My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

From Barnes & Noble

In the early days of the Internet — the days before ubiquitous URLs and 56k modems — online communities consisted, for the most part, of bulletin-board systems and more esoteric-based communities. One of the most prominent online communities at the time, hosted on a machine at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, was known as LambdaMOO.

One of the journalists who wrote about LambdaMOO in those days was The Village Voice's Julian Dibbell; his article, about a MOOrape case that sparked a historic debate on the right to criminals' virtual lives, eventually inspired him to spend more time on the MOO and get to know its characters and social structure better. His adventures — and the story of the MOO itself, which was going through a time of great social upheaval during his stay there — are chronicled in My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World.

Dibbell's chronicles of LambdaMOO's growing pains, from the debates on its internal mailing lists to the throttling lag on its increasingly overtaxed servers, offer a look at a society in its infancy, one experimenting with its newly acquired legs while dealing with the all too human dynamic that consistently lurked underneath and that constantly expanded as news of the MOO spread around and more people made the leap into the virtual world. Beneath the bits and scrolling pieces of text, love was born, sexual conventions were experimented with, friendships were made and surrendered.

At the same time, Dibbell's passionate narration and descriptions of his "tinylife"'soverlap with the everyday adds an element to My Tiny Life that couldn't have been found in a straight retelling of the LambdaMOO story. Through the stories of his initial forays into virtual life — identity experimentation, initial nonvirtual meetings with fellow MOO members, and the inevitable nights spent in front of the computer — the reader can see how, and why, this new world, with its seemingly endless possibilities, can be simultaneously gripping and unbelievably frustrating. Part sociological analysis, part tiny autobiography, My Tiny Life is a fascinating look at the early days of virtual society.

—Maura Johnston

Bill Carmada

Such a world could only exist in one place-a computer, of course. Hundreds of such worlds exist. They go by names such as MUDs and MOOs. They exist in alternate universes of all manner, framed by literature, adventure, or simply the evolving choices of their residents. At their best, they've been the setting for social interactions that are deeper and more real than much of what passes for RL (real life).

What can it mean to build a life-and a society-inside such a virtual world, real only as long as the switch remains turned on? What light, if any, do MUDs and MOOs shed on life in the "extravirtual" world? In My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, Julian Dibbell takes you inside the world that was (is) LambdaMOO, so you can decide for yourself. My Tiny Life opens with an event Dibbell chronicled in The Village Voice, in an article that's been discussed for years: a rape in cyberspace, and what the LambdaMOO community chose to do about it. You're with Dibbell as he becomes part of the community; tries to make sense of bitter disputes between his closest virtual friends; reimagines himself as Samantha, experiencing the "stunningly graceless overtures" of male strangers; and runs afoul of the powers that be, when his Garden of Forked Paths exceeds its 50K disk quota.

Four years later, LambdaMOO is still there, but Dibbell's alter egos no longer play there. (By the time you get to his Epilogue, you'll truly care why.) Some say the golden age of MOOs is over. Others say even more profound communal imaginings are in our future. Whether My Tiny Life is nostalgia or premonition, it's a story that will stay with you-and make you think in new ways about what it means to be human.

Bill Carmada @ Cyberian Express

Time Digital Magazine

John Sutherland

Kirkus Reviews

A noble objective, but in this book too soon lost sight of. Instead, Dibbell's chronicle disintegrates into various musings and anecdotes about his own adventures in LambdaMOO, starting with the author's first experience of cybersex, and all told in a style that lunges from breathless intellectual posturing to a folksy, talking-to-the-camera tone. The book is divided into sections demarcated as "VL" (virtual life) and "RL" (real life"), but rather than providing ironic contrast between a virtual world and a physical one, Dibbell mostly uses the "RL" sections merely to divulge details about his personal relationships. Moreover, the interest of his book leans too heavily on early prognostications of the new-media gurus, who five years ago forecast the future dominance of virtual communities, expecting them to sprout all over cyberspace. They haven't, at least not yet.