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Apocalypse MOO--an essay

"'Don't Fear the Reaper: Catastrophe in Cyberspace"

Ann Larabee American Thought and Language Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824-1033 larabee@pilot.msu.edu

the internet's impending "catastrophic collapse" because of data clogs. It seems that doom is in the ether, as it always has been, since the installation of Arpanet, designed to ensure communication in the hypothetical post-apocalyptic environment. Despite the notion that this military communications system was taken over in a hacker revolution--or, as Bruce Sterling puts it, the "grim fallout shelter" burst open and a "full scale Mardis Gras parade" stepped out--the internet is essentially still a fallout shelter. I borrow the metaphor especially for its usefulness in discussing so-called "virtual worlds/spaces", my focus for this paper. Virtual spaces, imaginatively existing as ad hoc communities in ad hoc geographies, share a civil defense mode with the technology that creates and sustains them. They are, indeed, simulacra emerging from a historical moment, the Cold War, a massive hegemonic discourse.

development of packet driven communications--a technology that both resists and is defined by, indeed takes its fragmented structure and meaning, from the Endgame. Packet switching, upon which internet communication depends, was initially a nuclear war technology, developed by the RAND Corporation's Paul Baran to replace vulnerable dedicated telephone circuits. Baran broke up information into packets with the ability to flow with other packets, seek out a destination, and retransmit and reroute in case of a broken connection from a missile explosion. He explained that "there would be no obvious central command and control point, but all surviving points would be able to reestablish contact in the event of an attack on any one point." Military and government transmissions could be sustained through continual reassemblage in this virtual medium, even as physical structures disintegrated. The fundamentals of this system--fragmentation, redundancy, decentralization, and rerouting--remain the structuring principles of internet communications. They also can be said to be the features of a post-disaster milieu, in which ordinary circuits of exchange have been broken into "surviving points" or nodes. So the Net is set up as if the disaster has already occurred, and yet is in a continual state of preparedness for surviving that disaster. The notion of an absolute disaster, or cybercide, which would erase the entire technological system and its virtual reality, is thus always displaced outside the closed loop temporal structure of survivability. In other words, if the missile actually arrived, there would be no nodes to connect, no relays, no text.

gaming environments created entirely imaginary, textual worlds; nuclear war was "a proliferating and paradoxical network of speculation which yet constitutes our reality." During the Cold War, world events and domestic arrangements were engineered to accord with these virtual scenarios, often generated and communicated with the aid of computers. One has only to look at the "ground zero" centers of major cities to see the cultural reassemblage of living space as target. In fact, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, applied his theory of information to civil defense, designing a traffic pattern for cities that would avoid clogs during an evacuation. The city became a cybernetic entity, wired to meet the needs of the Cold War. In the 1950's, marketing itself as essential to civil defense, Bell Telephone promoted an indestructible electronic city immune to the ravages of intercontinental ballistic missiles and hurricanes. Neighborhoods might be bombed to the ground, but the social structure would survive through the smooth flow of corporate and military information. The bad boys of the net, the hackers and crackers and phone phreaks, simply proved that this safety net could be thrown wide, and thus it was appropriate that they chose their literary style from post-apocalyptic science fiction and fantasy. They were playing the same Endgame, testing the holes and sealing them up with their own presence. The maverick MUDS, or role-playing dungeons, put the faceless "character" or "player" into the scenario, making identity itself a matter of survival, a packet shelter within the catastrophic virtual geographies of war games.

the real, usually determined to be a meaningless distinction, unfold from this earlier project. Cyberspace is a speculative reality in which survivability ascends over the risks of living outside of the disaster model. This speculative reality is still primarily textbased, just as nuclear war scenarios are. As Peter Schwenger notes, in his explanation of nuclear criticism, "nuclear war is dominated by textuality, is in a sense created by it." Furthermore, discussing the complicity of literature in creating the nuclear age, he argues that literature is "an archival institution that, like the nuclear age itself, is fabulously textual, without any referent outside of the words by which it constitutes itself." Thus, the bomb and the letter share a reciprocal relationship in constituting nuclear culture, a mutually assured destruction. The internet, too, can be said to be a fabulously textual archival institution, wherein information is redundantly stored against a hypothetical disaster created by the institution itself. As part of the assemblage, the technological apparatus for storing, sending, and receiving such information is a complex, tightly coupled system in which catastrophic failure is inevitable and expected. Catastrophe is the system's normal operative mode.

Virtual textbased communities revolve around this systemic ground zero. I will turn now to a discussion of the virtual community, Postmodern Culture MOO, which self-consciously announced itself as apocalyptic, and then engineered its own apocalypse, thus creating a fiction that reflects upon the ever-unfolding cyberdisaster. A few points of explanation for the uninitiated: an offshoot of the old MUDS, a MOO allows players to n communicate in real time--like a chat line-- and to easily build textual characters, settings, and props that can be viewed by other players. The community is constructed and perceived as a dynamic whole, with connected rooms and paths that can be mapped. Thus, the MOO is comprised of packets of information, connected by simple links and the imagination of the reader. It is a compelling interactive theatrical fiction, controlled by the limits of the MOO programming language, and by a social hierarchy that places "wizards" at the top and "generic players" at the bottom. Wizards have a great deal of power, and can disconnect players, eavesdrop, deny building permits, erase players and objects, and even wipe the database clean. In general, MOOs are run with some idea of consensus t