Julian Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace” discusses a sexual attack, the Bungle Affair, that occurred in an online world called LambdaMOO, and what this attack implies about online ethics and identity. This attack, Dibbell says, “raises questions that ... demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to ... 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 ... 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.” (p. 200)
The most obvious question to come out of “A Rape in Cyberspace” is: was it rape? What would qualify it as rape? Is rape even possible in cyberspace? The title Dibbell chose for his article is provocative. I remember reading (although it’s a long time ago, and I don’t have references, sorry) criticisms of “A Rape in Cyberspace” as sensationalist and perhaps even scaremongering. Common sense tells us that rape is physical, and MUD and MOO worlds are constructed entirely of text, so clearly Mr. Bungle’s attack wasn’t rape, right? But if LambdaMOO’s reality is textual, then isn’t textual rape as real as anything else that might happen there? The Bungle Affair brings into question the reality of all of LambdaMOO.
Perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Bungle’s attack is as a kind of crime that doesn’t quite exist in “real life”, not exactly rape but more than “just” sexual harassment. The LambdaMOO residents seem to have mostly felt this; Dibbell says that Mr. Bungle “had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.” (p. 208) This touches on the ethics topics we looked at a couple of weeks ago. If Mr. Bungle’s attack was a MOO crime, rather than a “real life” crime, does that mean that ethics and/or morals are different in cyberspace? Does the medium change the ethical and/or moral aspects of an action? Could there be crimes such as rapes in cyberspace which have no “real life” equivalent?
Identity is a a theme which comes through strongly. To a certain extent, LambdaMOO formed a space for identity experimentation; but at the same time, it was not entirely fluid. The mapping of character to user was not one-to-one. Dibbell mentions that he sometimes took on different characters in LambdaMOO, and Mr. Bungle was reborn after his “toading” as Dr. Jest, but having more than one character per person was discouraged. Sometimes a character might also be controlled by more than one person. The version of “A Rape in Cyberspace” which is in the course reader doesn’t mention this (see p. 29 of My Tiny Life), but “Mr. Bungle” was in fact a group of university students, and the attack was a communal affair. At the same time, however, LambdaMOO was more than just a “vast playpen in which [users] might act out their wildest fantasies”. Dibbell describes a user’s “concern for their character’s reputation” as “mark[ing] the attainment of virtual adulthood” (p. 209).
Gender is also a factor in the attack. The software of LambdaMOO allowed for fluidity in gender – typing “@gender female” or whatever you wanted to be was all it took to change your sex – and there were many gender options that were neither male nor female. However, the users brought their offline gender biases into LambdaMOO with them. Dibbell notes that Mr. Bungle’s attacks were aimed at female-presenting and gender-neutral characters, and that many female-presenting characters had suffered sexual harassment on LambdaMOO at some time or another. He also quotes (in My Tiny Life, p. 126) the creator of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis, who pointed out that female-presenting characters were often challenged to “prove” that they were really women, although male-presenting characters were rarely asked to prove themselves men.
(If anyone is interested in following up on this article, Dibbell's book about LambdaMOO, My Tiny Life, is available online. I've read it - you could probably tell from my references to it - and it's a fascinating study. Well worth the read, if you're interested in the issues he raises.)
24 comments:
I'll come back to this later (and all the other posts I've missed), but the point about females being challenged to prove they were female, hmmm I can't actually remember any specifics for some reason but it's something that I've come across a lot during my time on the internet and in gaming. (meaningful post hey? yeah i know, bigtime. haha)
I personally found it difficult to understand how and why it was seen as rape, but that's because I've never belonged to anything like LambdaMOO or Second Life or anything where you're involved in-depth with a community or whatnot.
but! it's not up to me or anyone but themselves to define their experiences.
cyber sex is definitely thought of as sexual activity, and it said in the article that sex was very much real, often could be more intense than in real life, on LambdaMOO. if so, I don't see why unwanted sexual activity can be seen as rape, even if it's not in a conventional sense. if those who were raped/harrassed feel violated by what happened, then they should be free to define what happened how they like.
but that's really about semantics. do you think that if people can be subject to rape over the internet, does this invalidate the experiences of "real life" rape victims? will this allow others to label their sexual harrassment or whatnot as rape? does that demean the "true" rape victims?
