow newly resonant conjecture *all reality might consist of
ideas, who knows.*

On these and other matters the anarchists, the libertarians, the
legalists, the wizardists - and the wizards - all had their
thoughtful say. But as the evening wore on and the talk grew
more heated and more heady, it seemed increasingly clear that
the vigorous intelligence being brought to bear on this swarm of
issues wasnt going to result in anything remotely like
resolution. The perspectives were just too varied, the
meme-scape just too slippery. Again and again, arguments that
looked at first to be heading in a decisive direction ended up
chasing their own tails; and slowly, depressingly, a dusty haze
of irrelevance gathered over the proceedings.

It was almost a relief, therefore, when midway through the
evening Mr. Bungle himself, the living, breathing cause of all
this talk, teleported into the room. Not that it was much of a
surprise. Oddly enough, in the three days since his release from
Zippys cage, Bungle had returned more than once to wander the
public spaces of LambdaMOO, walking willingly into one of the
fiercest storms of ill will and invective ever to rain down on a
player. Hed been taking it all with a curious and mostly silent
passivity, and when challenged face to virtual face by both
legba and the genderless elder statescharacter PatGently to
defend himself on *social, hed demurred, mumbling something about
Christ and expiation. He was equally quiet now, and his
reception was still uniformly cool. Iegba fixed an arctic stare
on him - *no hate, no anger, no interest at all. Just . . .
watching.* Others were more actively unfriendly. *Asshole,* spat
Karl Porcupine, *creep.* But the harshest of the MOOs hostility
toward him had already been vented, and the attention he drew
now was motivated more, it seemed, by the opportunity to probe
the rapists mind, to find out what made it tick and if possible
how to get it to tick differently. In short, they wanted to know
why hed done it. So they asked him.

And Mr. Bungle thought about it. And as eddies of discussion and
debate continued to swirl around him, he thought about it some
more. And then he said this:

*I engaged in a bit of a psychological device that is called
thought-polarization, the fact that this is not RL simply added
to heighten the affect of the device. It was purely a sequence
of events with no consequence on my RL existence.*

They might have known. Stilted though its diction was, the gist
of the answer was simple, and something many in the room had
probably already surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not,
perhaps, in real life - but then in real life its possible for
reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did, that what
transpires between word costumed characters within the boundaries
of a make-believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some
kind of emotional laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO,
however, such thinking marked a person as one of two basically
subcompetent types. The first was the newbie, in which case the
confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who
had not, upon their first visits as anonymous *guest* characters,
mistaken the place for a vast playpen in which they might act
out their wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with
time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to
make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity,
developing the concern for their characters reputation that marks
the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadnt
been around as long as most MOOers, hed been around long enough
to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement
therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.

And as there is but small percentage in arguing with a head case,
the rooms attention gradually abandoned Mr. Bungle and returned
to the discussions that had previously occupied it. But if the
debate had been edging toward ineffectuality before, Bundles
anticlimactic appearance had evidently robbed it of any forward
motion whatsoever. Whats more, from his lonely corner of the
room Mr. Bungle kept issuing periodic expressions of a prickly
sort of remorse, interlaced with sarcasm and belligerence, and
though it was hard to tell if he wasnt still just conducting his
experiments, some people thought his regret genuine enough that
maybe he didnt deserve to be toaded after all. Logically, of
course, discussion of the principal issues at hand didnt require
a unanimous belief that Bungle was an unredeemable bastard, but
now that cracks were showing in the unanimity, the last of the
meetings fervor seemed to be draining out through them.

People started drifting away. Mr. Bungle left first, then others
followed - one by one, in twos and threes, hugging friends and
waving goodnight. By 9:45 only a handful remained, and the great
debate had wound down into casual conversation, the melancholy
remains of another fruitless good idea. The arguments had been
well-honed, certainly, and perhaps might prove useful in some
as-yet-unclear long run. But at this point what seemed clear was
that evangelines meeting had died, at last, and without any
practical results to mark its passing.

It was also at this point, most likely, that JoeFeedback reached
his decision. JoeFeedback was a wizard, a taciturn sort of
fellow whod sat brooding on the sidelines all evening. He hadnt
said a lot, but what he had said indicated that he took the
crime committed against legba and Starsinger very seriously, and
that he felt no particular compassion toward the character who
had committed it. But on the other hand, he made it equally
plain that he took the elimination of a fellow player just as
seriously, and moreover that he had no desire to return to the
days of wizardly fiat. It must have been difficult, therefore, to
 reconcile the conflicting impulses churning within him at that
moment. In fact, it was probably impossible, for as much as he
would have liked to make himself an instrument of LambdaMOOs
collective will, he surely realized that under the present order
of things he must in the final analysis either act alone or not
act at all.

