LIVING INSIDE THE (OPERATING) SYSTEM: COMMUNITY IN VIRTUAL REALITY (DRAFT)
by John Unsworth
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"Machines speak to machines before speaking to man, and the
ontological domains that they reveal and secrete are, at each
occurrence, singular and precarious."
-- Felix Guattari, "Machinic Heterogenesis"[1]
"We live by the mode of referendum precisely because there is no
longer any referential."
-- Jean Baudrillard, Simulations [2]
"I think a lot of the common assumptions we make are actually built
in to the MOO apparatus . . . . The elements of the MOO are
constructed for the most part to simulate a real physical community.
Ideas like 'privacy' and 'ownership' are constantly implied by the
descriptions and properties if not the actual programming of every
object."
--Ogre, in "MOO.Terrorism"[3]
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This essay is an attempt to describe and explain the way that an
unusual (but by no means anomalous) culture has developed under the
aegis of PMC-MOO, a text-based virtual-reality program that runs on a
networked Unix workstation. It is also an attempt to describe the
scholarly and pedagogical trajectory of this program, by identifying
the conceptual coordinates of its origin.
MOOs belong to a class of programs known as MUDs, and MUDs are ably
defined by Pavel Curtis, the inventor of MOOs, as follows:
A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or, sometimes, Multi-User Dimension) is a
network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual
reality whose user interface is entirely textual. Participants
(usually called players) have the appearance of being situated in an
artificially-constructed place that also contains those other
players who are connected at the same time. Players can communicate
easily with each other in real time.[4] This virtual gathering place
has many of the social attributes of other places, and many of the
usual social mechanisms operate there. Certain attributes of this
virtual place, however, tend to have significant effects on social
phenomena, leading to new mechanisms and modes of behavior not
usually seen `IRL' (in real life).
I will substantially disagree with that last point in the course of
this essay, but suffice it to say, for now, that in practical terms,
the experience of participating in a MOO is that one sits at a
keyboard, in front of a screen, and projects oneself over a global
computer network into an entirely textual world, and into an entirely
virtual community. Community is generally a function of shared
location, shared interests, and sometimes shared government and shared
property: in order to deserve the name, a community needs more than
one, though not necessarily all, of those attributes.
In the case of PMC-MOO, the community which I will discuss here, all
those attributes are present in some sense or in some measure.
However, it would be a mistake to see this community, or the larger
archipelago civilization of MOOs to which it belongs, as entirely
communitarian, or as entirely self- determining. Rather, I will argue,
PMC-MOO and MOOs in general take shape under twin forces not unlike
fate and free will, where free will is what we always have understood
it to be, but where the role of fate is played by the operating system
in which the MOO is embedded. The aporia in this analogy, and it is an
important one for my argument, is that unlike transcendental fate,
computer operating systems are historically and culturally determined.
Unix and Monopoly Capital:
To understand the cultural moment that is expressed in the operating
system in question, Unix, and to understand the effects of Unix on the
formation of MOO code and MOO culture, we must isolate and understand
a few concepts and a little history as well. For our purposes, the
concepts that matter most are expressed in their most basic form in
the Unix filesystem, as hierarchy, user groups, and ownership. The
Unix filesystem is hierarchical in its organization, and the
particular kind of hierarchy is, in essence, dendritic: file systems
have a tree- like structure, with a "root" directory containing files
and other directories, or branches, of the filesystem, which in turn
can contain other files and directories. In Unix, every file (and
indeed, every process) has an individual owner, and the hierarchy of
owners explicitly mirrors the hierarchy of the filesystem itself, with
the superuser of all users and user groups called "root." Every
individual user, then, belongs to one or more user groups, and the
permission to read, write, delete, search, or execute a particular
file is precisely defined for owner, group, and other. It is difficult
to exaggerate the importance of these basic concepts in Unix: in fact,
the filesystem organization is itself a kind of first cause for Unix,
inasmuch as its origins lie in the dim prehistory of Unix, in Multics.