I'm torn, actually, to be honest. because while what happened was definitely, at the least, a very extreme form of sexual harrassment, I can't help but feel like it's just not rape, per se. that said, I don't think it's up to anyone but the victims to define their feelings and whatnot. Idk idk.
and to Liam: I'm not a gamer (as we all know haha) but I've heard this around the place, on communities on LJ and stuff, that females are often not believed to be females and asked to prove it. without trying to beat a dead horse, I do think it all goes back to my previous argument that gaming and technology are seen as gendered activities and thus it's like people are assumed male until proven otherwise, because why would a girl be gaming etc etc etc.
but really, not trying to beat that old thing again. reeaallly.
holy long comment batman D:
Reading through the actually article... I don't know. I feel it was a bit of an over-reaction. They got trolled. It wasn't nice.
But I think most online communities build up a certain 'bullshit tolerance' to counter this kind of crap. If they didn't, their little online worlds would be full of more epic whinging than an episode of the bold and the beautiful.
Reacting to a troll is effectively losing to the troll, and if a troll is successful (and even moreso if the act of trolling becomes well known), more trolls are attracted. There's a popular internet saying "Don't feed the trolls".
I just checked the date of the essay/event, and it's kinda making more sense now. I guess back then, a troll was something new/different?
And I might come back to you later Alex :p I'll kinda answer by saying, I agree with what you're saying in the context of Australia. But I think a) it's getting better/more equal and b) Australia is behind the ball on this.
@Alex: I think your questions as to the effect on real rape victims of calling this attack rape are fair. Do you think it's possible to say that it was rape in the context of LambdaMOO (textual world, therefore textual rape), but not rape in the context of the "real world"? I'd like to, but it strikes me as too neat and tidy... I don't think you can partition off the "real" world and cyberspace so cleanly. Consider (well, you mentioned it yourself) cybersex on LambdaMOO, which engaged the "real" body as well as the LambdaMOO body.
@no one in particular: These comments and the lecture today reminded me of something else I was going to bring up, which was the ambiguous position of the body in cyberspace. Howard Rheingold's article says, "People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind. You can't kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose..." This seems like a pretty naive statement these days. Alex and I already mentioned cybersex, which seems to show pretty clearly that we don't leave our bodies behind when we enter cyberspace. I guess part of the question, thinking about the Bungle Affair and cyber-rape, is: where are the participant's bodies in all this?
@Liam: "Don't feed the trolls", sure. But when it comes to serious sexual harrassment... I think that warrants somebody taking action. The women involved in the attack were apparently honestly traumatised by it. "Ignore it and it will go away" is good advice, but emotions don't tend to take advice. The victims could have @gagged Mr. Bungle and pretended it wasn't happening but there would still have been the hurt of his first attacks, and the knowledge that other people were seeing them. (I think I'm pretty much paraphrasing Dibbell here.)
I suppose from the dates in My Tiny Life that the Bungle Affair happened some time around 1993. I'd guess that's quite late enough for people to be aware of trolls, even if they hadn't been named "trolls" yet. I get the idea from Dibbell's work that minor trouble-making was quite common on LambdaMOO; it was, after all, a fairly major chat MOO. But the community saw Mr. Bungle's attack as something else, something bigger.
Which brings us back to ethics and governance online. To what extent should we impose offline moral standards on the Internet? You wouldn't expect a woman in "real life" to just stand there and ignore some guy yelling the kind of things Mr. Bungle said. (In fact, the attack on LambdaMOO might be considered worse, since any observers who didn't understand how voodoo dolls worked would assume that the victims were really the perpretrators.) Why should she be expected to put up with it online?
