Chapter 2. Four Puzzles From Cyberspace
Everyone who is reading this book has used the Internet. Some have been in “cyberspace.” The Internet is that medium through which your e-mail is delivered and web pages get published. It’s what you use to order books on Amazon or to check the times for local movies at Fandango. Google is on the Internet, as are Microsoft “help pages.”
But “cyberspace” is something more. Though built on top of the Internet, cyberspace is a richer experience. Cyberspace is something you get pulled “into”, perhaps by the intimacy of instant message chat or the intricacy of “massively multiplayer online games” (“MMOGs” for short, or if the game is a role-playing game, then “MMORPGs”). Some in cyberspace believe they’re in a community; some confuse their lives with their cyberspace existence. Of course, no sharp line divides cyberspace from the Internet. But there is an important difference in experience between the two. Those who see the Internet simply as a kind of Yellow-Pages-on-steroids won’t recognize what citizens of cyberspace speak of. For them, “cyberspace” is simply obscure.
Some of this difference is generational. For most of us over the age of 40, there is no “cyberspace”, even if there is an Internet. Most of us don’t live a life online that would qualify as a life in “cyberspace.” But for our kids, cyberspace is increasingly their second life. There are millions who spend hundreds of hours a month in the alternative worlds of cyberspace — later on we will focus on one of these worlds, a game called “Second Life.[1]” And thus while you may think to yourself, this alien space is nothing I need worry about because it’s nowhere I’ll ever be, if you care to understand anything about the world the next generation will inhabit, you should spend some time understanding “cyberspace.”
That is the aim of two of the stories that follow. These two describe cyberspace. The other two describe aspects of the Internet more generally. My aim through these four very different stories is to orient by sometimes disorienting. My hope is that you’ll come to understand four themes that will recur throughout this book. At the end of this chapter, I come clean about the themes and provide a map. For now, just focus on the stories.
Borders
It was a very ordinary dispute, this argument between Martha Jones and her neighbors[2]. It was the sort of dispute that people have had since the start of neighborhoods. It didn’t begin in anger. It began with a misunderstanding. In this world, misunderstandings like this are far too common. Martha thought about that as she wondered whether she should stay; there were other places she could go. Leaving would mean abandoning what she had built, but frustrations like this were beginning to get to her. Maybe, she thought, it was time to move on.
The argument was about borders — about where her land stopped. It seemed like a simple idea, one you would have thought the powers-that-be would have worked out many years before. But here they were, her neighbor Dank and she, still fighting about borders. Or rather, about something fuzzy at the borders — about something of Martha’s that spilled over into the land of others. This was the fight, and it all related to what Martha did.
Martha grew flowers. Not just any flowers, but flowers with an odd sort of power. They were beautiful flowers, and their scent entranced. But, however beautiful, these flowers were also poisonous. This was Martha’s weird idea: to make flowers of extraordinary beauty which, if touched, would kill. Strange no doubt, but no one said that Martha wasn’t strange. She was unusual, as was this neighborhood. But sadly, disputes like this were not.
The start of the argument was predictable enough. Martha’s neighbor, Dank, had a dog. Dank’s dog died. The dog died because it had eaten a petal from one of Martha’s flowers. A beautiful petal, and now a dead dog. Dank had his own ideas about these flowers, and about this neighbor, and he expressed those ideas — perhaps with a bit too much anger, or perhaps with anger appropriate to the situation.
“There is no reason to grow deadly flowers”, Dank yelled across the fence. “There’s no reason to get so upset about a few dead dogs”, Martha replied. “A dog can always be replaced. And anyway, why have a dog that suffers when dying? Get yourself a pain-free-death dog, and my petals will cause no harm. ”
I came into the argument at about this time. I was walking by, in the way one walks in this space. (At first I had teleported to get near, but we needn’t complicate the story with jargon. Let’s just say I was walking.) I saw the two neighbors becoming increasingly angry with each other. I had heard about the disputed flowers — about how their petals carried poison. It seemed to me a simple problem to solve, but I guess it’s simple only if you understand how problems like this are created.
Dank and Martha were angry because in a sense they were stuck. Both had built a life in the neighborhood; they had invested many hours there. But both were coming to understand its limits. This is a common condition: We all build our lives in places with limits. We are all disappointed at times. What was different about Dank and Martha?
One difference was the nature of the space, or context, where their argument was happening. This was not “real space” but virtual space. It was part of what I call “cyberspace.” The environment was a “massively multiplayer online game” (“MMOG”), and MMOG space is quite different from the space we call real.
Real space is the place where you are right now: your office, your den, maybe by a pool. It’s a world defined by both laws that are man-made and others that are not. “Limited liability” for corporations is a man-made law. It means that the directors of a corporation (usually) cannot be held personally liable for the sins of the company. Limited life for humans is not a man-made law: That we all will die is not the result of a decision that Congress made. In real space, our lives are subject to both sorts of law, though in principle we could change one sort.
But there are other sorts of laws in real space as well. You bought this book, I trust, or you borrowed it from someone who did. If you stole it, you are a thief, whether you are caught or not. Our language is a norm; norms are collectively determined. As our norms have been determined, your “stealing” makes you a thief, and not just because you took it. There are plenty of ways to take something but not be thought of as a thief. If you came across a dollar blowing in the wind, taking the money will not make you a thief; indeed, not taking the money makes you a chump. But stealing this book from the bookstore (even when there are so many left for others) marks you as a thief. Social norms make it so, and we live life subject to these norms.
Some of these norms can be changed collectively, if not individually. I can choose to burn my draft card, but I cannot choose whether doing so will make me a hero or a traitor. I can refuse an invitation to lunch, but I cannot choose whether doing so will make me rude. I have choices in real life, but escaping the consequences of the choices I make is not one of them. Norms in this sense constrain us in ways that are so familiar as to be all but invisible.
MMOG space is different. It is, first of all, a virtual space — like a cartoon on a television screen, sometimes rendered to look three-dimensional. But unlike a cartoon, MMOG space enables you to control the characters on the screen in real time. At least, you control your character — one among many characters controlled