Multics was a multi-user mainframe operating system developed jointly
in the late 1960s by Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric and intended
to permit time-sharing on large, expensive, centralized computer
resources. Not surprisingly, the developers of Multics, and after
them, the developers of Unix, reasoned that if an operating system
will permit many users to look at and manipulate the same files at the
same time, it is necessary to establish which users are associated
with which files, and what permissions are granted them.
AT&T; began developing Multics in 1964,[5] eight years after the 1956
Consent Decree which settled the last anti-trust suit against the
company. Although the 1956 decision said nothing about software
(because the concept wasn't available), AT&T; interpreted the decision
cautiously, and when Unix came along, the company decided to
distribute its operating system on non-profit terms-- licensed at very
low cost to universities, and priced prohibitively high for commercial
clients, expressly so as to avoid developing a software business. In
fact, what was distributed was the source code, which meant that
university researchers could tinker with the system, offer
improvements, and make modifications to suit their needs. However,
since Bell Labs was distributing the software at or near cost, it
wasn't particularly interested in providing user support. This
fostered two things--a kind of priesthood of the code, manifested as a
hierarchy of arcane knowledge about the complex and often cryptically
documented system, and also a self-supporting user community, which
became incarnate in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Usenet. Usenet
was (and is) an independent mail network that allowed users to post
questions and receive answers about specific features of Unix, or
about applications that run under Unix. Usenet still flourishes, and
still fulfills its original function, but it has expanded to include
discussion of many topics that have nothing to do with operating
systems, and it has become an asynchronous culture in its own
right.[6]
In the largest context, then, Unix developed as a byproduct of
research at a corporate laboratory, under the constraints imposed by
anti-trust legislation, which helped to force it out of the channels
in which proprietary inventions usually travel in a capitalist
economy, and into the freely exchanged economy of academic research
and invention. It should also be noted, though, that Bell Labs itself,
at least in its research divisions, was and may still be a more
fertile environment for technological creativity than many
universities. The nature of pure research is that one doesn't know
what will ultimately "pay off": therefore, it's necessary to invest in
a diversified portfolio of research activities. According to Samuel P.
Morgan, a member of the Bell labs Research Area beginning in 1947 and,
during the early seventies, Director of the Computing Science Research
Center,
If there aren't a certain number of things taken up in the
organization every year that don't work out, we're not being
sufficiently aggressive, or innovative, or we are not gambling
enough. . . . We work on percentages, and of course this is true
throughout any research organization. We've got to have a certain
number of failures. . . .[7]
In fact, it is only a very large accumulation of wealth that makes it
practical to gamble in this way, investing resources in doing research
with no immediately obvious economic benefit. Moreover, the kind of
research environment that produces these unpredictable benefits,
especially in the area of computer hardware and software, has proven
to be decentralized and voluntaristic. This is true even outside of
the area of pure research, in the application of computer technology
to business operations. According to V.M. Wolontis, Executive Director
of the Operations Research Division at Bell labs during the early days
of Unix,
Things in the computer applications field have developed because
individual people at the working level have had ideas and have
pursued them. Things have grown from the working level up, rather
than by some major management figure sitting at his desk saying this
shall be computerized, and bingo, a hundred people march in the
direction of computerizing a big segment of the operation. There is
a tendency for the computer as a tool to inject itself into the
operation through the efforts of interested specialists who enjoy it
and who want to make the contribution. Management approval is a
subsequent step.[8]
Although the kind of intellectual freedom to "play around" with
problems and "contribute" solutions does depend on the kind of
corporate security that comes only under the auspices of monopoly
capital or government, individual projects still have to at least
attempt to justify themselves with respect to some cost- benefit
analysis, however putative: even when gambling, there are better and
worse bets. Within the atmosphere of free invention, the time-sharing
and resource-coupling nature of the Unix operating system was driven,
paradoxically, by the prohibitive cost of mainframes, which dictated
that each machine should have more than one user and, if possible,
more than one user at a time. One of the original developers of Unix
recalls that, when their group faced the decline of Multics, their