(had to fix spelling ugh)
I really don't think you can use "Don't feed the trolls" for something of this, I guess, magnitude? There's a huge difference between someone posting on a random online community "I accidentally a Coke bottle. What should I do?" and what happened in the LambdaMOO community, you know. If the victims felt violated and upset or even traumatised by it, then clearly something should be done about it. Saying "You have been trolled lol" or being like "It's the internet, it happens" is just.. no.
Just because things do happen doesn't mean it's acceptable, or that people shouldn't be allowed to do anything about it. And before I start verging into making RL-rape analogies here, I'm going to leave that there.
I'd really like to address the whole issue about real life thics & morals intersecting with online ones, but I honestly cannot think of anyway it would work out - I'm not good with ethics as it is (not in a sociopathic way, in an I-don't-do-Philosophy-or-anything way) but if anyone else has ideas on this it'd be interesting to hear....
See, I wouldn't have thought that trolling would have been a big thing then. The web was what, 3 or 4 years old. I haven't read Dibbel's stuff other than the reading, so can't comment on minor trouble making. Just going on my assumptions.
Moving on, Wikipedia has a definition of trolls pretty close to mine,
'An Internet troll ... is someone who posts controversial and irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community ... with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response.'
I'm not saying it's not sexual harassment, I'm not saying it's okay. I'm not saying nothing should be done about it - I'm all well and fine for banning the person/deleting account etc. But I honestly think having a massive song and dance about it is only encouraging other trolls.
This is difficult because I'm stuck trying to think what it might have been like then, and what it is like now. I would guess the internet was a more innocent place then, hence why this event was so shocking at the time. Again, not saying it's okay, not saying it's alright.
No you wouldn't expect a woman in RL to stand there and take it. Frankly though, on the internet these days, an action like that on a chat board or forum would (i'm sure) result very quickly in a ban.
Why were they so slow in acting anyway? I need to reread the piece. From memory it was because the moderators had basically stopped and said 'sort issues out yourselves'. Assuming you're on a forum with any respectable population, that just doesn't happen these days. At least as far as I know. Probably because of events like Mr.Bungle.
I don't think anyone should be expected to put up with any sort of harassment, but for jeepers sakes people, know it's a possibility, especially on the internet. Just like in real life, someone driving past you in a car can scream an obscenity at you. Or in my case as a highschool student, have a spoon thrown at you from the car (Seriously, a spoon?). What can we do about it? Nothing. Zilch. Zoop.
I've got more to say, but this has taken like half an hour and I'm tired anyway. If someone want's to jump in and post before I finish the rest of my post, I guess I leave this as my.. general opinion - RL and the internet aren't always nice places. Get a helmet.
*Liam expects much fury.
No time to comment properly, but I'd just like to say that 1993-ish is plenty late enough for trolls. Yes, the World Wide Web was only a few years old, but the World Wide Web is not the Internet. The Internet (e.g. mailing lists, MUDs) had been around for years. MUDs aren't part of the Web - they have their own technologies.
I feel really uncomfortable with calling it 'rape'. Sexual abuse sure. Definitely. But rape.... I don't think that rape is possible in cyberspace.
I don't quite understand how it happened. I don't really understand why the victims in question couldn't just log off, or go to a different room in the castle. Does that sound too victim-blaming? I guess I just expect people to have some common knowledge that predators/sex maniacs exists on the internet, and one should avoid them if they are not interested in cybersex. But yeah, perhaps this was not common knowledge back in the early 90’s.
No real time to argue as I have to go to work..
I think the main problem I have with this whole "It happens, get used to it", or, so very eloquently, "Get a helmet" is that you're taking away other people's rights to feel violated or upset or whatever about these things that happen to them.
Not everyone is you and not everyone will see things the same as you. Yes, it would be wonderful if everyone could laugh off stupid things that happen to them, getting trolled, having random people throw spoons at them or yell at them, but the reality is that not everyone can. And that's not a weakness, and that's not something to scoff about.
