My Tiny Life

"This one’s more journalistic and more accessible, but it deals with similar things. It’s called My Tiny Life by a journalist called Julian Dibbell, who is a fascinating observer of online communities. The first chapter of this book was originally published in the Village Voice in 1993, called ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’, and it quite literally changed my life. It was his first-person perspective of how an online text-based community called LambdaMOO created what’s described as a ‘consensual hallucination’. LambdaMOO was a very early online community, just after the web started, populated initially by idealists who thought: right, we’ll reject what we have offline and create this utopian society online, and we’ll do it in a very equal and libertarian way, in which there will be no hierarchy and everyone will have a say, man. Many early adopters of the web were part of this movement, and they thought that – perhaps like people in existing offline communities like Christiania, the freetown in Copenhagen – they could create their own utopia that preached equality. ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ documents how this idealistic society moved from being this utopian ideal into an environment in which people decided that they needed regulations, they needed rules, they needed very fixed community structures. This was inspired by a particular act one of the participants engaged in: he used a computer hack to take over the characterisations of two of the female participants who were in this space and then forced them, using his technological prowess, to ‘perform sexual acts’ on his character’s person, in a (virtual) public place. What is documented so beautifully in this book is how actions in these online environments can have a profound emotional impact on the real, offline individual. Julian Dibbell brought to the fore the link between the individual at the computer and what was happening online. And I think this is just as relevant today with reputations being smeared across the web on Facebook or on forums. Now the outcome of this was it turned this sort of free and easy hippie ideal into a society in which everybody came along and demanded the death penalty of this character – ie, removing his account and never allowing him to come back on again – and it created these debates, and an economy came out of this, and it created a hierarchy that ultimately led to the evolution of this environment in such a way that it was never the same again. I found that such a fascinating read – it was so compulsive you couldn’t put it down. Ultimately, what it does is reflect what we are, because look at this fascinating new world: it’s full of freaks, full of people like us, and it’s an environment that we have hewn in our own image. Absolutely. What I find fascinating about the documentation of this kind of thing on the web in particular, is that we’re seeing again and again with this new technology (and with previous new technologies, like the telegraph), that anything new initially suggests we can create this new society in which we’re all equal, man, and having a big group global hug and group global consciousness. In fact, we as human beings can only bring to these spaces what it is that we’ve experienced before. There is something about us socially that demands these structures."