type='note' xlink:href='#ch2_note_9'>[9].
So why not craft the same solution to Martha and Dank’s problem? Why not define ownership to include the quality of poisonousness, and possession without ownership to be possession without poison? If the world is designed this way, then it could resolve the dispute between Martha and Dank, not by making one of them change his or her behavior, but by changing the laws of nature to eliminate the conflict altogether.
We’re a short way into this not so short book, though what I’m about to say may make it a very short book indeed (for you at least). This book is all about the question raised by this simple story, and about any simplicity in this apparently simple answer. This is not a book about MMOG space or avatars. The story about Martha and Dank is the first and last example that will include avatars. But it is a book about cyberspace. My claim is that both “on the Internet” and “in cyberspace”, we will confront precisely the questions that Martha and Dank faced, as well as the questions that their solution raised. Both “on the Internet” and “in cyberspace”, technology constitutes the environment of the space, and it will give us a much wider range of control over how interactions work in that space than in real space. Problems can be programmed or “coded” into the story, and they can be “coded” away. And while the experience with gamers so far is that they don’t want virtual worlds to deviate too far from the real, the important point for now is that there is the capacity to make these worlds different. It is this capacity that raises the question that is at the core of this book: What does it mean to live in a world where problems can be coded away? And when, in that world, should we code problems away, rather than learn to work them out, or punish those who cause them?
It is not MMOG space that makes these questions interesting problems for law; the very same problems will arise outside of MMOG space, and outside MUDs and MOOs. The problems of these spaces are problems of the Internet in general. And as more of our life becomes wired (and weird), in the sense that more of our life moves online, these questions will become more pressing.
But I have learned enough in this business to know that I can’t convince you of this with an argument. (I’ve spent the last 12 years talking about this subject; at least I know what doesn’t work.) If you see the point, good for you. If you don’t, I must show you. So my method for readers of the second sort must be more indirect. Proof, for them, will come in a string of stories, which aim to introduce and disorient. That, again, is the purpose of this chapter.
Let me describe a few other places and the oddities that inhabit them.
Governors
A state — call it “Boral” — doesn’t like its citizens gambling, even if many of its citizens do like gambling. But the state is the boss; the people have voted; the law is as it is. Gambling in the state of Boral is illegal.
Then along comes the Internet. With the Net streaming into their homes through phones or cable lines, some citizens of Boral decide that Internet gambling is the next “killer app.” A citizen of Boral sets up a “server” (a computer that is accessible on the Internet) that provides access to online gambling. The state doesn’t like it. It tells this citizen, “Shut down your server or we will lock you up.”
Wise, if evasive, the gambling Boralian agrees to shut his server down — at least in the state of Boral. But he doesn’t choose to leave the gambling business. Instead, he rents space on a server in an “offshore haven.” This offshore web server hums away, once again making gambling available on the Net and accessible to the people of Boral via the Internet. Here’s the important point: Given the architecture of the Internet (at least as it was circa 1999), it doesn’t really matter where in real space the server is. Access doesn’t depend on geography. Nor, depending on how clever the gambling sorts are, does access require that the user know anything about who owns, or runs, the real server. The user’s access can be passed through anonymizing sites that make it practically impossible in the end to know what went on where and with whom.
The Boral attorney general thus now faces a difficult problem. She may have moved the server out of her state, but she hasn’t succeeded in reducing Boralian gambling. Before the Net, she would have had a group of people she could punish — those running gambling sites, and those who give those places custom. Now, the Net has made them potentially free from punishment — at the least because it is more difficult to know who is running the server or who is gambling. The world for this attorney general has changed. By going online, the gamblers moved into a world where this behavior is no longer regulable.
By “regulable” I mean simply that a certain behavior is capable of regulation. The term is comparative, not absolute — in some place, at some time, a certain behavior will be more regulable than at another place and in another time. My claim about Boral is simply that the Net makes gambling less regulable there than it was before the Net. Or at least, in a sense that will become clearer as the story continues, with the architecture of the Net as it originally was, life on the Net is less regulable than life off the Net.
Jake’s Communities
If you had met Jake at a party in Ann Arbor (were Jake at a party in Ann Arbor), you would have forgotten him[10]. If you didn’t forget him, you might have thought, here’s another quiet, dweeby University of Michigan undergraduate, terrified of the world, or, at least, of the people in the world.
You wouldn’t have figured Jake for an author — indeed, quite a famous short-story author, at least within his circles. In fact, Jake is not just a famous author, he was also a character in his own stories. But who he was in his stories was quite different from who he was in “real” life — if, that is, after reading his stories you still thought this distinction between “real life” and “not real life” made much sense.
Jake wrote stories about violence — about sex as well, but mainly about violence. They seethed with hatred, especially of women. It wasn’t enough to rape a woman, she had to be killed. And it wasn’t enough that she was killed, she had to be killed in a particularly painful and tortured way. This is, however unfortunate, a genre of writing. Jake was a master of this genre.
In real space Jake had quite successfully hidden this propensity. He was one of a million boys: unremarkable, indistinguishable, harmless. Yet however inoffensive in real space, the harmfulness he penned in cyberspace was increasingly well known. His stories were published in USENET, in a group called alt.sex.stories.
USENET isn’t itself a network, except in the sense that the personal ads of a national newspaper are part of a network. Strictly speaking, USENET is the product of a protocol — a set of rules named the network news transfer protocol (NNTP) — for exchanging messages intended for public viewing. These messages are organized into “newsgroups”, and the newsgroups are organized into subjects. Most of the subjects are quite technical, many are related to hobbies, and some are related to sex. Some messages newsgroups come with pictures or movies, but some, like Jake’s, are simply stories.
