Sex, States, and Nomads:

Comments on Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace" 

Mark Nunes

1995 DeKalb College President's Workshop

 In honor of this play between absence and presence, "gone-ness" and "there-ness," I decided to name my MOO character "FortDa," a nod of the head to Lacan, Derrida, and several other theorists who have used Freud's expression, "fort:da" as a signature for this game of presence. As FortDa, I began to ask myself and other people the most basic question about this space: "Where are we?" I was neither here nor there: or rather, I was gone and here at the same time. Unlike a phone call, which preserves distance ("You sound so close" implies you are not close), on a MOO you are close. Your presence expresses itself in terms of proximity. These experiences led me to conclude that MOO's make literal--or rather, virtual?--what goes on to some extent in popular presentations of internet as a whole. To the extent that "cyberspace" exists, it is entirely conceptual. The fact that the term has gone from a word in a science fiction novel to a commonly accepted figuration of internet speaks of our willingness to accept cyberspace as space. The question, then, is: Where is this space that isn't a space? Or as one virtual colleague of mine puts it, borrowing from Gertrude Stein, "Is there a there there?"

 In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Esther Dyson writes, "The first order of business is to grasp what cyberspace is. It might help to leave behind metaphors of highways and frontiers and to think instead of real estate" (26). Dyson "leaves behind" metaphors to uncover the essence of cyberspace, what it is, and reveals: another metaphor; one of real estate, property. This metaphor divides up cyberspace (itself a metaphor), into "intellectual, legal, artificial environment[s] constructed on top of land" (Dyson 26). Be it private or public, commercial or residential, all "real estate" depends on the concept of "landed property, or more generally property itself: ownership, who is proper to a place and what function does it serve. It calls upon the estate and its similar root with the State: status--"manner of standing...position, attitude"; and statos, to make stand--static.

 The concept of internet as real estate, and the associations that develop as a result of this metaphor, are quite germane to our discussion today. In response to the rape at LambdaMOO, we see the emergence of the state: laws, tribunals, votes, petitions, citizenry, crime and punishment. This desire for the state, I would argue, stems from a desire to imagine cyberspace not only as a space, but as a comprehensive, comprehendible, and controllable world. As I explore this desire for both a cyberstate and virtual real estate, I'd also like to introduce a contrary image of internet by way of the nomad, one who knows no property, who wanders on and uses the land rather than making it his proper. My comments on Dibbell's article, and on the nature of our metaphors for internet, grow out of this other image, leading me to wonder what would occur if we were to figure cyberspace not as residential and commercial property, but as the steppe, a land of roving and roaming motion and flow.

 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe these two models of space as "smooth" and "striated." Striated space describes limitations, grids, organization and control; smooth space is open, amorphorous and various. An example may help. A friend of mine taught English in Japan for a few years in the 1980's. After making a quite a bit of money, he decided to head back to the States the long way, travelling by trans-Asian rail into Europe. He told me that he saw an amazing thing outside his train window in Southern Mongolia. There, off in the distance, as he sliced across Asia by rail, he saw Mongolian truckers driving across the tundra. He saw no roads: just hard earth with trucks cutting their own lines of flight across the face of the steppe. A train travels through striated space. Train lines move from terminal to terminal, from ending to ending. One's tracks are always terminal, a determined journey on a dedicated line. Those Mongolian truck drivers, however, travel in a different space. Their domain is not the line, but the tundra, the open plain, literally the plane. Each journey across the plain draws its own line of flight, disappearing as dust kicked up by truckers' wheels. That's smooth space.

 Better yet, consider the complex system of highways that cover the United States. Now focus east of the Mississippi, where the highways are more dense. Move further east, focusing on the Boston-Washington corridor. Here we see a highly complex striated space. One can travel in multiple directions on various lines, but still, the lines themselves are determined and dedicated. You cannot head south on I-95 in Washington and find yourself in Atlanta; you have to switch roads. Now imagine, if you will, roads so densely packed that they started to converge. Imagine blacktop covering the whole eastern shore. Imagine it covering the entire earth, so that a single blanket of tarmac covered the globe, allowing you to speed in any direction. At this point, highways disappear, and we are left with smooth space.

