It was also at this point, most likely, that TomTraceback reached his decision. TomTraceback was a wizard, a taciturn sort of fellow who’d sat brooding on the sidelines all evening. He hadn’t said a lot, but what he had said indicated that he took the crime committed against exu and Moondreamer very seriously, and that he felt no particular compassion toward the character who had committed it. But on the other hand he had made it equally plain that he took the elimination of a fellow player just as seriously, and moreover that he had no desire to return to the days of wizardly intervention. It must have been difficult, therefore, to reconcile the conflicting impulses churning within him at that moment. In fact, it was probably impossible, for . . . as much as he would have liked to make himself an instrument of the MOO’s collective will, [he surely realized that under the present order of things] he must in the final analysis either act alone or not act at all.

So TomTraceback acted alone.

He told the lingering few players in the room that he had to go, and then he went. It was a minute or two before 10 p.m. He did it quietly and he did it privately, but all anyone had to do to know he’d done it was to type the @who command, which was normally what you typed if you wanted to know a player’s present location and the time he last logged in. But if you had run a @who on Mr. Bungle not too long after TomTraceback left emmeline’s room, the database would have told you something different.

“Mr_Bungle,” it would have said, “is not the name of any player.”

The date, as it happened, was April Fool’s Day, but this was no joke: Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone.¹

When the Wizards saw this, they moved to the other extreme. With no formal decision by the citizens, the Wizards called forth a democracy. Starting May 1, 1993,² any matter could be decided by ballot, and any proposition receiving at least twice as many votes for as against would become the law.³ Many wondered whether this was an advance or not.

There is a lot to think about in this story, even in my savagely abridged version.⁴ But I want to focus on the sense of loss that accompanied the Wizards’ decision. There is a certain romance tied to the idea of establishing a democracy—Kodak commercials with tearful Berliners as the Wall comes down and all that. The romance is the idea of self-government and of establishing structures that facilitate it. But LambdaMOO’s move to self-government, through structures of democracy, was not just an achievement. It was also a defeat. The space had failed. It had failed, we could say, to self-regulate. It had failed to engender values in its population sufficient to avoid just the sort of evil Bungle had perpetrated. The debate marked the passage of the space from one kind of place to another. From a space self-regulated to a space regulated by self.

It might seem odd that there would be a place where the emergence of democracy would so depress people. But this kind of reaction is not uncommon in cyber-places. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon tell a story of the emergence of a “widget” called the FINGER command on UNIX, that would allow users to see when the last time another user had been on the computer, and whether she had read her mail. Some thought (not surprisingly, I should think) that this command was something of an invasion of privacy. Whose business was it when I was last at my machine, and why should they get to know whether I have read my mail?

A programmer at Carnegie Mellon University, Ivor Durham, changed the command to give the user the power to avoid this spying finger. The result? “Durham was flamed without mercy. He was called everything from spineless to socially irresponsible to a petty politician, and worse—but not for protecting privacy. He was criticized for monkeying with the openness of the network.”⁵

The values of the UNIX world were different. They were values embedded in the code of UNIX. To change the code was to change the values, and members of the community fought that change.

Footnotes

¹ Dibbell, My Tiny Life, 24–25. Edit Delete

² See Haakon (Pavel Curtis), “Petition System Implemented and in Force,” message 773 on *social-issues (#7233), LambdaMOO Bulletin Board, May 1, 1993, available at http: //vesta.physics.ucla.edu/~smolin/lambda/laws_and_history/ballothistory (visited May 30, 1999). Edit Delete

³ See Haakon (Pavel Curtis), “How to Make a Vote Binding on the Wizards” (first draft), message 511 on *social-issues (#7233), LambdaMOO Bulletin Board, April 8, 1993, available at http: //vesta.physics.ucla.edu/~smolin/lambda/laws_and_history/ballothistory (visited May 30, 1999). Edit Delete

⁴ For a rich account of both the democracy and how it functions, and the implications for self-regulation with a MUD, see Jennifer Mnookin, “Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law on LambdaMOO,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2 (1996): 1. Edit Delete

⁵ Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 216. “Flaming” is e-mail or other electronic communication that expresses exaggerated hostility; see Gurak, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace, 88. Edit Delete