And it's 10 o'clock, which means it's time for Off The Hook.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
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Detective Columbo here.
Solved the case.
Pretty incredible.
This is the 1990s.
Okay.
Now, as far as accountability goes, we have something on a rather grander scale.
And that, of course, is President Clinton.
A review of thousands of pages of state telephone records and other bills
show numerous calls by Bill Clinton to a woman identified by four Arkansas State Troopers
as one of several they believe he had affairs with while he was governor of Arkansas.
A lot of pronouns going on in that sentence there.
But basically, the phone bill is supposed to be the incriminating factor here.
The records, which cover only a portion of the telephone calls made on Clinton's car phone
and from his hotel rooms between 1989 and 1991,
show 59 calls to the woman's home and to her office extension.
On one day alone, that day being July 16, 1989,
the records show 11 calls to the woman's home from Clinton's cellular phone.
Eleven.
Neither that woman nor others named by the troopers will be identified to protect their privacy.
It's a mere formality, you know.
The state records are incomplete, and after the spring of 1990,
few cellular phone bills were placed in the public file.
In September 1989, when Clinton was on a state-paid trip to Charlottesville, Virginia,
the bill for his hotel room showed a call was placed to the woman's home at 1.23 a.m.
It lasted 94 minutes, according to Clinton's hotel billing statement.
At 7.45 a.m. the same day, another call to the same number lasted 18 minutes,
according to the hotel records.
I'm not sure if it's 7.45 later that same day.
I suppose it was, not the previous morning.
I don't know that it really matters, I guess, but it's interesting.
Always interesting looking at phone bills.
Well, in March 1990, the governor wrote a personal check to the state of Arkansas for $40.65.
At the bottom of the canceled check, the line describing the purpose of the expenditure,
Clinton had written, phone calls.
A tabulation showed that Clinton's calls to the woman's home and office,
both from the cellular phone and from his hotel rooms, cost $44.38.
Now that's, in my eyes, a discrepancy there of about $3 and change.
Of course, it's a discrepancy to Clinton's disadvantage, meaning that he swallowed the loss there.
So that's something to his credit, anyway.
When asked Sunday about the telephone calls to the woman,
White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum said,
The president calls lots of people at 94 minutes at 123 in the morning.
Hasn't called around here recently.
Well, that's pretty much it as far as the telephone aspect of this goes,
but it certainly is interesting.
Did you know that, though?
You stay at a hotel, you make phone calls.
People can somehow look at those bills and see what you've been up to, see who you're calling.
Now, is it possible that the hotel has fraudulent bills?
Yeah, I suppose it is.
I suppose it's possible that a hotel could do something nefarious and sneaky.
In fact, it just happened to me recently.
I'll even say where.
At the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Isn't that the one Reagan got shot outside of or something?
I don't know, but all kinds of unpleasant things happen out there.
They have a unique phone system there.
Well, it's not that unique, though.
It's not that unique to hotels.
I'd like our listeners who are in hotels here in New York, and I know there's a sizable amount of them,
to check with the front desk now.
You can probably pick up the phone and dial zero without incurring a charge,
and ask them how much it costs to call an 800 number.
Now, in the Omni Shoreham, they have this little pamphlet on how the phones work.
Basically, they tell you to dial an 800 number.
You dial 9-1-800 plus the number, and a charge of $1.50 applies.
A charge of $1.50 applies for toll-free numbers.
And they just say it.
They say it matter-of-factly.
Like, yeah, that's true.
Two and two equals five.
Got a problem with that?
If you say it enough times, if you tell people, yeah, $1.50 for a free call,
people will say, oh, yeah, free calls cost $1.50.
Yeah, you have to pay for your free calls.
You say it enough times, people will start to believe it.
And that's what's happening in the hotel world.
I mean, let's face it.
How is it costing them any money at all?
How can they justify passing on expense?
What, what, using the receiver?
You're using up the plastic or something?
And it wears out, and they have to get another one?
Uh-uh, I don't buy it.
I don't buy it at all.
Be careful who you call from hotels.
Too bad Bill wasn't listening to this program a couple years ago.
Well, some good news for telephone users, maybe, in this particular area.
The Public Service Commission has ordered New York Telephone
to cut its rates by 3% next year
and told the utility it must set aside another chunk of money
to improve service in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, among other places.
And that's rather interesting that they're chiding the phone company
for not providing good service to those areas.
Now, anyone that has used the phone company,
and I mean used them to get services such as repair services,
to change particular classes of service on their lines,
I'm sure you're going to hear all kinds of horror stories
as to the fact that New York Telephone does not respond most of the time.
Either they don't answer their phones,
they put on recordings saying they're closed when they're really open,
they get things wrong,
they bill you for things they're not supposed to bill you for.
The list goes on and on.
And I've heard so many stories from so many different people.
And you might say,
well, Emanuel, you host a radio program where you do nothing
but bash the phone company for an hour every week.
Of course people are going to come to you and say this.
But I hear it in other places too.
I hear it where people are not out there trying to impress me
with how much they've been ripped off by the phone company.
I hear people just casually in the supermarket
talking about how horrible the phone company is
and how they wait for people to show up for appointments and they don't show up.
And when they do show up, they get the order wrong
and they charge them for things that they should never be charged for.
It's a disgrace.
It's a disgrace what's going on.
And I say this also because there are good people that work for the phone company.
I know because I found some of them.
And it's kind of hard because you have to always talk to those people
in order to get anything done.