Let's leave behind I-95 and return to the "information superhighway," where you can actually discuss the pro's and con's of blacktopping the globe on a newsgroup called alt.pave.the.earth. Robert Adrian has argued that the popular metaphor "information superhighway" is on its way to replacing the older, more anarchistic "cyberspace." We are seeing, he argues, the emergence of a new figuration of control: in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, a striation of smooth space. I would argue, though, that we currently use both metaphors to create that essentially striated image of a comprehensive, controllable world. We imagine the 'net as a static space inhabited by "netizens"-- residents of various cyber-communities. Now perhaps these virtual worlds could become on-line "zones of empowerment." Mitch Kapor, for example, founder of The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and Lotus Corp. declares:

Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community (53).

As I mentioned earlier, I'd like to contrast both these versions of inhabitable space with Deleuze and Guattari's image of nomadic terrain. While the striated state system delimits and controls, the smooth nomad system encourages movement from territory to territory. When I read of attempts to form a state at LambdaMOO, or to control access to pornography, or to set up defined on-line communities, I hear attempts to striate cyberspace. But there seems to be another tendency out there as well, and we can find tastes of it in the very origins of the 'Net. In the late 1960's, the Department of Defense experimented with designing a network of computers that would survive if one of the nodes were to become "incapacitated" (read that "nuked"). That successful four-computer "war machine" soon became a research tool for the National Science Foundation, allowing federally funded scientists to work collaboratively over long distances. With that, internet was born. The DoD noticed, though, that in addition to neat packages of data, other communications were wandering their way across the net: mostly discussions about Star Trek and Isaac Asimov. When they decided to crack down on this unofficial usage of netspace, the result was a significant decrease in productivity. The state attempt to striate internet had run up against a smoothing effect; the more control they tried to exert, the less viable the space. Perhaps the most extreme example of this conflict occurred in France in the 1980's. In an attempt to modernize France's outmoded telephone lines, the government created Minitel: a nationalized information network--an internet with national borders, so to speak. Within the first week of Minitel, the citizens of France discovered the "love letter" potential of this system. Within a month, Minitel was so overwhelmed with sexually explicit correspondences, bulletin boards, and on-line chats that the state system crashed. In response to clear national boundaries and dedicated lines, the French people found their own lines of communication, turning the striating machine of the state into the sex machine of the masses.

 To regroup a bit, then. Clearly internet presents a vast communication potential. We have imagined this medium as an inhabitable space: either a roadway between homes or a tract of quickly developing real estate. But we also find a tension that resists these metaphors: a tendency to communicate in undisciplined and unregulated ways; a tendency to roam freely, nomadically across smooth, open territory. In this context, I find myself asking: Can we smooth out the increasingly striated space of internet? Can we create a steppe for nomads? Or are we driving down the same highway we've been paving for the past four hundred years? These are my interests in Dibbell's article, "A Rape in Cyberspace," and more generally in the discussion of our presence in this "space that is no space."

 We might begin our discussion of "A Rape in Cyberspace" by looking at how Dibbell positions his own interest in these issues. He starts off by distancing himself from the "West Coast cyberhippies" (that's Rheingold and the WELL crowd, I imagine), asking us to "look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building [societies] in the on-line spaces of this world." While denying Rheingold's flavor of technotopia, he affirms another: one that would allow us to form "societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital." We must "behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and. . .get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones." But if Dibbell is firm in his conviction that we should look with "undazzled" eyes on this idealized goal, he is equally clear in his portrayal of virtual reality as a hallucinatory model of the real. He tells us to "look without illusion" on the potentials of these virtual spaces, but how might that be possible in a world inhabited by Dr. Bombays? He writes, "I won't say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stevens's outlandish cousin. . .or what exactly led me to my mild but so-far incurable addiction to. . . semifictional digital otherworlds" The MOO is apparently not real; it is a "semifictional otherworld," a place for wearing masks and disguising ourselves, an addictive drug that induces hallucinations. Dibbell's interest, it would seem, stems in part from this tension between MOO as fictional world of suspended identity and MOO as "more decent and free society," and in particular, from the way that a rape "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." For Dibbell, LambdaMOO is obviously a world of hallucination, illogic and illusion; but it is equally a "real" community of "real" residents with "real" potential.

