Case # 1
A classic example is "The Strange Case of The Electronic Lover"
by Linsy Van Gelder, which was published in Ms. magazine in October 1985.
Van Gelder met "Joan" on Compu-serve, and began to chat. It
was learned that Joan was a neuropsychologist in her late twenties, living
in New York who had been disfigured--crippled in fact and left mute by
an automobile accident at the hands of a drunken driver.
Joan's mentor, so the story went, had given her a computer, modem and
subscription to Compu-serve where Joan blossomed into a celebrity. Her
wit and warmth extended to many people.
Eventually , however, Joan was unmasked, defrocked (so to speak) and
it was discovered that she was not disabled, disfigured, mute or female.
Joan was in real life a New York psychiatrist, Alex, who had become obsessed
with his own experiments in being treated as a female.
The shock in electronic world has a higher voltage than anywhere else.
The assault of this discovery was coupled by the fact that Joan had achieved
an intimacy with many people who trusted her. Joan's very skeleton was
based on pure deception. Van Gelder is quoted as saying that "through
this experience, those who knew Joan lost their innocence".
In the real world, it could be thought of as a kind of rape. A deep
penetration by a masked stranger. Questions of ethics, and behavior ensued
so as to avoid further incidents of netsleazing and other repulsive forms
of bad netiquette.
Alex had cleverly called upon the icons and codes of a society that
has learned to fantasize media produced females in a particular way. He
chose to be a woman. a gender marginalized in technology. Most people logging
on are men. When Joan logged in it was 1986, and women chatting was unusual.
It still is. So unusual in fact, that even today whenever someone logs
on as a woman there is a barrage of questions in order to determine whether
it really is a woman, or someone just trying on a new sex for size.
It is a kind of harrassment that people logging on as men or animals
do not experience. Furthermore, Alex chose to make Joan the epitomy of
vulnerability. Perhaps whetting desires even more by making her paralized
and mute. The fictional presumption was that in real life she had lost
her body yet she could still be seductive. In fact she could even lure
her responders, like the Sirens calling Odysseus, into lustful responses
to her non body.
The Electronic Frontier is attempting to do this and have been enormously effective since their creation. A self sponsored group, they are like Ralph Nader was to ecology; a hacker posse who round up, capture and hold virtual vigilantes accountable. These not only include hackers. They have also questioned the computer and privacy invasions launched by the United States Government. New users are forming the largest immigration in history. What happens to this population's non body is of critical importance.
Case # 3
About 1990, Tom Ray created a virtual computer that had evolved
creatures. As Kevin Kelly notes, in his book Out of Control, Beginning
with a single creature, programmed by hand, this 80 byte creature began
to reproduce by finding empty RAM blocks 80 bytes big and then copying
itself. Within minutes, the RAM was saturated with replicas. By allowing
his program to occasionally scramble digital bits during copying, some
had priority. This introduced the idea of variation and death and natural
selection, and an ecology of new creatures with computer life cycles emerged.
The bodies of these creatures consisted of program memory and space. A
parisite, this creature could borrow what it needed in the RAM to survive.