The Cyber Rape by Mr Bungle the Clown
When it comes to the boundaries between reality and fantasy and between moral and immoral acts, probably the most poignant tale that reveals the blurring in these situations is the story of Mr Bungle the Clown. Mr Bungle was a cyber character who inhabited the virtual world of LamdaMOO – one of the first online communities back in the early 1990s where multiple players create and control virtual characters. Mr Bungle was a particularly nasty piece of work. In one notorious event one evening in a virtual room in a virtual mansion, he violated members of his fellow online community using software subroutines (sections of code designed for a particular task in computer programming) to make the other characters perform perverted sexual acts.47
Of course, this terrifying vision of Mr Bungle was all in the users’ mind. He didn’t really exist. If you logged on to LamdaMOO back in these early days of virtual communities, you simply accessed a database stored somewhere inside a Xerox Corporation research computer in Silicon Valley that presented the user with scrolling lines of description. The environment, objects and all the characters were just subroutines of text – fairly basic stuff compared to the rich visual environments that are expected in today’s technologically advanced online communities. LamdaMOO was nothing compared to the graphical 3D visual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft, but then human imagination doesn’t require very much to generate a vivid impression.
Mr Bungle was the disturbed creation of a young hacker logging on from New York University who had managed to hack the system’s software to produce a subroutine that presented other users with unsolicited text. During the event in question, several female users were online when they were presented with text describing how their characters inserted various utensils and derived sexual pleasure as Mr Bungle watched, laughing sadistically. Again it was all in the mind as the whole attack was played out as a series of scrolling text.
Afterwards, one female user from Seattle whose character, called ‘Legba’, had been virtually abused, publicly posted her assault on the LambdaMOO’s community chatboard and called for Mr Bungle’s castration. Months later she told the reporter who had first covered the story that as she wrote those words, ‘post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face’. Clearly this was no longer a virtual incident in her mind – as a victim she had taken it to heart. The assault had crossed the boundary of imagination to affect the real-life emotions of those concerned.
They say words can never harm you but for the self illusion, words from other people can be everything. The case of Mr Bungle raises so many interesting issues about identity, the self and the way these operate in online communities. Everything that happened, the characters, the assault, the reaction and the eventual retribution were nothing more than words, the frenetic typing of cyber geeks on their keyboards. But why the outrage? Why did people feel emotionally upset? No physical contact had ever taken place. Clearly the players were not deluded into believing that a real assault had happened, but psychologically the users felt violated. In the minds of the players it had gone beyond role-playing. Their indignation was real. Ostracism and the pain of social rejection can be so easily triggered by simple computer simulations of communities that are a sufficient substitute for reality. That’s because they stimulate our deep-seated need for social interaction.
So where is the real self in these different examples of online communities and virtual worlds? Most of us believe that we are not hypocrites or duplicitous. We like to think we have integrity. If the self is a coherent, integrated entity then one would predict that the way we behave online should accurately mirror the way we behave offline. However, that does not appear to be the case. How people behave depends on the context in which they find themselves. The Web is no different. The way you behave online would never be acceptable offline and vice versa. Online you have to be open, engaging and willing to share but then you are more likely to tell others what you think of them, flirt and generally act in a way that would get you into trouble in real life.
Sometimes we surprise our self in the way we behave online as if we have become a different person. Maybe this is why online life is so popular. We get to be a different self. We get to be someone else – maybe someone we aspire to be. At the very least we get to interact with others who are missing in our daily lives. This need for an online identity that seems so different to our offline self perplexes pre-Web adults, but we need to understand how this need for technological escapism has become integrated into the human psychological development. This is because the Web will eventually swallow up everyone on the planet so it is important to consider how it may influence and change the next generation. We are not likely to become like the Borg, but we do seem to shift effortlessly between our online and offline selves. Consequently, the Web dramatically reveals the extent to which the notion of a core self is an illusion.
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Why You Can’t See Your Self in Reflection
When I was a graduate student working on visual development in very young babies some 20 years ago, I studied how they move their eyes. Babies don’t speak, but their eyes are windows into their brain. Where they look and for how long, reveals what their brain is paying attention to. Where is the self in this decision? If you think about it, for the most part, we do this unconsciously. But who is moving our eyes? Who decides? Does a newborn have a self in control? Working with newborn babies, sometimes only minutes old, I never really asked this sort of question. I was more concerned what newborn babies looked at.
It seemed obvious to me that babies look at things that they can see most clearly and that this is determined by what is out there in the world to look at. As far as I was concerned, it seemed unlikely that they had models of the world already encoded in their brains that predicted where they would look next. Rather, at the very beginning, everything must be driven by what existed already in the environment to be seen. It is the properties of the external word that compete for the attention of the eye movement systems in the baby's brain. There was no need for a self in control. Newborns don’t really make decisions about where to look. Rather, the brain mechanisms they are born with have evolved to seek out information from the external world and then keep a record of those experiences. It was this early insight into the mind of an infant that opened my eyes to the self illusion.
As the brain develops, it builds up more complex models of the world–expectations about where and what should happen. We develop an increasing flexibility to apply those models to understand and make predictions. Twenty years ago, I appreciated that development was the integration of internal mechanisms working in conjunction with information in the world. That fundamental principle works all the way up the nervous system from simple eye movements to the full repertoire of human thoughts and behaviours – the same activities that give rise to the self. This is why the self is an illusion. It did not suddenly manifest one day inside our head on our second or third birthday. It has been slowly emerging – sculpted out of the richness of human activity and interaction. Our self is a product of our mind, which in turn is a product of our brain working in conjunction with other brains. As the brain develops, so does the self. As the brain deteriorates, then so must the self.
Why did we evolve the self illusion? Like every other illusion our brain generates, it serves a useful purpose. If you think about the “I” and the “me” that we usually refer to as the self, it provides a focal point to hang experiences together both in the immediate here and now, as well as to join those events over a lifetime. Experiences are fragmented episodes unless they are woven together in a meaningful narrative. This is why the self pulls it all together. Without a focus, the massive parallel processing in our brain means that we would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of computations if we ever had to deal with them individually, Rather, we get a summarized headline that relates all the outputs from these unconscious processes. Sometimes we can delve into the details of the story a little more closely if we scrutinize the content, but very often much of it is hidden from us.