 Now obviously no one was "really" raped, but someone was virtually raped. What does that mean, and why continue to use the word "rape"? First: note that Bungle introduced his verbal acts with the phrase, "As if against her will." Bungle chose that text, chose to specify force and violation of will. His intention was not only to control another player, but to simulate that player's inability to control her own actions. Bungle's rape is as "real" as his expressed desire to take control of these women, to treat them as objects. Now remember that the "O-O" in MOO stands for object-oriented. In other words, the MOO expresses all its data in terms of objects that can be created, modified, and eventually recycled. Although players can manipulate these objects, it is the owner of an object who ultimately controls access to it. Bungle's actions violated the most sacred assumption of ownership: that a player has "sole control" over his or her own character-object. The issue of rape in this environment, then, rests in part upon this distinction between what is public/shared and what is private/proper/one's own. Although the entire MOO is a public database running on a server at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the MOO "internally" creates a public/private distinction through property; private is what you own, your proper. Public spaces are "open" to all, a "convivial common ground." Note that although Mr. Bungle "hid himself away...in his private chambers," his violations occurred in plain view, in a public space. Again, I see this act as an expressed desire, not an accident. Bungle's rape not only violated a player's sense of the private, of property; it was also a violation of communal assumptions: "a violation of LambdaMOO's communal spirit."

Mr. Bungle's violence stands at the heart of a series of assumptions about self-determination, autonomy, property, privacy, and identity. He was literally a self-declared evil, ending each attack with the phrase, "You hear Mr. Bungle laughing evilly in the distance." Bungle raped LambdaMOO of its truths by carrying those truths to an inverse extreme; he used assumptions of self- possession and public space to create an act of rape. This "evil," then, did not come from outside of the system; rather, it rose out of its core assumptions. Without suggesting that we condone this act of verbal violence, or ignore its malicious intent, I'd like to consider what Bungle might teach us about our desire for controllable, comprehensive systems, virtual or otherwise. Rather than trying to combat the evil of a Mr. Bungle by creating increasingly striated "states," we might instead try to think critically and theoretically about the assumptions he violated, and the way these assumptions shape our virtual worlds.

Probably the most--and paradoxically least--obvious assumption in a MOO involves mediation. We're all quite used to mediated forms of communication, from the written word to the television screen. Most of us also engage daily in mediated two-way communication by way of the telephone. But as I pointed to earlier, unlike the telephone which preserves distance, the MOO effectively erases distance by creating this sense of space. The mediation becomes "transparent." Mediation in MOO terms, then, involves entry or projection; you throw yourself into the MOO, so to speak. But we cannot forget that "behind" each player, there's a human being at a keyboard. Our presence in cyberspace, therefore, is a form of representation, or rather, a re-presentation. Although this virtual self may appear to be a masquerade, I would argue that on the level of basic assumptions, the MOO asks not only for a split self--a self behind a keyboard and the virtual self in cyberspace--but for a "real" virtual self. The MOO makes the paradoxical assumption that identity is both self-determining and pre-determined. You can double yourself; just don't be duplicitous. Note that Bungle plays by these same rules. He is not being duplicitous; rather, he is highly readable. One glance at his stained, vile self announces a tableau of malevolence and misogyny. Likewise, legba's choice of character reveals a great deal about her "real" character. The same could be of Dibbell, that is, Dr. Bombay, or even myself, FortDa: hints of interests, likes, and tendencies. The real world is hardly that readable. Rapists, batterers, serial killers rarely look like our culturally created constructs of evil. But we want it that way, ideally: what Roland Barthes calls "the popular and age old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality," where "nothing exists except in the absolute. . .everything is presented exhaustively" (24-25). This assumption of a highly legible world informs the basic structure of LambdaMOO.

