The blurred boundary between online and reality
Feel that beneath your feet? A new legal swamp is starting to form
You may be expecting something natural and lyrical here but allow me a slight deviation. Because last week, I had — literally — a rather grounding experience.
It was a bright and crisp morning, mist still crowning the distant hills. Recent rain had unearthed jagged stones in my path. Naturally, in the wet, clay-heavy soil, I slipped. My hands went out to stop me, grabbing onto nothing, and before I had time to do anything, there was mud all the way down one side of me, a bloody slash along my hand and splinters of thorn in my palms.
On the drive home — and once I had stopped bleeding — I heard on the radio about some new research by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) into attitudes around sexual consent.
I know the two seem unrelated but bear with me.
The research — which surveyed 3,000 people across various age groups — found that while public understanding of rape and consent had improved over the course of twenty years, there were still worrying misconceptions among those aged 18-24. For instance, only 46% of those surveyed in that age group thought a man was responsible for his actions if he had been drinking or taking drugs. Even fewer (42%) thought being in a relationship or marriage was enough for consent to be assumed.
People were calling in. Social media firms had to take responsibility! Too much misinformation online! Blame Andrew Tate! Pornography is too accessible, too young! Reactive statements that hinted at some truth. “More needs to be done around education” was the conclusion by both the callers and the CPS. And while I agreed with them all, nobody seemed to talk about the relevance of simply… being online. There was an acceptance that that was just how it was, that a digital generation was inevitably going to be different, and we were powerless to do anything about it.
It reminded me of a story briefly in the news last month, in which a teenage girl claimed to have been ‘sexually assaulted’ by a group of strangers in the Metaverse, the colourful, confected virtual world created by Meta (formerly Facebook), accessed by a headset.
At first, I thought this sounded downright bizarre. Laughable, even. Like being mugged in Narnia or shanghaied in Neverland. But the victim reported feeling violated and distressed, as if it had happened in the real world. The police now have to figure out how they investigate such an allegation, since legislation applies to this world and this world only.
Other than for playful curiosity, I have struggled to see why anyone would want to spend so much time living, working, playing and spending their money in a full-fat hologram of the world. Just look at American marketing company TechTarget’s definition of the Metaverse as a “single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual space” — it sounds remarkably like real life. The distinction it makes between the two, however, is that in the Metaverse, humans can “experience life in ways they could not in the physical world”. Which, apparently, includes gangrape.
But most of those activities, for now at least, are banal: going to a virtual art gallery, meeting friends in a virtual café, spending virtual money in virtual shops. Still, all better in real life. But in 2021 Statista ran a survey on the activities 1,000 people said they would do in the Metaverse but not in real life. Banal they were not. Engaging in hate speech, playing extreme sports, taking conscience-altering drugs, game hunting, watching an execution, conducting unethical experiments, or playing adult games that feature sex or violence. What emerges is Grand Theft Auto in Noddy’s Toyland.
And perhaps this is all fine in the confines of the imaginary. It is no different, some might argue, to the days when I would drop visitors into a lion enclosure in Zoo Tycoon or drown entire families in The Sims. Online games can give us a place to engage in dangerous or socially unacceptable behaviour, testing our morality to its ethical limits, with few, if any, repercussions.
Because most who play them can see the line between the real and digital spaces, and can therefore laugh at our tyrannical tendencies. But the Metaverse is designed to blur that line, to be as immersive and sensory as possible, effectively tricking the user into a new reality. While I do not condone the actions of virtual criminals, many will not be surprised that this assault even happened as a result; Meta is hardly admired for its track record in safeguarding children. Indeed, one New Mexican attorney described the firm as the “world’s single greatest marketplace for paedophiles” in a court hearing this week.
A life spent out of the real world will do this… It will turn us all into anonymous gases,
drifting from space to space, accountable to nobody and for nothing
As well as child safety, this incident poses some general questions around reality itself. If children living online is a fait accompli as those callers seemed to believe, then will our definition of ‘reality’ have to broaden to include virtual ones, too? And if a crime is committed in one reality, can it be investigated in another? No physical act was committed here, but perhaps that is irrelevant — do we need to redefine assault to refer not to the act, but the resulting feelings of the act, whether real or perceived? How do we legislate for that? And what does that mean for other physical crimes such as arson, theft or murder?
Feel that beneath your feet? A new legal swamp is starting to form.
There was another finding from the CPS report that further evidenced this chasm of understanding. A disturbing statistic showed that 16-24-year-olds were less likely to know that consent can be withdrawn in person, even if it had already been previously agreed online.
Consent is a retractable email, as most of us know. But is it any wonder these respondents do not understand, when so many of them socialise primarily in that shapeless online world? Where everyone is just a username or cartoon? Where information runs wild and responsibilities are few?
When this is the norm, expectations become so warped that when the time finally comes for a young person to break from their digital amnion and enter everyone else’s world — school, the workplace, the bedroom — their foundations are dangerously uncertain. We need only look at the state of teenage mental health to know this: a report by Wysa last year (itself, ironically, an AI mental health service) found one in three teenagers are afraid of even just speaking to people.
The online world’s current lack of limitations means we can road-test our morality.
While that might not be a problem in itself, it can quickly become one
A life spent out of the real world will do this. It turns us all into anonymous gases, drifting from space to space, accountable to nobody and for nothing, where factors such as age, sex, ability, and intent can be invisible or irrelevant. Ultimately, we become detached from our bodies. This is the charge for which both parties in this Metaverse misdemeanour are guilty: one was so invested in their virtual self that an act against it felt physical, while the other, no doubt, believed an assault could not have taken place because there was no physical body, only a virtual one. But both believed in an absence of the body.
Back out in the field, stumbling in the mud and thorns, I left my thoughts and entered the world again. Immediately, intensely aware of my surroundings. My bleeding body was having a clear physical reaction to what had happened. Days later, I am still tweezing splinters from my skin.
Things make more sense when we have a grounding in real life. Talking to people, feeling the rain on our face or the thorns in our hand, we are reminded that we are physical entities, not just mental ones. Living, breathing things in a similarly dynamic world.
Humans benefit from limitations; without them we are prone to following mental delusions or base, animal instincts. By contrast, the online world’s current lack of limitations means we can road-test the hell out of our morality there. While that might not be a problem in itself, it can quickly become one when we fail to see the increasingly blurry boundary between these two worlds.
I suspect this is only the beginning. Legislation will have to catch up with this murky dimension of modern life. And I can only hope for the same for education around consent. But if the digitisation of young people is as inevitable as those callers seemed to believe, then we must all swot up.
We need to learn how to bring online information into the real world, into the light, where we can pull it apart, discuss and debate it. How to take responsibility for what we say, do and share. Like bacteria, misinformation spreads rapidly under the right conditions.
Life will depend on us keeping a foothold in this world. After all, it is not going anywhere. We will still need surgeons and soldiers, farmers and fashion designers, babysitters and biologists. And we will need them all in this world, not that one.