I mean, yeah, sometimes I try to go the normal route,
the route we're supposed to go.
You call the business office and you ask somebody to do something for you.
And then after a couple of weeks of trying that,
you realize you should have done it the way,
you know, the shortcut that you've learned over the years.
You call this particular person that you happen to know there and you say,
will you please just do this for me?
Thank you so much.
That's the way you have to do it in order to get anything done.
Unfortunately, most people can't do it that way.
And that's what the Public Service Commission is all upset about.
So what they did was good by telling the phone company to cut its rates by 3%.
But they didn't do enough.
They didn't do enough because that amounts to $170 million.
That's nothing to the phone company.
That's going to cut most phone bills by about maybe a dollar.
But the thing is, the touchtone fee is being cut in half.
That fee should be wiped out entirely.
They should wipe out a fee for touchtones entirely
because how can you charge somebody for nothing?
It's just like charging for an 800 number.
There is no service.
There is no service with touchtones.
There should not be a charge for it.
So cutting it in half is a step in the right direction,
but it doesn't solve the problem.
And that's pretty much it.
New York Telephone is expected to appeal this sometime next month,
and we'll see exactly what does go into effect.
It's not too late to voice your opinion.
You can certainly voice your opinion here or to the Public Service Commission
on one of those 800 numbers where you get a different 800 number
depending on which operator you ask.
And you can voice your opinion in that particular way.
By the way, New York Telephone will no longer exist at the end of this year.
Just about a week and a half away, they will be absorbed by NYNEX.
There will be no more New York Telephone.
Consequently, we will stop bashing New York Telephone as of December 31st.
It's our way of trying to be nice.
Okay, and finally, as far as news items, and this is exciting.
This is real exciting.
Home Shopping Network and Telecommunications Inc., TCI,
have agreed to form a worldwide television shopping service.
Now that's real exciting.
The venture will be called Home Shopping Network International.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any better.
We are convinced that there is enormous opportunity
to develop TV retailing beyond the U.S.
After all, we're able to send out that Nestle baby formula for a couple of decades
and we make quite a bit of money on that.
And there's the DDT and all the other substandard things
that we send to the third world.
Why not clothing and jewelry and all these other things?
I guess I probably should give his name.
Denver-based TCI, the nation's largest cable operator,
has operations in more than 10 other countries.
TCI spokesman Bob Thompson said the two companies
are still working on plans for the venture, but he added,
we have a lot of confidence in HSN's ability to handle the logistical end
and we look to them for advice on how to adapt the concept for the different cultures.
Talk like that, he should be an ambassador.
And today, of course, QVC looks like they're going to be taking over Paramount.
So, who knows what kind of neat items you'll be seeing
popping up on Star Trek characters.
So that's news from the multinational corporation front today.
I had an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago
I wanted to share with people concerning parking.
Now, I mentioned this to a...
I think I might have mentioned it once over the air that I went away
just for a few days to the wilds of Kansas.
And I came back and got my car from the airport.
Now, what I had done wrong, and I knew I had done this wrong,
I parked in the short-term parking lot instead of the long-term parking lot.
And the reason for this is, if you've ever been to JFK,
you kind of need to pack in advance if you're going to go to the long-term parking area.
It's very, very far away.
You know, they have their own bus and everything.
And sometimes the bus doesn't come and sometimes it does come
and it goes to the wrong place, and all kinds of horrible things can happen.
So I figured, you know, since my plane was leaving in about 10 minutes,
I should probably park in the short-term lot and just accept the extra charge.
Now, this is the extra charge.
As opposed to $6 a day for long-term parking,
you wind up paying $24 a day for short-term parking.
So if you go away for, you know, four or five days, that's over $100.
So in my criminal mind, I was thinking to myself as I was flying back to New York,
how can I maybe get out of this, you know,
and not pay over $100 to have my car sitting outside for four days?
It's just, you know, I know the law is the law, but somehow this doesn't seem morally right.
There's like a natural law here that somehow this must be violating.
And maybe, maybe, you know, the people of the world will support me
as I try to get out of this injustice.
So I thought to myself, well, okay, how would they know?
What if I lost my ticket?
You know, how much can they possibly charge me if I lose my ticket?
You know, do they charge you for one day?
Do they charge you for two days?
Do they charge you for 100 days?
What do they do?
How can they possibly know how long I've been there for if I lose my ticket?
Well, one person said they make a note of everybody that's there at night.
Now, I don't know how they could possibly do that because there's hundreds of cars there,
and I don't know how they would write down all the license plates
and keep track of it when you drove out.
But that was a possibility.
So I thought to myself, well, maybe, maybe if I went there and I changed my license plates,
I could get out of it that way.
They wouldn't find me because they had written down my license plate,
and, you know, I could just get out of there and they, you know,
they wouldn't have any record of me.
But, of course, I didn't have any spare license plates on me.
I don't usually travel with them.
Something to consider for the future.
But I figured, you know, I'd try it anyway at least to see what they knew.
You know, how much they knew about me and whether or not they could figure this out.
So I pulled up to the gate and I said, look, I don't have the ticket.
I don't know, and I also don't know when this car was parked here.
That was the tricky part, convincing the person that you didn't know when the car was parked there.
I had to concoct a story that somebody else parked the car there
and I wasn't sure when they did it and I didn't get the ticket from them.
So they said, okay, we need to see your license and your registration, I guess,
to prove that you own the car.
And so I showed them that information, the license, the registration,
and they came back about a couple of minutes later and they had the exact figure.