 The "crime" of cyber-rape, and more generally the popularity of "tinysex" on LambdaMOO, reveals another essential assumption about mediation and representation in this particular virtual space. One might argue that although verbal assault certainly occurs on other MOO's, cyber-rape can only take place in MOO's where netsex occurs. Now, sex and rape are clearly two very different acts, but in cyberspace, both share the same set of assumptions about mediated presence. Dibbell describes virtual sex as "possibly the headiest experience in the very heady world of MUD's." Heady means dizzying here, I am sure, but given the virtual nature of cyberspace, sex would have to be head-y as well. But aren't we talking about bodily acts? Sex? Rape? He reasons, "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." Real and virtual bodies are different, of course, but also identical. We become, in Baudrillard's terms, "fractal selves," capable of infinite division into self-same parts, each part a simulation of a self that can no longer be considered whole, original, or unique (Transparency 57). Early on, Dibbell suggests that we "get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones." The fractal nature of the self encouraged by inhabitable cyberspace demonstrates just how difficult that task can become.

This mental simulation of body presents--if you'll pardon the expression--a tangible example of both the problematic ontology of cyberspace and the way in which these problems disappear the moment they appear. When one character comments, "In MOO, the body is the mind," Dibbell notes "the ease with which very knotty metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR." For Dibbell, netsex is more than just virtual "nookie"; it's an opportunity to "surrender(s) 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." Dibbell at this moment briefly opens up a terrain worth exploring, but then he quickly brings it to a problematic closure. The MOO creates questions about the nature of body and how we think "the body," in the same way it challenges the nature of self-determination and identity. But in the same way that the MOO encourages a transparency in mediation, it also asks us to ignore these questions and simply accept the banal simulation: "The body is the mind." Instead of keeping the "buzzing gap" between real and virtual open, Dibbell allows it to close as he "surrenders wholly" to the "full-bodied," double and single experience, "inside" an inhabitable world.

 The formation of a more inhabitable and controllable cyberstate provides another example of this closure. Dibble writes, "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." Now if you've completed your homework, you'll know that Alvin Toffler compares vertical, rigid hierarchies to more fluid, transient horizontal structures in Future Shock. We could just as easily describe these organizations as striated or nomadic. Although the MOO intends to be a horizontal, spreading structure with no center, periphery, or core, to solve matters of the state, LambdaMOO must resurrect the hierarchical power structure. (Note that the MOO always was hierarchical. Programmers have more power than builders, and wizards are "all powerful.") The desire for a "legitimate community" calls on its residents to legitimate community, make it a lawful, "defined" community: a bordered, definite state. This desire already assumes closed, controllable inhabitable space. Even the anarchists, who "hoped the MOO could be a place where people interacted fulfillingly without the need for [state structure]," want to close out Bungle, to "annihilate" him, to "[erase] him from the face of the MOO." All of these possible systems--from the anarchists to the monarchists--assume a "community as a whole": a definite, definable whole. Although all political systems are open to discussion, only the open system remains closed out. "Consensus" here means excluding dissent in order to create a closed, comprehensive "whole."

But this great MOO debate and its desire for closure leads, of itself, nowhere--drifting apart into wandering, rambling conversations. Once again, resistances pop up in the attempt to produce idealized, controllable worlds. In fact, the only action that occurs comes about as a result of two wizards, by way of hierarchical, executive decision. For the purposes of our discussion, I am less interested in that first action, Bungle's toading, than in the second: when Pavel Curtis, "ponder[ing] the chaotically evolving shape of his creation," decides to institute "a system more purely democratic than any that could ever exist in real life." Idealized goal of cybercommunity, or model of community? Perhaps we can pick up on this question in our discussion. Or perhaps some of us, like Dr. Bombay early on, are still not quite ready to "meet the spectacle on its own terms." One thing should be clear, though: that the "buzzing gap" between real and virtual has closed for these residents, and as a result, complex questions such as these become as transparent as the mediation itself.

