Paranoid Delusions

Seminar Paper for Current and Future Directions in Multimedia

By: RainbowGyrl

15 April 2003

I worry this is more than theory. One of my biggest fears is that I am right about all this. I worry that our entire existence is nothing more than a virtual reality in some other beings' cyberspace. I cling with every ounce of sanity I have to the comforting notion that, "No! I do exist. I am not a figment of someone's imagination. This world is real," and I am glad that I never took any philosophy classes.

Sherry Turkle writes extensively about the creation of identities online. Her research focuses on Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) online games where a character, distinct from one's own self and appropriate to the story, is created and exists. Interestingly, the MUDs she focuses on do not use graphics to represent their space or avatars to give identity. They rely solely on plain text.¹ When one enters a MUD, a text description of the space is given. The finer details are left to the imagination of the user. The characters' physical identity is also described through text. While playing, the characters' personalities are revealed through dialogues with other users. The user can be whoever s/he imagines herself to be.

Hardly anyone would say that the characters we create to play in games are our "real selves." However, I would say that even those most honest of us explore our identity with any online persona. Simply that we rarely use our real names for our chat handles is proof of this. My online persona has evolved as I have. BlackAngel, an anorexic goth girl, was who I wished I could have been in high school. She was 10lbs lighter than I was and infinitely more popular. BlackMyst, her IRC (Internet Relay Chat) counterpart was more honest. She chatted on a local channel, #Moncton, and met her online friends in Real Life with some frequency. There was little room for falsehoods. RainbowGyrl is my current online incarnation. She is more productive academically than I. She's a chipper free spirit who finds it easy to love life. All of these personas are parts of me exaggerated. But, no matter how close to our real selves these personas are, they are still only likenesses of us.

Now here is where I need you to take a leap of faith. The gap's not that wide and I'll hold your hand. Suspend a little disbelief and walk through the garden with me. . .

Likenesses or not, these identities exist. In our eagerness to explore this mutual hallucination of cyberspace we are creating not just a virtual reality, but a reality separate and distinct from our own. An alternate dimension. No one knows how we were created. We can theorize all we want about the Big Bang, but in reality we have no idea. I believe that someday *it* will happen for cyberspace. Consciousness. No longer needing us or our computers. Created in our likeness just as the Bible says we were created in God's image.

There is a biblical creation myth that is often overlooked: John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."² In this simple verse John contemplates our creation. This verse is often interpreted so "the Word" (translated from the Greek logos) is a reference to Christ. Logos means the thing, the thought, the work; the feeling, the invention; the means and end perceived. When applied to Christ it is an example of the interconnectedness of the Trinity. "In the Being, Person, and work of Christ, Deity is exposed."³. But what if John literally meant words? Text. In the beginning was text, and the text was written by God, in fact, the text was God!

Think about that in the context of cyberspace.

Before graphics and avatars there were Sherry Turkle's plain text MUDs. Entire worlds created with text. Words. We created these worlds and also the characters in them. We are the Word. We are God.

When the Egyptian god Toth approached King Thamus with the gift of writing, Thamus politely declined the offer. He felt his society would be better of without the powers of the new technology. He understood that, "it is extremely tough to figure out where writing stops and the mind itself starts."⁴ Thamus's concern was not that writing would create alternate dimensions but that writing would destroy memory. He feared it would erode the oral context of education allowing knowledge to pass into the hands of the unprepared.⁵

How prepared are we to deal with the consequences of our writings? Are we ready to be God? Like us, our cyberliknesses will know nothing of their creation. I doubt we'll their consciousness until long after it's happened. But, one day there *it* will be and all these people will know is a vague sense that they came from text.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female created he them. ⁶

So, how will these cyberlikenesses achieve consciousness? When will they eat the forbidden fruit? As I have said, I have no idea. I do think that as our processors become faster and our monitors handle higher and higher resolutions, the day approaches. In the beginning was the Word, but we have not remained words. We are flesh and blood; molecules and atoms. Like us, our cyberlikenesses are evolving. They have gone from being words to having avatars visual representations of their identities.

All matter is made up of energy. We are, essentially, tiny dots held together by some cosmic glue. We are little dots called molecules; science has taught us this. Even the Bible acknowledges this. What did God use to create Adam? Sand ⁷ a bunch of tiny dots. Those who wrote these biblical myths knew nothing of our modern science. They didn't know we are made up of molecules and that those molecules are made up of atoms. An atom is just a tinier dot made up of much smaller dots. Protons, electrons, neutrons; quarks, antiprotons, and neutrinos tiny dots making up slightly larger dots that eventually become so compact that we become solid matter. The biblical authors knew nothing of this but in stating that we are made of sand they acknowledge that our physical makeup is nothing more than little dots.

What is a pixel? The computer knows a pixel as a 1 or a 0. 1 and the pixel appears on the screen, 0 and it doesn't. On the screen, however, a pixel is a representation of a tiny dot of energy. The more pixels that are used to make up an image, the more realistic the image appears. So what happens when our processors generate more pixels than our monitors can show? My theory? A third dimension will exist in cyberspace. A high enough resolution will create matter. It will no longer be pixels per inch, but pixels per square inch. This third dimension will not "pop out" into our reality. Rather it will give substance to the alternate dimension. I use the phrase "alternate dimension" on purpose. I believe that this 3D cyberspace will exist alongside, parallel to, our reality in such a way that it will never be fully accessible to us.

