What Lives Under the Digital Bridge

“…For whatever else these thoughts tell me, I have come to believe that they announce the final stages of our decades long passage into the Information Age… After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as makethingshappen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does… This is dangerous magic, to be sure, a potential threat—if misconstrued or misapplied—to our always precarious freedoms of expression, and as someone who lives by his words I do not take the threat lightly. And yet, on the other hand, I can no longer convince myself that our wishful insulation of language from the realm of action has ever been anything but a valuable kludge, a philosophically damaged stopgap against oppression that would just have to do ‘till something truer and more elegant came along…”

— Julian Dibbell “A Rape in Cyberspace” (1993)

Julian Dibbell’s famous article A Rape in Cyberspace details the unfortunate events which conspired on a Multi-User Domain (MUD) called LambdaMOO back in the early 90’s. The important thing to note about LambdaMOO is that, being a MUD, it is solely text-based. No graphics, just words on an otherwise blank screen.

Dibbell retells the story of how a clown character who calls himself Mr. Bungle allegedly logs into the game and proceeds to engage in virtual non-consensual sexual acts with multiple characters. These acts are witnessed by other players who were online at the time, and the actions in question are logged into the game’s database in real-time. Bungle’s harassment of other players leaves witnesses disgusted and unsure of how to proceed. The victims cite being left in a confused and uncomfortable state of mind—concerned that their post-traumatic stress and feelings of violation aren’t fully justified due to the fact that it didn’t actually happen in real life.

When Bungle is questioned as to why he did what he did, he responds with the following: “I engaged in a bit of a psychological device that is called thought-polarization, the fact that this is not RL [real life] simply added to heighten the affect of the device. It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence.” After much debate, the game community comes to a decision to have Bungle “toaded,” or essentially banished from the game. This ends up backfiring as Bungle simply creates a new account and character and continues on in his ways, until eventually disappearing without a word.

The events in Dibbell’s article detail the beginning of a sickness on the internet that has since spread into an all-out pandemic: trolling. Mr. Bungle is maybe one of the earliest internet trolls in the history of cyberspace. Is protecting the free speech of someone who sexually harasses people in a virtual online world legally justified through extension of United States law?

While most will unanimously agree that Bungle’s actions are morally reprehensible, some argue that Bungle isn’t necessarily violating any laws and is simply exercising his right to free speech—because after all, it’s technically only words.

Others will cite more recent events in which online threats or cyber bullying, once only words, later became action through heinous crimes or tragic suicides. These people claim that the justice system failed the threatened or bullied person/s. Threats made online are rarely taken seriously. It often depends on the context. If the threat can in any way be taken as satire by the authorities, then it holds no weight–regardless of whether or not it is intended to be taken seriously by the sender (Khoury “Is It Illegal To Threaten Someone Online?” 2016).

As we carefully begin to construct both the official and unspoken laws of the internet, how do we effectively deal with the trolls under the digital bridge–these types of people who’ve so effortlessly disconnected themselves from empathetic ties to humanity via the online “reprogramming” of our generation?