requests for new computer equipment on which to write a new operating
system were repeatedly rebuffed: "[I]t is perfectly obvious in
retrospect (and should have been at the time) that we were asking the
Labs to spend too much money on too few people with too vague a
plan."[9]
The fact that the operating system developed in the context of a
corporate entity whose primary business was telecommunications, and
whose primary interests were communications and connectivity, helped
to enshrine within it the principles of modularity and
interoperability. But at another level, one extremely relevant to the
effects that Unix has had in the world, communication was a motivating
factor in the design of this operating system:
Even though Multics could not then support many users, it could
support us, albeit at exorbitant cost. We didn't want to lose the
pleasant niche we occupied, because no similar ones were available;
even the time-sharing service that would later be offered under GE's
operating system did not exist. What we wanted to preserve was not
just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system
around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that
the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access,
time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal
instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.[10]
The fact that the software these researchers produced was easy to
modify, good at accepting instructions from remote users, and
unsupported by its corporate parent, helped to ensure that one of the
first uses to which it would be put, once it reached the outside
world, was the networking of users into a community, originally a
user-support community, but later something much more diverse.
If we consider all these factors together, the paradoxes are striking.
On the one hand, as a mental representation of the universe of
information, Unix is deeply indebted to culturally determined notions
such as private property, class membership, and hierarchies of power
and effectivity. Most of these ideas are older than the modern Western
culture that produced Unix, but the constellation of cultural elements
gathered together in Unix's basic operating principles seems
particularly Western and capitalist--not surprisingly, given that its
creators were human extensions of one of the largest accumulations of
capital in the Western world. On the other hand, this tool, shaped
though it was by the notions of ownership and exclusivity, spawned a
culture of cooperation, of homemade code, of user-contributed
modifications and improvements (viz. the canonical /contrib/bin in
Unix filesystems, where user-contributed programs are stored) --in
short, of "fellowship." And finally, in some sense it is true, as
Guattari suggests, that the entire assemblage of causes for Unix is an
instance of machines speaking to machines, or needing to speak to
machines, with humans as the midwife at this precarious and unlikely
birth. In order to explicate this paradox, though, it might help us to
consider a set of relevant insights from an early and expert analyst
of capitalism, Karl Marx.
MOOs and Marx:
In writing about the French Revolution, Karl Marx observed that the
civil [or bourgeois] society that was established for the first time
by that revolution understands itself to be based on the "natural and
imprescriptible rights" declared in the Constitution of 1793, namely
"equality, liberty, security, property." According to that document,
liberty "consists in the right to do anything which does not harm
others;" the right of property "is the right vested in every citizen
to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruit of his
labour and of his industry according to his will;" equality "consists
in the fact that the same law applies to all, whether that law
protects or punishes;" and security "consists in the protection which
society offers to each of its members for the preservation of his
person, his rights, and his property." It is worth pointing out that
each of these rights has its equivalent in the world of Unix: users,
the equivalent of citizens, are permitted actions which do not harm
the data of others--unless those others have, of their own free will,
disposed of that data so that permission is granted to others to
overwrite it; the same rights apply to all (within a given user class,
at least. All bets are off when it comes to root--but even in
Enlightenment democracies, equality has always been the most
problematic right, especially when it comes to conflicts of interest
between an individual and the state. . .and arguably, since all rights
are granted, ultimately, by root, root is the Unix equivalent of the
State). Security, in Unix terms, is called exactly the same thing, and
providing systems security, so as to protect the accumulated labor of
legitimate users, is considered the paramount duty of the Unix systems
administrator.[11]
Marx finds these "so-called rights of man" to be the defining
characteristics of bourgeois society because none of them
goes beyond the egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil
society, as man separated from life in the community and withdrawn
into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary
will. These rights are far from conceiving man as a species-being.