And I said to myself, wow, I mean, this car has been here for four days.
How did you know that, by the way?
The person said, well, as soon as you came in, we made a record of you.
And since my license plate is not on this ticket anywhere,
one has to wonder how did they get that information.
And when you come in to an automated machine,
the automated machine spits out a ticket to you,
and you hold on to this ticket, and then on your way out you're supposed to,
and this is the silly part, you're supposed to feed the ticket into a machine
and there's a human being standing right behind the machine.
So you feed the ticket into the machine instead of giving it to the human,
and the machine takes it, spits it back out or puts it someplace else,
and the human says, that'll be such and such an amount of money.
I don't know why you can't just hand it to the human.
But apparently what is happening, and this is just a theory at this point,
and I'd like to experiment with this some more just for informational purposes,
it looks like they're digitizing license plates.
It looks like they're somehow recording the information as you come in
and transmitting that into a data form so that when you leave they can cross-reference it.
So if I was to go out without the same license plate as I went in with,
something would be flagged that I was doing something wrong.
There's all kinds of ways to play with that kind of a system to figure out how it actually works.
I don't know how many people use parking lots and like to play around with technology,
but if there's anyone out there that, well, if it's a slow night and people are driving around,
you want to head over to JFK and play around with their machines
and see just how it is they know when you go in there and how long you've stayed.
It's kind of scary, you know, when people know exactly what you've done.
I mean, it was a learning experience.
At least I didn't just pay the money and, you know, be done with it.
At least I tried to figure out how the system worked.
Of course, I don't really know how the system works.
So hopefully people can educate us as far as that goes.
All right, that's my little adventure of the week.
A lot of you may have picked up a copy of The Village Voice this past week,
seen a front-page article, front-page article called Rape in Cyberspace.
Yeah, that was rather unusual for The Voice,
and a lot of people think that it was an interesting story.
A lot of people think it was, I don't know, controversial, I guess,
is probably the thing most people will agree with.
Basically, I'll read you the first paragraph, and then we'll get into a discussion on this.
With the author who is here with us tonight in the studio.
They say he raped them that night.
They say he did it with a cunning little doll fashioned in their image
and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired.
They say that by manipulating the doll, he forced them to have sex with him and with each other
and to do horrible, brutal things to their own bodies.
And though I wasn't there that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true,
because it all happened right in the living room, right there,
amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace
of a house I've come to think of as my second home.
With that, I'd like to introduce Julian DeBell from The Village Voice.
Welcome to our fine studios this evening.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Now, this is quite an interesting story.
In fact, people walking down the street over the past week,
seeing the red letters RAPE on the front cover of The Village Voice,
must have caught quite a few eyes there.
Well, I don't know. It certainly irked enough people on the net.
But in a sense, that wasn't really who the cover was directed at.
I was trying to lure unsuspecting people who are sick and fed up of reading
the thousandth story on the information superhighway
into one last look at cyberspace.
Well, it must have worked, because here you are in primetime radio.
So, why don't you tell us something about the story itself,
as far as what is RAPE in cyberspace?
What exactly happened?
Well, what exactly happened? A very good question.
And it took me about 8,500 words to explain exactly what happened,
because it's a pretty subtle thing.
That opening paragraph is, of course, not really the truth of what happened.
It was kind of a trompe l'oeil kind of thing,
sort of like in the beginning of a movie you might see a scene
where people are fighting, and slowly the camera will pull back
to reveal that it's really just actors and extras fighting on a movie set.
Basically, no one was raped.
People were virtually raped.
Now, obviously, there's as big a difference between virtual rape and rape
as there is between virtual reality and reality.
Virtual reality is, of course, basically a form of communication,
and virtual rape is basically a form of violent, aggressive, sexual communication.
Well, let's talk about the communication first.
Now, how does this communication come about on this particular system?
You're on a system called, I believe it's called a MU, which is a subset of a MUD.
Maybe you could define those terms for us.
Okay, a MUD is short for multi-user dungeon,
because the original MUDs were basically Dungeons & Dragons type role-playing games,
which were databases located on the Internet.
Now, as some of these MUDs are starting to become less role-playing game oriented,
people might prefer the term multi-user dimension, and that's the term I use.
Basically, it's a kind of virtual reality.
It's not the kind of virtual reality that you've read about probably in magazines,
where there's a fully graphic representation of a reality which you are visually immersed in.
It's done through text. It's done entirely through text.
Anyone who's familiar with a game called Adventure, which was one of the first computer games,
it's very much like that.
Basically, you enter a database, and as soon as you enter it,
you are presented with the description of a room or some area of the database.
So you get a kind of rich description.
When you first log into LambdaMU, for instance, which is the name of the MU in which this story happened,
you are presented with a description of the living room.
Once you wander into the living room, you are presented with a description of the living room.
You see messages indicating which people are also in the living room,
and these are people that can be logged in from anywhere on the Internet,
which means basically anywhere in the world.
And this is different from the normal text adventure, because normal text adventure of years past,
only one person can be in at the same time.
Exactly.
So basically, we have different users coming from all over the world,
and they're wandering through these rooms together,
and you go from one room to another by simply saying, go into this room.
Right.
Yeah, you issue a command that will be move north, move south, move east, move west.
It says you are in this room now, and there are these people here.
Right.
And once you move, the database presents you with another description of a different room.
And you can also do look commands, which you can look at a particular person,
and you will see their description that they have applied to themselves.
What is the object?