Just because you find it so easy to deal with and not a problem doesn't mean everyone else has to. You != everyone else. Your experiences != everyone else's. You reactions != everyone else's.
Therese - I do agree with you but as I randomly went on about in my comment, I also don't feel comfortable in telling others how they should view their own experiences and whatnot. But yeah, rape to me implies physical sexual activity, but anyway.
I think the problem that they said in the article with just logging off or gagging Mr Bungle was that even though the victims wouldn't have to put up with it, everyone else could see it, which was humiliating and degrading for them.
Yeah sorry Emily, that was a little slow of me.
Would you agree that the victims felt they were in a safe location? I got the impression that was part of the shock/pain - that they 'had' felt safe. I'm just wondering if that feeling was misplaced. Well, given the reaction, I'd say it was.
Alex, I thought long and hard about replying, and indeed wrote several replies. But I think it'll be better if we just leave this one - I don't foresee either of us budging much in our views.
Punishments can't be dished out unless the act is established to be a crime. Sure, people can cry about whatever they want to cry about, its a free world. Go ahead, express emotions. But one can't claim for compensation, or justice for just anything.
To me the idea of logging off when the abuse started seems like a win for the sexual predator. Using the example Liam gave, if some hoon cuts infront of your car and yells obscenities at you, if you yell back they might think twice about what they did. It's the old 'stand up to a bully' thing.
That a storm was kicked up about Mr.Bungle's "rape" goes to show him and other users that whether in RL or cyberspace, people will not tolerate that sort of behaviour. If you persist with it, repurcussions will occur. In my view it had to be done, and Mr.Bungle needed to be punished to get the message across to the rest of the online community.
The question of whether it can be considered as a "real" rape could arguable be considered a side note.
Yell back at a hoon??? A normal person would not scream obscenities at you as they drive past. There are some mental people out there, right on the edge of sanity, right on the edge of snapping. If you value your life you would not scream back at them. Examples:
1. A mate of mine pulled the finger at a guy who yelled something at him, my mate was followed to the shopping centre confronted, threatened by the obscenity-yelling-driver.
2. My mum recently went back to uni to do mental health nursing and did stints at graylands and casarina prison. They are not the sort of people you want to be yelling back at.
The world is not full of completely stable happy people whom you can reason with. No matte how hard we may try, we can't seem to rid the world of violence, hate and crime. Sometimes you just have to walk away.
@Liam: We seem to keep harping on this thing of dates, but don't think of LambdaMOO as anarchic just because of its date. As a matter of fact, it started off with pretty standard moderation procedures, with the "wizards" enforcing the rules. But the owner got tired of this and decided to give control over to the users instead. This didn't mean total anarchy, though - just that the wizards wouldn't take any steps that the users hadn't first requested.
Which is why such a storm blew up about the Bungle Affair. It's not that some people thought what he'd done was okay or excusable or whatever. It was because the affair meant users had to finally figure out what LambdaMOO's government was going to look like. Dibbell says this himself, on page 206: "Arguments broke out ... that had only superficially to do with Bungle (since everyone agreed he was a cad) and everything to do with where the participants stood on LambdaMOO's crazy-quilty political map."
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. So I guess you'd label what happened sexual harrassment and expect it to be dealt with by moderators the same way as any other kind of harrassment? (I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just trying to get your position straight in my head.)
Did the participants feel like they were in a safe location? Hm, hm, hm... I don't know. Dibbell implies it, but I'm not sure to what extent that's true, and to what extent it's just his rhetorical style. (He dramatises the story a bit too much, in my opinion; it's sometimes hard to tell what's fact and what's embellishment.) I guess it would have been true to a point; if you hang out in the same close-knit community for long enough, you can start to forget that it's the Internet, and that any idiot or psychopath can come along and join the party.