They see, rather, the life of the species itself, society, as a
frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original
independence. The only bond that keeps men together is natural
necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of property
and of their egoistic person.[12]
Because I am arguing that the MOO draws out and enacts some of the
contradictions inherent not only in Unix and Unix culture, but also in
capitalism and Western culture, it is important to stop here and
concentrate for a moment on the term that Marx opposes to bourgeois
monadic egotism. Marx defines "species- being" elsewhere, in
manuscripts written during the same period, in terms that cast an
interesting light on my earlier assertion that Unix, and in its own
turn, the MOO, are mental representations of a world:
His creation, in practice, of an objective world, his working upon
inorganic nature, is the proof that man is a conscious
species-being, that is a being which is related to the species as
its own essence or to itself as a species being. To be sure, animals
also produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling places, as the
bees, beavers, ants, etc. do. But the animal produces what it needs
directly for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, while man
produces universally. It produces under the domination of direct
physical need while man produces even when he is free from physical
need and produces truly, indeed, only in freedom from such need. The
animal produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of
nature. . . . It is precisely in his working over of the objective
world, therefore, that man proves himself to be really a species
being. This production is his active species-life. In and through
such production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The
object of labor, therefore, is the objectification of the
species-life of man: for man duplicates himself not only
intellectually, as in consciousness, but also actively, in reality,
and therefore contemplates himself in a world that he has created.
Once again, the paradox I have in view is that the material
conditions and conceptual rubrics out of which Unix developed are the
epitome of capitalist endeavor, and yet Unix itself was circulated on
quite anti-capitalist terms, answers fairly well to Marx's description
of universal production (or production that doesn't answer to an
immediate need).
The tension between these two concepts--civil [or bourgeois] society
as incarnated in the French Revolution's "Declaration of the Rights of
Man," and the "species-being" that (Marx says) these rights ignore--is
precisely the enabling condition of capitalism:
In so far as alienated labor tears the object of his production away
from man, therefore, it tears away from him his species-life, his
actual objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his
advantage over the animal into the disadvantage that his inorganic
body, nature, is taken away from him. . . . A direct consequence of
man's alienation from the product of his labor, from his life
activity, from his species-being, is the alienation of man from man.
When man confronts himself, he confronts another man. . . .
Generally, the proposition that man's species-being is alienated
from him means that one man is alienated from another, just as each
of them is alienated from human nature.[13]
The second level of our paradox is that, when the MOO arises it
answers, better than Unix or even capitalism itself, to Marx's
description of alienation: within the MOO, when one confronts oneself,
one literally confronts the representation of a representation of a
person--a player, a character, a projection of (alienated)
personality. And yet, again, the labor that goes into creation in the
MOO is labor which answers exactly to the call of species-life: it is
creation in the absence of need, the creation of a supremely useless
object, an object world, an objectification of life in the world.
This brings me to the second chapter of this history, which begins
about ten years after the invention of Unix, but still in the
corporate neighborhood of AT&T;, when Pavel Curtis and others at Xerox
PARC invented MOOcode. MOOs are not intended to replace Unix in any
sense, but they do mimic some of the functions of an operating system,
and they mirror many of the features of Unix. In the MOO, which is
really just a large database, the world is made up of objects: objects
always have a particular location within the database and the fictive
landscape of the MOO, and objects are in turn composed of properties
and verbs. The universe itself is an object (object #0), as are all
players. Players own themselves, and they belong to one or more
classes of players.
The basic classes of MOO-character are player, programmer, and wizard.