Well, in the role-playing game, in the gaming-oriented ones,
there are adventures that you go on, and you get points for killing people
or finding certain treasures and things like that.
But even those are kind of not, as I understand it,
so much points-oriented as it's about cooperative type of gaming.
In other forms of MUDs, which are the social MUDs,
there really isn't any point except to interact socially
and create a kind of artificial world to enrich the social experience
and also to, you know, people express themselves.
People create all kinds of different little objects.
If you learn the programming language of the MUD,
you can devise all kinds of fancy little gadgets to play around with,
different kinds of weapons, different kinds of toys, different kinds of...
So you have to program within the MUD.
Yeah, well, you have to have a certain amount of proficiency at a basic level
even to interact in the MUD.
I mean, you have to know the commands for moving around and talking to people.
And after you get more experience,
you can learn even more about how to affect the reality of the MUD.
Okay, so this particular system was a MU, though, not a MUD,
which is an object-oriented MUD.
Now, there's a character that entered into this named Mr. Bungle.
Why don't you tell us who Mr. Bungle was
and what Mr. Bungle did that caused this whole controversy?
Well, Mr. Bungle, at the time, was masquerading as an evil clown.
He was actually a very creative type of guy.
His descriptions were very rich and descriptive,
and, well, he still are. He still is on the system.
And he was going around as this disgusting-looking clown
who was oozing sebaceous fluids from every pore
and had a belt made of hemlock and mistletoe,
which on the buckle there was the inscription
KISS ME UNDER THIS BITCH in very large capital letters.
And you saw that if you looked at him?
If you looked at him, this is the pleasant sight that greeted you.
Yeah.
All right, so now that's...
I think we have a pretty good sense of how the whole game works here,
but what was it that actually happened?
The incident that was the spark for this entire story
was that he...
There were a number of people in the living room of this Lamda Mu,
which the conceit of Lamda Mu is that it's a big mansion
with many rooms in it and various odd chambers and stuff.
And people generally tend to gather in the living room,
and it's a very social space, a very public space.
And there were a number of people in there on this Monday night in March.
A couple of them were biological females,
although their characters, one was listed as a female,
the other one was listed as a hermaphrodite.
But they were both biological females.
And Mr. Bungle, who I presume to be a biological male,
although he was never able to...
And the thing is you can't really know for sure what anybody is on this system.
It's words on a screen, basically.
Yeah, it's all words on a screen.
And he, using the little doll, which was referred to in the passage you read,
was a sub-program that some character, some player on the Mu,
devised a few months earlier called a voodoo doll.
And basically a voodoo doll is a program which is one of a class of sub-programs
that are spoofing programs.
In other words, they're designed to allow you to give the impression
to other people in a given room that someone else has issued that message.
In other words, when I'm in the Mu and I want to say something to somebody in the room,
my issue of say command, it'll say,
Dr. Bombay says, Hello, everybody.
My name is Dr. Bombay on the Mu.
And what a spoofing program allows you to do is to issue that command
that will make it appear on everybody's screen,
Dr. Bombay says, I am a raving idiot.
And it will appear as if Dr. Bombay had said that.
Now, people are pretty much hip to spoofing programs,
like you're going to fool anybody for very long.
And, in fact, the voodoo doll has built-in signals
so that you know that someone is using a voodoo doll.
Oh, you can tell.
Yeah.
It's not really spoofing then if you can tell it's, you know.
Yeah, it's spoofing in the sense of, I mean, everybody knows,
but it's a kind of gag that people use.
Okay.
I suppose it would be possible to make one, though, that didn't have that particular signature.
Oh, absolutely.
And also one that would silence the real person
and object and say that this is me talking.
Possibly, although you'd probably have to do more.
Probably giving people ideas now.
You'd probably have to get into a wizard level of hacking the system in order to do that.
But, yeah, there are such spoofing programs that don't give any kind of signal,
but the voodoo doll does.
And it's a kind of a creepy thing.
It says, as if against his will, Dr. Bombay does this,
and then it does whatever you've, you issue the command, force the voodoo doll to.
And that's what you do is you shape the voodoo doll in the image of the person that you want to spoof.
And then you say, force voodoo doll to writhe on the floor in agony.
And then the command, the message that will appear on everybody's screen is,
as if against his will, Dr. Bombay writhes on the floor in agony.
So, with this voodoo doll, Mr. Bungle proceeded to act out his sadistic fantasies
in relationship to various people in the room.
And so various people were seeing things like, you know, as if against her will,
Legba, you know, goes down on Mr. Bungle, sucks, whatever, fill in the blanks.
And things got more and more violent to where he was having people.
Now, there was no way to stop this?
There are a number of, and we'll get to,
there are a number of technical things that you can do to stop this kind of thing.
One thing is you can move the person out of the room.
That's often an effective way.
And that's one thing they did with Mr. Bungle.
But the voodoo doll allows you to do this remotely from other parts of the Moo.
So that didn't stop him.
There is a command called the gag command.
This is a very effective tool in most situations.
The gag command basically stops other people's messages from appearing on your screen.
So if you are pummeling me with abusive language or just being an idiot,
I can say, you know, at gag, the commands are preceded with an at sign.
They just say, gag, Emanuel, and I won't hear anything you say.
You can still say it.
But everybody else will hear it.
But everyone else will hear it.
And that was why gagging was sort of tricky in this case
because it was a living room, which is a very public space.
Anybody can come in there.
And so the victims wouldn't necessarily be witnessing their own violation,
but other people would.
Now, this is an interesting issue.
