Jennifer Mnookin reads LambdaMoo case.
Public performance at
Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University, 1998.

MOOs are virtual worlds, on-line communities. They are worlds of words where all communication takes place by typing on a keyboard. Let's be clear about this - Lambda Moo is made up of nothing but text. It is a richly imaginative environment, in which residents engage in the ultimate in self-fashioning - they write themselves into existence. All encounters in LambdaMOO are read on a computer screen. How, then, could there be any such thing as a rape on a MOO? How could a sexual assault be made solely out of words? Within LambdaMOO itself there have been numerous efforts to articulate the nature of cyberrape, and to think about how to distinguish speech from action in a world made up entirely of text. Most of these definitional efforts focus on whether the encounter was violent, non-consensual, and conveyed a 'sense of action' rather than a 'sense of speech' or a sense of quotation. These definitions suggest that some words 'say' while other words 'do.' As you can see, to take these issues seriously leads us quickly into LambdaMOO's spiral space.

Just how serious can a bunch of text be? If we compare Legba's virtual rape to the other cases of this evening, it would be easy to dismiss the harm done to her as trivial. After all, unlike Brandon, Chanelle Pickett, or Sarah Hood, Legba's real body survived, alive and unscathed. No blood was shed in Lambda MOO. No physical body was touched, or ever at risk of being touched. And yet Legba was violated - against her will, the virtual representation of her body was made to engage in humiliating sexual acts in front of her peers. We might say that the harm caused by a virtual rape is representational rather than physical. Meanwhile, Mr. Bungle's punishment has the same purely representational quality. He was banished from the MOO - but unlike Chris Wheatley, he never saw the inside of an actual prison. His virtual identity was annihilated, but his life outside the MOO went on pretty much as usual.

So some of you here tonight are surely asking, why on earth should we care? But I would suggest to you that this virtual rape deserves our attention for at least two reasons. On a MOO, participants invent themselves. They create on-line persona, constructing their identities, choosing exactly how to represent themselves within and to the virtual community. Within the MOO, the persona does indeed exist. It is embodied in text, brought to life through communication. In a virtual assault, the flesh-and-blood body may not be harmed, but the persona surely is. And it seems to me that all of the cases we're thinking about tonight force us to think about forms of self-representation, and the complex, fraught relations between persona and person. All of the earlier cases involve people who were harmed or judged or jailed at least in part because of the specific ways their identities were constructed. So if we dismiss the harm done to Legba as 'just' representational, we fail to see the important role representation played in all of these cases. When the court tells us that it will refer to Chantelle Picket as a man, that he is just a man in women's clothing, it dismisses her lived identity as 'just' representational.

The incident in LambdaMOo invites the question: but was what happened in that virtual living room that night 'really' rape? I'd like to suggest that this is precisely the wrong question. The provocative and powerful aspect of the incident is precisely the way that it is both virtual and rape. Virtual communities by their very nature invite us to reject a simple binary opposition between virtuality and physicality, or between representation and reality. The violation in LambdaMOO was real and virtual at the same time. We don't have to posit an equivalence between what happened on LambdaMOO that night and the physical violation of a human body. But I would suggest that we be wary of efforts to dismiss the incident in LambdaMOO as 'just' virtual.

Finally, I want to spend just a moment reflecting on the role of law in LambdaMOO - and the role of law here in this space this evening and in this project more generally. In LambdaMOO, a form of democratic government and a fledgling legal system was established, partially in response to the Mr. Bungle incident and the ensuing debates about norms, law and punishment. The turn to law in LambdaMOO served multiple functions - to provide workable mechanisms for resolving disputes between players, for one - but law also served an important symbolic role. Law was a legitimating device- it showed the MOO to be a 'real' society. If LambdaMOO had a legal system, then it couldn't just be a game - the existence of a legal system itself constituted the proof that something important was at stake in this virtual community. As we sit here tonight at the Harvard law school, in a space that is, itself, a virtual courtroom, what is at stake in our invocation of the rhetoric of law?

In many ways, what is going on here bears little resemblance to real-world trials - for one thing, Shu Lea has explicitly rejected the notion of final judgment. The goal here is exploration, not resolution, and Shu Lea hopes to probe the ambiguities and tensions contained within each of these cases rather than flattening their complexity to achieve closure. Why, then, borrow the rhetoric of law at all? Is it a legitimating device here, just as it is within LambdaMOO? Do virtual courtrooms offer a place from which to critique law, or imagine it anew? Perhaps Shu Lea's project, or LambdaMOO's legal system, can offer alternative theaters of proof, new spaces in which to rethink law, evidence, punishment, and law's relation to the body. But can we borrow the rhetoric of law without accepting law's authority? Does virtual law challenge law's hegemony, or merely reinscribe it?