Many refinements and elaborations of that tripartite scheme have been
implemented, but the basic distinctions remain significant: players
can move around and communicate, but they cannot build or create
things; programmers are players who can also create, program, and
recycle their own objects, and they can bestow owned objects on
others; wizards are programmers who can also program or recycle other
programmers' objects and players themselves. To this extent, then, the
MOO adopts the notion of a "root" user, expressing it more fancifully
in the term "wizard"-- the superuser of all MOO users. In keeping with
the dendritic hierarchy of files (and processes) in Unix, the MOO has
its own (anthropomorphized) hierarchy of parents and children.Every
object and player inherits the verbs and properties of its parent, and
commands are always executed along a search path that includes one's
entire parentage. In the moo, things can be readable, writable, and
executable by wizards only, by the owner, or by anyone, and the system
of parentage, in its effect, mimics the functionality of user groups
--for example, the average player on PMC-MOO belongs to the programmer
class, which in turn is a child of the basic builder class, which in
turn is a child of Frand's player class, which in turn is a child of
the basic player class. Such a player has permission to execute any
verb associated with any group or class that appears in that family
tree.
Unix and MOOcode share the following characteristics, then: both
emerged from large corporate research labs (Bell and Xerox,
respectively); both are hierarchical, multi-user, time-sharing
environments for the creation, storage, and retrieval of information;
both systems are predicated on the notion that every object (or file)
has both an owner and a location, and perhaps most importantly, both
Unix and MOO function as command interpreters and as programming
environments. It is this last thing, more than any other single
feature, that unites MOOcode with Unix and distinguishes it from other
forms of gaming and/or virtual-reality environments. The "OO" in MOO
stands for Object Oriented, and it means that programmers can easily
have access to the individual building blocks of the MOO, and can use
the tools within the MOO to alter or add to those building blocks.
The important difference between a MOO and the Unix operating system,
though, is that while both may be considered to be mental
representations, or self-representations, of information
processing--models, if you will, of collective memory, of communal
libraries, even of collective intelligence-- the MOO is the world it
models, as well as the model of that world. In other words, if
capitalism is a first-order model of the way labor and value and power
circulate in the world, Unix is a second-order simulacrum of the way
that a particular kind of capital, namely information, works in the
world, and the MOO--an inhabitable model of Unix --is then a
third-order simulacrum of the world, in which information is not only
a representation of labor, and a source of power, and a form of value,
but is also quite literally the form that the species-being takes,
"not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is
real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without
reference or circumference."[13]
PMC-MOO: A Virtual Community
It's time now to discuss the way in which one such simulacrum has
actually developed, and to think about the future of MOOs in general.
PMC-MOO is the MOO with which I am most familiar, since I have been
(with the help of many others)* running it for the last couple of
years, and since it has, at various times, taken up a good deal of my
time. It is not the first MOO I started--the NCSU Virtual Campus has
that dubious distinction [14]--nor is it the newest (iath-moo, the
virtual conference center for the Institute for Advanced Technology in
the Humanities is the most recent), but it has become the largest and
longest lasting of the MOO experiments with which I've been involved.
PMC-MOO is an offshoot of the electronic journal Postmodern Culture,
and it was established to serve two principal functions. First and
foremost, it was intended to provide a text-based conferencing
facility for journal-related activities, a kind of real-time
supplement to PMC-Talk, the listserv-based discussion group that has
always run alongside the peer-reviewed journal. Second, because the
object-oriented nature of the MOO made this feasible, it was to
provide an opportunity for interested users to produce interactive
programs that would demonstrate or interrogate concepts of relevance
to the study of postmodernism--object-lessons, if you will. In other
words, from the outset, PMC-MOO had that Disney schizophrenia that
characterizes Epcot Center--a conference hall surrounded by a theme
park, work embedded in play.
For a time, quite a time, it seemed that work might never surface at
all in this environment, and early visitors to the MOO would have been
justified in doubting that this would ever develop into an environment
in which anything useful could ever be done. MOOs are naturally
somewhat chaotic, since the program allows everyone in a room to speak
and be heard in sequence, with no possibility of interrupting another
speaker and with little in the way of etiquette that encourages
orderly, single-topic, limited-participation conversations. Users who
have spent some time in MOOs do learn to use some common tools, such
as the stage-talk feature, to identify the topic to which they are
speaking or the speaker to whom they are responding, and (more
importantly) they seem to develop a certain ability to do
conversational multi-tasking, but the MOO tends to be a noisy place
when there's anything happening at all.