Well, if they don't see it, does it hurt them?
Well, I mean, once you're really immersed in this kind of reality,
you would see the situation kind of as analogous to a situation where, say,
a woman passed out drunk at a party and a bunch of guys took off all her clothes
and let everybody walk through the room and see her naked
and then put the clothes back on so that she didn't know when she woke up.
And if she then knew that this would happen, obviously this was a violation.
And so there was that element to it.
And there's also the element that with the kind of violent language
that Bungle was using and that a lot of this is not an uncommon occurrence.
There's always a window of damage where you've seen,
once the language has gotten through, a certain amount of the damage has been done.
You can then gag the person, but already you've been abused.
So gagging and other kinds of tools for shutting out people's abusive speech
are very helpful, and they're a key part of dealing with this kind of situation.
But there's still an element of this stuff is disruptive to community,
it's hurtful to people, and you can't stop that.
And so you have to also use other elements, social elements,
in order to discourage this from happening.
And that's sort of the second part of the story.
Eventually, Mr. Bungle, the way they stopped Mr. Bungle was they called on Zippy,
who was this older, trusted player who had access to a gun, which was a sub-program.
Well, now, just to get to that point, because there is a very interesting part of this story,
where, first of all, there's a lot of discussion amongst the users as to,
well, how do we deal with this?
What exactly is the crime that this person is being accused of?
What was interesting, I thought, in the article was that not very many people,
really nobody, seemed to actually want to prosecute the person himself, the real person,
just the virtual character.
And the suggestion was made to do something which is known as toting,
turn somebody into a toad.
I can't believe we're actually talking about this.
But that's basically how you deal with characters.
You turn them into toads, and then they can't do anything anymore.
But in order to do this, they all had a meeting.
And this meeting took place, was it in the living room or was it in his mother's room?
No, no, this was in the room of a character called Evangeline.
Okay, so everybody came in.
The way you described this was very interesting.
Everybody sort of gathered into her room.
There were all these people hanging out in her room discussing this.
Yeah, and they all have sort of colorful, you know, there was Herky Cosmo and Silver Rocket
and Bakunin and Legba and Evangeline, and they were all there to discuss what do you do.
Now, toting actually, in the case of Lambda Moo, on other kinds of muds,
toting does involve turning the character into a toad and sort of, you know,
a kind of public humiliation where they're just a toad and they can't do anything.
In Lambda Moo, toting actually means terminating the player's account.
So it's a little heavier than just being terminated.
It's a kind of virtual death.
I mean, that's kind of the analogy.
Right.
So, you know, it had that element of, you know, people were calling for his head.
And, you know, a lot of people sort of had qualms about that because, you know,
for the same reasons they have qualms about capital punishment.
It wasn't that they thought, oh, you know, Bungle didn't do anything bad, really.
You know, everybody thought he was a cad and a bounder.
And it seemed like the majority thought, you know, it would be just fine if he was toted.
But there was a situation on the Moo.
The social situation on the Moo was such that there was a social vacuum.
In other words, since its inception, the Moo had been run as a sort of benign dictatorship
by a class of players called wizards, who are people that have access to deep levels of the systems program.
Basically analogous to a system operator of a bulletin board or a system administrator.
But at a certain point, they had gotten fed up with mediating disputes between players
and running the day-to-day business of people's social affairs,
and they had abdicated all responsibility.
But the problem was they were the only people that could toad someone.
So there was this big thing of, well, how do we convince the wizards to toad this guy?
And how do we convince them that this is the will of the mud?
And so they thought they would gather together.
And some people thought that there wasn't any way to do this,
that there needed to be a system where there was voting and judges and parliaments.
And other people thought, you know, no, let's just bring back the wizards.
They knew how to run the place.
And, you know, this is sort of like bring back Mussolini type of people.
I can only imagine people that are just tuning in now what they think we're talking about,
because this is really a crazy discussion.
Well, that's the bizarre thing.
I mean, you flip back and forth.
It sounds like the beginning of some mythical civilization.
Well, it's like that.
And then there were people who felt like, no, you know, there shouldn't be any rules or any government.
Everybody should be – it should be every man for himself,
and we'll just build all these great tools to protect ourselves, like the gag command.
And then there were sort of people that considered themselves anarchists,
and they were – their position was more like aligned with the sort of libertarian position of every person for themselves,
but, you know, that there still was room for collective action about things and building consensus about things,
and that if, you know, if we could sit around and talk for hours
and come to a consensus about what to do with Mr. Bungle, we could figure it out.
And Mr. Bungle himself was part of this discussion.
He wandered into the room as well.
At a certain point, he did wander in.
It was a very weird encounter.
I mean, the discussion was well underway and was plumbing all the heights and depths of the situation,
and some people did bring up the possibility of, well, couldn't we prosecute him in real life?
Couldn't we tell his system administrator back at his account, which was actually at NYU here in the city?
But the rest of the people involved in the incident, some of them were in Australia at the time, others in Seattle.
And there was some sense that, you know, he could be prosecuted under, say, obscene phone call laws.
But generally, you know, what people settled down into was, well, you know, it's happened in the MOO.
We'll deal with it in MOO justice.
All right.
So to wrap up, since we do want to take some phone calls, how was it dealt with?
What finally happened?
At a certain point, they just talked and talked, and really the discussion went nowhere.
And as people were leaving, there was a wizard who had been present in the room,
felt like he had sort of gleaned from the discussion that there was consensus to toad Mr. Bungle.