 I have not forgotten about Mr. Bungle, and the challenge he poses to these systems. As I said, I have no intention of condoning "virtual violence" as a resistance to closed systems. Instead, we need to now, and finally, look at what Bungle's evil says about his own assumptions. His only explanation of his action is: "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. . . .It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence." Dibbell concludes that "Mr. Bungle was psycho," a virtual reality "sociopath" who "assume[d]. . .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." Regardless of whether or not we entirely accept Dibbell's diagnosis, one feature of Bungle's bizarre response is worth focusing on: like Ayn Rand objectivism carried to an extreme, Bungle apparently lived in a world in which other players were objects, but his own identity was stable and untouchable. By assuming that virtual reality presents "a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence," Bungle again shows himself as an extreme inversion of the virtual/real divide. Instead of imagining the virtual self as a fractal re-presentation of "the real," Bungle ignores the real--those folks behind keyboards--and treats the entire MOO as imaginary. Bungle himself becomes the closed, static system, the state; he is "whole" and cannot project anything of himself into the MOO because the MOO is nothing but an imaginary representation "with no consequence on. . .RL existence." Bungle assumed the ability to distance himself from his own representation, and as a result, became a violent rapist.

We have one more lesson to learn from Bungle. But now, instead of allowing him to reverse LambdaMOO's assumptions, let us reverse his. Perhaps instead of treating ourselves as an extracted stable entities, playing laboratory games with other players, we might consider the MOO as a place of experimentation for ourselves. In other words, we might use this space to make ourselves aware of our own assumptions about body, community, identity. Instead of allowing the "buzzing gap" to close, we might try to keep it--and us--open to these questions. Dr. Bombay seems to follow this line of flight toward the end of the piece, when he becomes interested in approaching Dr. Jest, the reincarnation of Mr. Bungle. Dibbell writes: "It was obvious he'd undergone some sort of personal transformation in the days since I'd first glimpsed him [as Mr. Bungle]." True, he was now a new character, but there's a more subtle transformation going on here, one that Dibbell notes in himself: "I too was undergoing a transformation." I'd like to leave us with that word: transformation. We might see cyberspace as a place of transformative interactions, rather than as a static place to re-present our stable selves. We need not imagine cyberspace as a stable, static, inhabitable space; rather, we can conceive of it as a place of motion and change. We might even imagine wandering through ourselves in cyberspace, giving ourselves over to the connections that we make. Cyberspace can offer us the opportunity to experience, as Dibbell did, "unsettling effects on the way [we] looked at the rest of the world."

 I would suggest that this approach is more nomadic than state oriented. Instead of wondering how we can control internet or make it our utopian home, we might instead try to produce a nomadic territory of challenge, what Baudrillard calls a seduction, "a locus of that which eludes you, and whereby you elude yourself and your own truth" (Ecstasy 66). Certain on-line figurations, I would argue, encourage that structure. In the same way that the MOO may encourage us to think statically, a program like world-wide web, with its continuing evolution of outposts, zones, etc, may induce us to think in terms of wanderings. From my own experience at pmc- MOO, I can attest to the fact that a majority of the players who approach the MOO--individually or as a collective will--are petitioning for an increase in those features I have associated with a striating force: privacy, property, stability. This desire for a duplicate world, or rather a more controllable, more "model" world in cyberspace, strikes me as a far greater danger than the fairly rare cyber-criminal. I recently received an invitation to an online classroom called Dream_House at another MOO. The collaborative project was accompanied by an essay entitled "Making Our Dreams Come True on the MOO." Here I see a banal acceptance of a set of values and assumptions that seems as harmful as the self- declared evil that thrives upon it.

 Rather than working toward (re)producing our conceptual models of body, identity, and community in virtual reality, cyberspace could just as easily keep us moving beyond our ends, toward new connections. Again, a program like the world wide web provides me with the closest application of this alternative metaphor. Unlike the desire for model communities, the web presents us with a way to smooth out cyberspace. Rather than laying out dedicated lines to static sites, the web encourages users to mark their own lines of flight, to wander and drift through information. There's no guarantee that a path will remain permanently; one cannot approach the web as a dedicated journey. When we become wanderers instead of inhabitants, the net becomes a different space with very different potentials. Hakim Bey calls these moments of "smooth" culture Temporary Autonomous Zones--not utopian, stable communities or residences, but zones that individuals pass through on their wanderings from territory to territory. On my more optimistic days, that's the hope I have for the space that is not a space: that it can give rise to these places that do not affirm our expectations, but that set us free from our closed assumptions by providing an open space for the play of individuals and ideas.

                           Works Cited



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