Beyond the noise factor, there is the issue of identity and
accountability. Professional life and professional credit depends, to
a large extent, on being able to identify the sources of intellectual
contributions, and on attributing borrowed ideas to their originators.
The MOO, by contrast, encourages the borrowing of code, by making it
easy to copy objects and verbs (or pieces of objects and verbs that
seem useful) without attribution. The flip side of attribution is
accountability: since most MOOs, including PMC-MOO (but not iath-moo)
allow users to create fictitious names for their players, and since it
is generally the case that only wizards can locate a player's home
site, anti-social behavior including theft, harassment, impersonation,
and even "virtual rape," are common problems in these virtual
environments. PMC-MOOs most famous episode of anti-social behavior
came to be described as MOO Terrorism, and is described elsewhere in a
kind of MOO documentary.[15] After our rocky infancy, though, the
community has stabilized a good deal, and it has begun to develop some
of the familiar features of civic life--it has a zoning board, a board
that reviews requests for quota (the permission to create things),
regular public events including poetry slams and other performance
events, social hours, and special seminars and events. It also has
spawned a number of internal discussion groups on various topics, some
of them theoretical, some of them social, some organizational. It is
worth noting that, although postmodernism is steeped in the kind of
theory that even educated non- specialists find difficult to
penetrate, PMC-MOO has succeeded in drawing a broad range of
non-specialists into the discussion of theoretical issues, and those
non-specialists have frequently challenged and in other ways affected
the conversation on those issues. High school students, college
students, graduate students, professors, librarians, as well as
non-academics, government workers, professionals: the population of
PMC-MOO is diverse, if not by comparison to the general public,
certainly by comparison to the usual audience for literary and
critical theory. Furthermore, people whose background was
non-technical have become interested in programming through the
experience of inhabiting a shared programming environment, and
especially (I think) as a result of being able to see and immediately
share the results of their efforts from within the same environment in
which they are produced. Some programming that demonstrates postmodern
theoretical concepts has, in fact, been done, and efforts are underway
to foreground that programming in the landscape of the MOO.
What this factual history suggests is that, like its parent, Unix, the
MOO has the capacity to turn play into something useful (though it
isn't always easy to predict what kinds of play will prove useful, or
in what ways), and it certainly fulfills the desire of the early Unix
developers for a communal programming environment in which fellowship
could come about. The MOO is also clearly an environment in which,
independent of need, one can pursue creative activities with tangible,
communal, and perhaps even economic results.[16] As with pure research
at Bell labs, it seems clear that in the MOO innovation comes from the
ground up: in fact, the same thing could be said of the internet
itself--that it was born from a monopoly (in this case, the military),
and that due to certain external constraints (the threat of nuclear
war, which dictated its decentralized design) it has developed into a
chaotic, voluntarist, and unpredictably fertile world in which
individuals invest large amounts of time and energy "playing" in ways
that sometimes produce enormously useful innovations. As far as
teaching and research go, the MOO (and the same could be said of the
internet itself) is demonstrably useful for some kinds of pedagogical
and conferencing purposes, particularly those which rely heavily on
verbal information (as opposed to graphics or sound), and particularly
when the community of users has developed a set of consensual rules of
behavior that downplay the potential for communicational chaos and
anti-social behavior, and that play up the potential for cooperation
and collaboration.
In closing, I'd like to recall for a moment a recent advertising
campaign for AT&T;, in which lots of "ordinary" (but very
professional-looking) people are shown using technology in futuristic
ways. The tag-line of the campaign is "have you ever ... You will":
"Have you ever gone to a meeting in your bathrobe?" asks the
voice-over, while a man lounges at the breakfast table while
video-conferencing, "Or sent a fax from the beach?" while the man
lounges in his beach-chair, sending a fax from his (apparently
sand-proof) laptop: "You will." I'm sure that AT&T; intends this
campaign to present a happy vision of the future, in which work
somehow is less work-like; I'm equally certain, though, that it's
possible to view the campaign in exactly the opposite light, to hear
an imperative tone in that "You Will," and to consider that, without
that handy laptop, the man on the beach might not have to be working.