So JoeFeedback acted alone.

He told the lingering few players in the room that he had to go,
and then he went. It was a minute or two before 10. He did it
quietly and he did it privately, but all anyone had to do to
know hed done it was to type the @who command, which was
normally what you typed if you wanted to know a present location
and the time he last logged in. But if you had run a @who on Mr.
Bungle not too long after JoeFeedback left evangelines room, the
database would have told you something different.

*Mr. Bungle,* it would have said, *is not the name of any
player.*

The date, as it happened, was April Fools Day, and it would still
be April Fools Day for another two hours. But this was no joke:
Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone.

They say LambdaMOO has never been the same since Mr. Bungles
toading. They say as well that nothings really changed. And
though it skirts the fuzziest of dream-logics to say that both
these statements are true, the MOO is just the sort of fuzzy,
dreamlike place in which such contradictions thrive.

Certainly whatever civil society now informs LambdaMOO owes its
existence to the Bungle affair. The archwizard Haakon made sure
of that. Away on business for the duration of the episode,
Haakon returned to find its wreckage strewn across the tiny
universe hed set in motion. The death of a player, the trauma of
several others, and the angst-ridden conscience of his colleague
JoeFeedback presented themselves to his concerned and astonished
attention, and he resolved to see if he couldnt learn some
lesson from it all. For the better part of a day he brooded over
the record of events and arguments left in *social, then he sat
pondering the chaotically evolving shape of his creation, and at
the days end he descended once again into the social arena of
the MOO with another history-altering proclamation.

It was probably his last, for what he now decreed was the final,
missing piece of the New Direction. In a few days, Haakon
announced, he would build into the database a system of
petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to popular vote
any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for its
implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the
wizards. At last and for good, the awkward gap between the will
of the players and the efficacy of the technicians would be
closed. And though some anarchists grumbled about the irony of
Haakons dictatorially imposing suffrage on an unconsulted
populace, in general the citizens of LambdaMOO seemed to find it
hard to fault a system more purely democratic than any that could
ever exist in real life. Eight months and 11 ballot measures
later, widespread participation in the new regime has produced a
small arsenal of mechanisms for dealing with the types of
violence that called the system into being. MOO residents now
have access to a @boot command, for instance, with which to
summarily eject berserker *guest* characters. And players can
bring suit against one another through an ad hoc arbitration
system in which mutually agreed-upon judges have at their
disposition the full range of wizardly punishments - up to and
including capital.

Yet the continued dependence on death as the ultimate keeper of
the peace suggests that this new MOO order may not be built on
the most solid of foundations. For if life on LambdaMOO began to
acquire more coherence in the wake of the toading, death
retained all the fuzziness of pre-Bungle days. This truth was
rather dramatically borne out, not too many days after Bungle
departed, by the arrival of a strange new character named Dr.
Jest. There was a forceful eccentricity to the newcomers manner,
but the oddest thing about his style was his striking yet
unnameable familiarity. And when he developed the annoying habit
of stuffing fellow players into a jar containing a tiny
simulacrum of a certain deceased rapist, the source of this
familiarity became obvious.

Mr. Bungle had returned from the grave.

In itself, Bungles reincarnation as Dr. Jest was a remarkable
turn of events, but perhaps even more remarkable was the utter
lack of amazement with which the LambdaMOO public took note of
it. To be sure, many residents were appalled by the brazenness
of Bungles return. In fact, one of the first petitions
circulated under the new voting system was a request for Dr.
Jests toading that almost immediately gathered 52 signatures
(but has failed so far to reach ballot status). Yet few were
unaware of the ease with which the toad proscription could be
circumvented - all the toadee had to do (all the ur-Bungle at
NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of
acquiring a new Internet account, and LambdaMOOs character
registration program would then simply treat the known felon as
an entirely new and innocent person. Nor was this ease generally
understood to represent a failure of toadings social
disciplinary function. On the contrary, it only underlined the
truism (repeated many times throughout the debate over Mr.
Bungles fate) that his punishment, ultimately, had been no more
or less symbolic than his crime.