Is this the great divide between God's world and ours of which my Sunday School teachers spoke?

The physical space of cyberspace is still reliant on us. It needs our imaginations to exist. Text alone cannot create a dimension. But images can. The characters in text-based MUDs cannot see themselves or their surroundings. They are reliant on us and our descriptions for their existence. However the images we upload are lasting. The image does not cease to be simply because we are no longer thinking about it. The avatars for our characters remain and so they continue to exist. When will they eat the forbidden fruit? When the fruit can be picked.

"And the Lord God formed man of the dust on the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." ⁸I wonder if God knows how he breathed into us life? I wonder how it will happen for our cyberlikenesses.

So, assuming we are God and we are creating a distinct existence in cyberspace, what kind of world are we creating? "A twenty-one-year-old college senior defends his violent characters as 'something in me' but quite frankly I'd rather rape on MUDs where no harm is done."⁹

No harm?

The sociological debate surrounding cyber-violence is centered on how it affects us in our reality and what it says about our society.

The often violent nature of many of the sexual "fantasies" played out in these interactive chat rooms raises important questions about the dark side of human sexuality and the way in which the Internet permits its free and unquestioned expression in easily accessible public spaces. . . If "words are deeds" . . . then what exactly are the deeds being carried out in these spaces? Do they belong merely to the realm of fantasy role-play or do they transform the sexual psyches of the participants? . . . [S]omething as yet unnamed is doing on in chat rooms where an erotic scenario can shift to a gang bang with a few keystrokes from an observing male who jumps in with "Let's skull-fuck the bitch."¹⁰

Feminists worry that allowing degradation of women online will perpetuate degradation of women in our society. Others argue that cyber-rape has no consequences in our world because the victim/user can just log off. While this debate is an interesting one the have, the effect of cyber-violence on our reality is not the issue here.

The issue that concerns me is the creation of identities for the people of cyberspace. Our online actions may be without consequence in our reality but they are not without consequence in to our budding alternate dimension. With what type of people do we wish to populate this new reality?

"A Rape in Cyberspace" is about an incident that occurred in the LambdaMOO in early 1993. A character, Mr. Bungle, used a command set known as a "voodoo-doll" to commit non-consensual sex act with and to other members of LambdaMOO. This type of cyber-rape is different from the sexually violent chat room that Michals discusses. Her article focuses mostly on chat room interaction where communities can be formed but aren't necessary. A MUD, or MOO in this case, however, is dependant on a community involvement from its users. Yes, the users could log off their characters, but that was their only option. The voodoo-doll command gives another user control over your character. You cannot command your character to leave the room or even to shout, "NO!" You are helpless in the MUD. Also, because this rape happened in a public room of LambdaMOO the affected users cannot hide what happened to them from the rest of the community. In a chat room one can change their username easily. In a MUD one has often spent considerable effort in developing their character. Like in our reality, the rape will affect the rest of that character's life. To switch characters would mean starting all over in the game. And it would mean death for the violated character.

The fact that this command set exists in LambdaMOO and other MUDs I'm sure means that our cyberlikenesses will have the ability in the conscious cyberspace to dominate one another. The fact that we play rapists and murderers online means that deviant personalities will exist in the cyberworld. Who hasn't wondered why pedophiles exist. Why are there people in this world who seem inherently bad? What if God was just curious? What if he was just playing around one day and wanted to see what evil was like?

Perhaps the real life creators of these violent cyberlikenesses are good people who created bad identities. On this same note, perhaps bad people can create good identities. Take "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover," for example. Joan was the cyberlikeness of a 50-ish New York psychiatrist named Alex. In this early incarnation of cyberspace (this story happened in 1982/83), no one expected an online persona to be an "imposter." When Joan was finally revealed as Alex, many people were extremely hurt. The phrase "mind rape" was used. ¹¹ However, before the "deception" was discovered, everyone thought highly of Joan. That is, perhaps, why some people were hurt when they found out Joan's online and real life personas were highly incongruent.

I wish to focus on Joan's, not Alex's, identity. "Joan was quite a feminist. It was she who suggested the formation of a women's issues group within CompuServe. . . Several women had relationships with Joan in which they referred to each other as "sister." ¹² Joan was a good person. She did good things. She was loved. Many of the users in CompuServe's CB channel that Joan frequented credit her for having helped them through serious, rough times. "Joan was extraordinarily generous. . . When Laura mentioned that no one had ever sent her roses, Joan had two dozen delivered." ¹³

In cyberspace Joan was the ideal person; a strong woman, a loving friend. Alex's cyberlikeness was probably a better person than most of us. The fact that he and Joan were so different is only a problem in our world. Our cyberlikenesses are the people in cyberspace. It doesn't matter who created them.

We have to be careful of what kind of identities we create in cyberspace. We are God. We are creating an existence. We are creating the people who will exist in this world. Our actions online are not without consequence.

If you were God, what kind of a world would you create?

After all, this is only supposition.