All right.
I'd like to read that last part.
This guy's name was Joe Feedback, right?
Joe Feedback.
Okay.
So Joe Feedback 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.
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 at 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 at sign who on Mr. Bungle not too long after Joe Feedback left Evangeline'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, and it would still be April Fool's Day for another two hours, but this was no joke.
Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone in the virtual world here.
In a manner of speaking.
But then he came back, didn't he?
He came back as Dr. Jest.
He got himself another.
The toting software that keeps people from coming back, all it does is look for the same Internet email account,
and if you're using the same Internet email account, you don't get back on.
But all he did was got himself a new email account and came back with a new character called Dr. Jest.
He didn't announce that he was back, but people figured it out soon enough.
So it's pretty obvious then.
We're not dealing with the real world here.
People come back from the dead.
People turn into toads.
Now, introducing the concept of rape onto the net, do you think that might be trivializing the real world version?
Yeah.
I mean, that point has been made.
There's been a lot of discussion on various online forums about this piece,
and that point has been made, that it trivializes rape.
I'd say there's a certain amount of truth to that.
On the other hand, I'd say it's equally true that it sensitizes people to sexual harassment online,
which is a real serious issue.
It's a serious barrier to women's participation in online systems.
There's a lot of free speech zealotry on the net,
and I'm certainly a wholehearted endorser of the notion of free speech,
and I've been that kind of a zealot about it.
But I think what happens sometimes is that commitment to free speech desensitizes people to the seriousness of what words can do to people psychologically.
So, yes, on the one hand, it trivializes real rape,
but on the other hand, I think it sensitizes people to sexual harassment, to put it in those stark of terms.
We'd like to know what our listeners think.
Our phone number is 212-279-3400.
We're here with Julian DeBell of The Village Voice, author of A Rape in Cyberspace,
which was a front-page article in last week's Voice.
You know, reading the story, I did like the story.
I thought the story read very well.
It was a very interesting piece.
The front page, there's something about that front page that bothered me, you know,
with the words rape crying out at you, just like the real version, just like in the real world.
And when you read the story, I don't get that real-world connection.
It's obvious we're talking about people in a whole different society here, the virtual society,
where they're still making rules, where there are mythical people and wizards and resurrections and all kinds of things like that.
So what kind of a decision was that to make it a front-page thing with that?
I mean, do you have say in that, or is that something else?
I had some say.
My main part in choosing the headline was sort of after the fact.
The original and my main role consisted in getting them to use that line instead of one that I thought was even more garish and sensationalistic,
which was, in cyberspace, no one can hear you scream, rape online by Julian DeBell.
So I thought, well, let's tone this down a little bit, you know,
because it was clear that they were going to go with something kind of dramatic and sensationalistic,
and I thought it wasn't necessarily such a bad idea if it was going to bring people in to read a story that I felt was not sensationalistic or irresponsible.
Looking back, now knowing people's reactions and the extent to which it seems to have really distracted people from reading the real story,
I might have lobbied for something a little bit tamer.
Okay, let's take a couple of phone calls, see what people think out there.
We're talking with Julian DeBell of The Village Voice, and I must ask people that are calling in,
please keep it to the subject since we only have about a little less than 15 minutes here.
We don't really have time to talk about other technical issues tonight, so let's keep it to the subject of The Village Voice article.
So those of you out there that are calling in now with something else,
this might be an opportunity to, you know, hang up the phone and do something else,
and we'll just get to the people that want to talk about this particular issue.
Okay, since there are still people there, we're going to go to the phones.
Good evening.
Oh, that person left.
Good evening.
That person left, too.
I'm beginning to wonder if there's something wrong with the phones.
Okay, good evening, are you there?
Hello, I'm here.
Yeah, go ahead.
I'd like to talk about something that came up this evening.
Yes.
Well, thank you.
That's very nice that people share things like that with us.
An old gag, but it still works.
Yeah, okay, 212-279-3400.
We have lots of phone lines open because all the silly people are dropping off.
All right, 212-279-3400.
Good evening, you're on.
Yeah, hi, good evening.
Hi.
Yeah, I was listening to that thing, but I haven't read the article yet,
so I can't really make a comment on it.
Okay, did you call for a purpose?
Yeah.
Okay, well, do you have something to say?
We would like to keep it to the subject of the article.
I know, but I was trying to get you earlier, but I guess you went on to something else right away.
Yeah.
I just wanted to tell you, if you look on your registration on your car, you will see a barcode.
That's all you need.
Except I didn't show the registration.
No.
What are you talking about on the windshield?
On your car.
Right.
Good point.
Barcode right there, and they can pick it up with just a simple scanner.
That's pretty scary.
The question is, where is the scanner?
I didn't see one, but I'm going to look.
As long as you registered in New York, it's simple.
Yeah.
You see when you go in to do your safety inspection?
Uh-huh.
All the guy does is put the scanner on the barcode.
Everything comes up.
Right, except there was no guy.
There was just a machine.
A machine?
A machine has a scanner.
Yeah.
Apparently it does.
I think you're right, but we need to know where it is and how it works and things like that.
Listen, thanks.
We want to get on to some more calls.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
No problem.
Interesting how we still haven't touched upon the subject, but we are talking about the
Village Voice article with Julian DeBell.
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on.
Hi there.
I actually did turn in late, and I was thrown for a loop by that discussion.
But it reminded me of the articles that were appearing in computer magazines about 10 years
ago about the CB simulator on the CompuServe where there was a lot of sex discussion and
everyone had handles.