It is, in some sense, the essence of professional occupation that it
crosses the line into our personal lives: no profession is truly 9-5.
If technology, born from useful play, becomes an environment in which
work can be carried on in the guise of play, then either we will never
really work, or we will never really play, after this. It remains to
be seen which of these--or both, or neither--proves to be the case.
_________________________________________________________________
Notes
* Grateful acknowledgements are due to PMC-MOO's many productive and
creative inhabitants, but especially to Chris Barrett, Lisa Brawley,
Craig Horman, Paul Outka, David Sewell, Ted Whalen, and Shawn Wilbur,
the wizards who have helped to keep the community running, during good
times and bad. Back
Felix Guattari, "Machinic Heterogenesis" in Rethinking Technologies,
ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (U of Minnesota P, 1993), 22. Back
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 116.
Back
Moo.Terrorism is the name of an ascii text file available by anonymous
ftp from jefferson.village.virginia.edu, as
pub/pubs/pmc/pmc-moo/MOO.Terrorism. It consists of material
collected from the MOO database, its mail system, and its player
logs, and edited (or "ruthlessly pillaged") by Troy Whitlock. Back
For a suggestive, if somewhat hysterical, discussion of the term "real
time," see Paul Virilio, "The Third Interval: A Critical
Transition" in Rethinking Technologies. Back
See Tom Van Vleck's Multics Chronology; for further information see
Van Vleck's Multics General Information, and Multics Features. A
first-hand discussion of some Unix-related history can be found in
Van Vleck's Unix and Multics, with pointers to more WWW-based
information about some of the early developers of both systems.
Back
For an extensive treatment of the history of Usenet, see Netizens, an
anthology of essays collected by Ronda and Michael Hauben,
available by anonymous ftp from umcc..umich.edu, in
pub/users/ronda, or from jefferson.village.virginia.edu, in
pub/projects/netizens. Back
Malcolm G. Stevenson, "Bell Labs: A Pioneer in Computing Technology"
(Part III. Computers in Technology--Today and Tomorrow). Bell Labs
Record (February, 1974): 57. Back
Malcolm G. Stevenson, "Bell Labs: A Pioneer in Computing Technology"
(Part II. Helping Man Use the Computing Machine). Bell Labs Record
(January, 1974), 18. Back
D.M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing System," AT&T
Bell Laboratories Technical Journal 63.8 (October, 1984): 2. Back
Ritchie, 3. Back
It is a somewhat bitter irony that, on the very day I wrote this
sentence, PMC-MOO crashed and--because of somewhat shoddy systems
administration practices on my part--two weeks worth of changes to
the database were lost. Back
Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844) Back
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) Back
Baudrillard, 11. Back
A paper describing my experience teaching on the Virtual Campus is
available by gopher from the Institute for Advanced Technology in
the Humanities:
Gopher:
jefferson.village.virginia.edu/00/pubs/publications/Virtual.Campus
.txt
FTP: pub/pubs/publications/Virtual.Campus.txt
WWW:
gopher://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/00/pubs/publications/Virtu
al.Campus.txt
Back
See Troy Whitlock's "Fuck Art: Let's Kill! Towards a Post-Modern
Community." Available from the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities via
Gopher:
jefferson.village.virginia.edu/00/pubs/pmc/pmc-moo/Moo.Terrorism
FTP: jefferson.village.virginia.edu,
pub/pubs/pmc/pmc-moo/Moo.Terrorism
WWW:
gopher://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/00/pub/pubs/pmc/pmc-moo/Mo
o.Terrorism
Back
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, for example, in
June of 1994 issued a call for proposals on the use of MUDs for
manufacturing--a virtual shop floor, if you will. This brings my
argument full circle, and perhaps raises the specter of virtual
Taylorism... Back
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