What _was_ surprising, however, was that Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest
seemed to have taken the symbolism to heart. Dark themes still
obsessed him - but he no longer radiated the aggressively
antisocial vibes he had before. He was a lot less unpleasant to
look at (the outrageously seedy clown description had been
replaced by that of a mildly creepy but actually rather natty
young man, with *blue eyes . . . suggestive of conspiracy,
untamed eroticism and perhaps a sense of understanding of the
future*), and aside from the occasional jar- stuffing incident,
he was also a lot less dangerous to be around. It was obvious
hed undergone some sort of personal transformation in the days
since Id first glimpsed him back in evangelines crowded room -
nothing radical maybe, but powerful nonetheless, and resonant
enough with my own experience, I felt, that it might be more
than professionally interesting to talk with him, and perhaps
compare notes.

For I too was undergoing a transformation in the aftermath of
that night in evangelines, and Im still not entirely sure what
to make of it. As I pursued my runaway fascination with the
discussion I had heard there, as I pored over the *social debate
and got to know legba and some of the other victims and
witnesses, I could feel my newbie consciousness failing away from
me. Where before Id found it hard to take virtual rape
seriously, I now was finding it difficult to remember how I
could ever _not_ have taken it seriously. I was proud to have
arrived at this perspective - it felt like an exotic sort of
achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing experience of the
MOO a richer one.

But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I
looked at the rest of the world. Sometimes, for instance, it was
hard for me to understand why RL society classifies RL rape
alongside crimes against person or property. Since rape can
occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself
reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind -
more intimately and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross
burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably
located on the same conceptual continuum. I did not, however,
conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion
by the First Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more
seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously
I was able to take the notion of freedom of speech, with its
tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real.

Let me assure you, though, that I am not presenting these
thoughts as arguments. I offer them, rather, as a picture of the
sort of mind-set that deep immersion in a virtual world has
inspired in me. I offer them also therefore, as a kind of
prophecy. For whatever else these thoughts tell me, I have come
to believe that they announce the final stages of our
decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift
that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself
a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the
Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact After all anyone
the least bit familiar with the workings of the new eras definitive
technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle
impracticably difficult to distinguish from the
pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you
type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesnt so much
communicate as _make things happen_, directly and ineluctably,
the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in
other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial
megatrends of the moment - from the growing dependence of
economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and
numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the
spells written in the four-letter text of DNA - knows that the
logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our
lives.

And its precisely this logic that provides the real magic in a
place like LambdaMOO - not the fictive trappings of voodoo and
shapeshifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and act
that s inevitable in any computer-mediated world, be it Lambda
or the increasingly wired world at large. This is dangerous
magic, to be sure, a potential threat - if misconstrued or
misapplied - to our always precarious freedoms of expression,
and as someone who lives by his words I do not take the threat
lightly. And yet, on the other hand, I can no longer convince
myself that our wishful insulation of language from the realm of
action has ever been anything but a valuable kludge, a
philosophically damaged stopgap against oppression that would
just have to do till something truer and more elegant came
along.

Am I wrong to think this truer, more elegant thing can be found
on LambdaMOO? Perhaps, but I continue to seek it there, sensing
its presence just beneath the surface of every interaction. I
have even thought, as I said, that discussing with Dr. Jest our
shared experience of the workings of the MOO might help me in my
search. But when that notion first occurred to me, I still felt
somewhat intimidated by his lingering criminal aura, and I hemmed
and hawed a good long time before finally resolving to drop him
MOO-mail requesting an interview. By then it was too late. For
reasons known only to himself, Dr. Jest had stopped logging in.
Maybe hed grown bored with the MOO. Maybe the loneliness of
ostracism had gotten to him. Maybe a psycho whim had carried him
far away or maybe hed quietly acquired a third character and
started life over with a cleaner slate.

Wherever hed gone, though, he left behind the room he d created
for himself - a treehouse *tastefully decorated* with rare
book shelves, an operating table, and a lifesize William S.
Burroughs doll - and he left it unlocked. So I took to
checking in there occasionally, and I still do from time to time.
I head out of my own cozy nook (inside a TV set inside the
little red hotel inside the Monopoly board inside the dining
room of LambdaMOO), and I teleport on over to the treehouse,
where the room description always tells me Dr. Jest is present
but asleep, in the conventional depiction for disconnected
characters The not quite- emptiness of the abandoned room
invariably instills in me an uncomfortable mix of melancholy and
the creeps, and I stick around only on the off chance that Dr.
Jest will wake up, say hello, and share his understanding of the
future with me.

He wont, of course, but this is no great loss. Increasingly, the
complex magic of the MOO interests me more as a way to live the
present than to understand the future. And its usually not long
before I leave Dr. Jests lonely treehouse and head back to the
mansion, to see some friends.