But one thing that came clear at the time was that everyone assumed a persona and that
no one...
You know, you don't walk into the situation assuming that you believe everything you hear
from the other characters.
Everyone was playing a role.
And in this case, too, I really think that people shouldn't assume that the other participants
are really sincere about the things they're saying, that everyone's playing a role.
They're all actors.
Also, another thought I had listening to the discussion for the past 20 minutes or so is
don't these people have lives to lead?
They spend all their time in cyberspace.
Have they got better things to do with their lives?
Well, Julian was one of those people.
Perhaps he can answer that.
It's a very common question, and I've asked it myself as well.
The thing about, are people all playing roles?
Well, they are and they aren't.
I mean, it's a very...
The tricky thing about this issue is it's very much sort of in between reality and people's fantasies.
I mean, it's somewhere sort of in between a dream and waking life, what goes on in here.
So in some sense, yeah, don't take it so seriously.
But on the other hand, it hurts in a strange way.
And people's, actually the victims' responses was very strange.
It was kind of this mix of real hatred of this guy for doing this,
and at the same time this kind of recognition that it was all kind of silly and he was just being annoying.
Yeah, like turning him into a toad is an appropriate response for a non-real thing.
You respond by doing something that isn't real.
Right, exactly.
I think ultimately that the response was apt to the crime.
And he responds by coming back from the dead, which is equally real.
Yeah, right.
Unreal, I'm sorry.
Yeah, and this is all on the internet?
Yeah.
A proper guess, because up until like six months ago, I thought the internet as a thing for business and technical and scientific discussion.
Not for this.
Well, that's one of the few things I haven't thought of it as.
Well, I mean, the past six months it's expanded, and I know that there are traffic jams on it now.
I mean, it gets mentioned in the paper every day, usually about things that are kind of peripheral to it.
But I can see this more on the sort of thing on the computer rather than the internet.
No, no, much more common on the internet.
This kind of fun and games are all over the internet.
And MUDs have been going on since 1980, and they're growing explosively.
All right, we're going to go on to another phone call.
Thanks for calling.
Thank you.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hello, Emmanuel.
Yes, go ahead.
How are you doing?
My name is Tony.
I just wanted to say that that was a very, very funny story, listening to it over the air with the wizards and the toad
and all the different names of the people who were in the room that popped up.
It was really funny.
It goes to show the crazy world that we're all living in here with regards to communicating by computer around the world
What happens when people are linked together without concern over per-minute charges of a phone call?
Yeah, yeah.
It's a big part of the internet.
It's a very, very interesting subject, you know.
And it's really funny what can go on out there.
What did you think?
I understand the concept of the story, you know.
Yeah.
Things can get a little crazy, but what you can do as a team and how people can interact and make changes is very interesting, you know.
Yeah.
At the level that it's done, you know, at that level, you know.
I agree, because this was a very...
It's like practice for reality.
Exactly, yeah.
People were sort of projecting their hopes for, you know, the good society onto this realm.
It was very interesting to see the way that played out.
Yeah, a lot of emotions came to play, you know.
You get a feeling from the story that if you were personally involved, that there would be a high level of emotions going back and forth all over the circuitry.
Yeah, absolutely.
Which, so, on the one hand, yeah, get a life.
On the other hand, there are very real emotions in play here and real social interactions.
It is a crazy kind of sphere, as you said.
Thanks for the call.
Yeah, all right, Emmanuel.
It was always a pleasure listening to the show.
Okay, take care.
Bye.
Do you think this affected people in their real lives, people that were a part of this?
Did it affect you in your real life?
Do you now think of things differently?
Well, yeah, I do.
As I mentioned in the article, it kind of, like, does weird things to your head to, like, walk around in this kind of environment.
As I said, I've always been a strong supporter of free speech and the distinction between language and action.
But more and more, I'm coming to see that distinction as a kind of, it's not really true.
I mean, it is a kind of, it's an almost arbitrary distinction between what is language and what is action.
An extremely important one for the purposes of protecting us from oppression.
But I didn't quite recognize how arbitrary it was beforehand.
As for people on the, affecting people's real lives, the victims were very, very upset, you know, by what happened.
You know, in a state of.
In real life they were.
Yeah, in real life they were in a kind of traumatized state for what that's worth.
All right, let's go back to the phones.
Good evening, you're on.
Howdy, two things.
The parking thing, why couldn't someone have just been walking around the lot doing licenses?
Is that too simple?
Well, there's an awful lot of cars there, you know.
Well, a lot of people need work.
Plus, something that someone else came up with, which I think might be an interesting way to deal with that parking situation.
What happens if you park your car for four days, right, and then you go back and you get another ticket,
and then you just leave with that ticket and make it seem like you've only been there for five minutes, you know?
Why wouldn't that work?
That's what I want to know.
I think you have to have someone drive over the little gizmo for you first, the magnetic doofer.
But anyway, last question on this other thing.
Yeah.
Isn't real life interesting enough?
Maybe I'm missing something, but I could either get on this computer system and say you're whatever you want to be.
You could say you're a dog or whatever, or you could just take a Prozac and live that way.
Well, haven't you ever wanted to be a dog?
I'd rather be a mule.
Well, thanks.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
Well, you know, like the cartoon says, no one knows you're a dog on the internet, right?
Right.
And are there dogs in this game?
Yeah.
There actually is a character named – I forget the character's name, but the character is a dog
and speaks pretty consistently in woof-woof talk, pretty deep into this dog character.