@Therese: The option of logging off is something I thought about before doing my presentation, and then forgot about. I think it's a very important distinction between "cyber-rape" and physical rape; you can't just walk away from physical rape. My instinctive reaction is, like Nikky, that logging off would be letting the attacker win. But like you say, sometimes it's best to swallow your pride and just walk away.
Then again, if you were really deeply invested in an online world, "just log off" might have a different ring to it. It implies that the online world is less real and important than the offline world, that if you don't like what's going on you can just leave and there won't be any consequences. Which might very well be true, but I think a lot of LambdaMOO residents would have disagreed.
I don't know if that made any sense. I think I need sleep.
I think they're kinda a different class of people (troll vs bully), although they're both happily found under the 'jerks' banner.
The trouble with trolls is that they're in it for the reaction, and the bigger the better. Punishment really isn't an issue.
Ahh and you've posted while I was writing a post hahah.
The thing I was meaning about the dates was that, perhaps because of the relative infancy of the internet (again though, I'm not really sure at what stage it was at, just given the response, that it was relatively young), perhaps people would have been less aware of the possibility of this kind of stuff. Like, today, everyone's aware that there are horrible people on the internet, and there's plenty of talk about the dangers of the internet and how to keep safe (broad topic). I wasn't meaning to suggest that because the internet/lambdaMOO was young, there wasn't any moderation. I had picked that up that they weren't active anymore. I probably mixed up my argument/points somewhere.
I think you've got my position pretty good there. Ultimately, I don't think there's much else available in the way of responses.
The thing I was meaning about the dates was that, perhaps because of the relative infancy of the internet ... perhaps people would have been less aware of the possibility of this kind of stuff.
Ah, okay. I don't know, to be honest. I guess there was a fair bit of utopian idealism about the Internet early on, but I don't know how naive the users would have been. Dibbell does mention (on p. 204) that quite a few female-presenting characters on LambdaMOO had experienced some sort of sexual harrassment there, so I think the users would have been mostly aware of the issue, at least after spending some time on LambdaMOO. It seems pretty clear that the discussion on what to do with Mr. Bungle was as much about "MUD rape" in general as it was about the Bungle case in particular. But it might be true that there was less awareness then than there is now.
Just a little side note, but are any of you fans of the metal band Mr Bungle? A mate of mine is obsessed. He was reading this forum over my should and started shouting out titles of songs that Mr Bungle has produced:
Love is a fist
Girls of Porn
Violenzia Domestica
So thats just a little information on a possible influence on Mr Bungle's user(s)...
Ok, bad example with the car thing. But if I knew that I was in the right I wouldn't back down - perhaps that's just me. But I still maintain that ignoring the problem of trolls and bullying will not solve the problem at all.
@Liam - what if the "punishment" was real world? (I'm talking about extremes here and if the offence was serious enough)
Do people think that if RL fines would involved, that this sort of thing would stop? Or would it just ad more fuel to the fire?
I don't know about adding fuel to fire, but in terms of practicality I think it would be very hard to enforce. I mean they struggle enough to sue people for actual online crimes, let alone grey area stuff.
That said, I don't think trolls would be happy if they incurred RL fines/penalty, so if it could be done, I think it would be fairly effective.
I'm a little out of my league here as I don't actually have an xbox 360, but I believe if you troll/grief/make racist comments etc etc, you can get your xbox effectively permanently banned from the internet, which is a lot less fun. I'm fairly sure that's been effective at minimising anti-social behaviour.
I reckon RL fines would add more fuel to the fire, until a fool-proof method of catching the trolls in RL was developed. For now, I think it would be like the round 22 Hawthorn game when Buddy was expected to kick his 100th goal for the season. Official reports stated that anyone who ran onto the field during the game would be hit with a $6000 fine. It didn't stop more than 20,000 people from running on when that magical goal was kicked. That many people could not be caught and fined by the small staff of security guards on duty. I think a punishment wouldn't stop trolls, it'd just make them a little more careful not to get caught.
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