I wonder how much it affects them in real life.
Yeah.
I wonder.
All right.
Good evening.
You're on.
Oh, hi.
Go ahead.
Oh, okay.
I was calling about the parking lot thing.
Next time you go through a parking lot, they have cameras videoing your license plate as you're going through.
I know they have that on the way out.
I don't know if they have that on the way in.
They do, because I've seen it and it makes me want to cover up my license plate with mud or something.
Well, then that's a possible solution.
Unless the license plate is somehow meant to penetrate whatever is put over it.
But that's an experiment you might want to try.
If, in fact, they are filming your license plate as you enter, that means they're digitizing it
and they're keeping track of your location, which, of course, is for your protection on the sign.
It will say we're monitoring this to make sure your car is not stolen,
but at the same time it could be used for bad purposes.
Yeah.
I just do not have them.
Okay.
Any comments on the voice story?
I didn't read it.
Okay.
Any comments on the discussion?
It's interesting, but I didn't quite follow it all the way.
Uh-huh.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Take care.
Let's go to another call.
Good evening.
Good evening.
I'm calling to talk about the discussion on the voice article.
Okay.
Can you turn on your radio just a little bit?
Okay.
This is very confusing, yeah.
Hello?
Yeah, go ahead.
Okay.
I just wanted to say, in some cultures, people read a lot of fantasy magazines of varying degrees,
varying graphically, and I wanted to know,
wouldn't this be a good outlet for somebody to vent their rage at the world,
if it is a virtual world?
Uh-huh.
Why would people be upset about a world that is not real?
Well...
I mean, even though they're settling down into a society-like setting,
but this is not reality.
Uh-huh.
That was a point that also was brought up in the course of the discussion that they held
in order to decide what to do with Mr. Bungle,
was, well, isn't it maybe better for people to unleash their violent tendencies
in this environment than in the real world?
Well, it might be better.
It's still not good, because it's very unpleasant for the other people
that are the objects of these expressions of sexual coercion or other kinds of aggressive language.
But as long as you don't forget that there's a difference between that world and this world,
and that the offenses in that world do not translate to the same offenses in this world,
and that's something that seems pretty obvious,
but sensationalism will make it not so obvious sometimes.
Right.
I mean, it would seem like a...
What's the correct word?
That an outlet or...
Just to see what a different world is like,
because, I mean, what would a world be like without the rules that we have set up today?
Maybe it might be better, it might be worse.
Yeah, well, this is one way to find out.
We're going to try one more phone call.
Thanks for your call, and let's see if we have time for one more.
Good evening, Eron.
All right.
Maybe we can fit in two more.
Good evening.
Hello?
How are you doing?
Okay.
I was listening to your thing.
When you started talking about it, I never saw the voice article,
but when you started talking about it, I knew it had to be Lambda.
I'm Frodo on Lambda Mu.
Hey, Frodo.
How are you doing?
Well, now, that means nothing to virtually all of us here,
but who exactly is Frodo?
I'm also a character.
I'm the resident hobbit, not the dog.
Okay.
Well, Frodo, you have about 30 seconds to express yourself virtually or real or however.
My basic take here is that there is a real sense of community on the Net,
on places like Panix and Echo NYC and things, and Mu, Lambda Mu.
The sense of something virtual happening and it hurting people in real life, I think, is very real,
and I've been contemplating what's going to happen when a lot more of these abuses take place on the Net
and what kind of people are going to want to control it
and how much freedom we're going to lose because of fools like this Mr. Bungle.
I'm afraid of what's going to happen.
I really don't know what's going to happen,
and I can almost see people moving in and censoring things and saying,
well, you have a place.
I think what's going to happen is really up to you guys.
Yeah.
It's not up to anybody else.
You're the ones controlling this world, so you make the rules.
And that was why there was so much at stake in the discussion about how to deal with Mr. Bungle
because there is a sense in which if we can just figure out how to govern ourselves in a decent and just way,
then maybe we won't have to face these kinds of censors that are going to come in and trample all over this stuff.
You already have people telling us we're kind of weird for being there in the first place.
Well, that's another issue, yeah.
Thanks for the call.
We're out of time.
Take care.
Okay.
Julian, I suppose there are a lot of people out there now that are interested in getting involved in this.
Can you give any information as to how people can get hooked up?
Yeah, sure.
If you have access to an Internet gateway, and there are a number of such gateways here in the city,
and you have access to the Telnet command, in order to visit Lambda Mu,
you can Telnet to the following address, and that is Lambda, L-A-M-B-D-A dot P-A-R-C,
park dot Xerox, X-E-R-O-X dot com, C-O-M,
and after that, you type the port number, which is 8888, four eights,
with a space between the address and the port number.
Okay.
And then they can take it from there?
And they can take it from there.
You can connect as a guest character.
Does this cost money?
It costs as much money as your Internet gateway costs.
Well, it sounds like an interesting way to participate in something.
We'll see where it leads.
And, Julian, I want to thank you very much for coming in this evening and for talking about the Voice article.
I guess that article is off the streets now because a new issue came out.
Yes, it is.
But it will be on electronic libraries around the world.
Okay, and one to be talked about for quite some time.
Again, thanks for coming in.
Sure, thanks.
It's great to be here.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
We'll be back again next week talking about something else in the electronic world.
Until then, take care.
Stay tuned for a rebroadcast of the evening's news.
Good night.
The telephone keeps ringing.
So I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
For Billy Bond, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
For Billy Bond.