Book from a Bygone Era: a Review of My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell

My first taste of the internet was in the mid-'90s, approximately. America Online discs would periodically appear in the mail and we did try it out, once or twice. My brother, however, found cheaper, local dial-up for us, and we used Trumpet Winsock to connect (thank you, many times over, to Peter Tattam, the wizard who developed that. Sorry to read that you got pretty much no compensation for it).

Anyway, this seems to have been the right time for MUDs and MOOs and all that embryonic virtual reality, but I was in high school, my brother in upper elementary, and I think it just wasn't our age group. (The author mentions that these environs were popular for college students, and most of the other personalities in this book also appear to skew older, so maybe we didn't know because no one told us).

Sure, I've heard about them, these nascent virtual communities where people met and created and even fell in love, all through the medium of text (and maybe some ASCII art, which is also based in words and letters . . .) I played a little Zork back in the day, the text-based adventure game.

But I wasn't there to experience this. I don't know how this book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, came to be on my TBR, but it was an interesting glimpse into this phenomenon, via the author's several-month immersion into the community known as LambdaMOO.

The book's chapters dive into a different aspect of MOO-society, such as economics (the quota of kilobytes each user had for character or object creation - yes, kilobytes, not megabytes- this is the '90s, remember), politics and their ramifications (who intervenes, or should, when one of the society's rules is broken. What constitutes a rule?), social and gender issues (female-presenting characters on the platform and how they're treated, forays into gender-bending and nonbinary characters), and of course, sex.

There are interstitial bits labeled RL, for real life, but those are written how one would encounter characters and experiences inside the MOO (my attempt below):

The first thing you notice is The_Author's fondness for purple prose. You can see him, squeezing a thesaurus so hard that, if it were animate, it would cry. If he were regaling you with these tales face-to-face, it would be in a breathless manner, gesticulating wildly over a pint of IPA. He's also a bit of a whiny git, with his fear of commitment to his long-suffering girlfriend, Jessica. (She also doesn't come off great for a portion of this narrative, but it's a bit more understandable in her case).

My Tiny Life is part cyber-memoir, part historical document. Reading this in 2025, despite being on the internet in its early heady days (when there was a distinction between "internet" and the World Wide Web), it feels so . . . quaint, in a lot of ways. A full house party in text, waiting with bated breath for friends to arrive, because you didn’t have any other way to connect. Anything goes! It seemed was the attitude. (Until it wasn't, and then there were attempts at democratizing the community, with ballots and petitions and whatnot).

And yet, while I never participated in any of this, I can identify with some of the feelings this must have engendered, and I did get a feeling of nostalgia whilst reading this book. Never a denizen of LambdaMoo, but those of us of a certain age did spend late nights on ICQ, or AOL instant messenger, chatting with random folks that we never saw (unless someone emailed you a grainy low-resolution picture, if you were comfortable sharing your email address, that is). Graphics were slow to load and took up too much space, so we were still relegated to text a lot of the time.

We have advanced so much, technologically, since the 1990s; however, some things that plagued LambdaMoo are still issues today, online and otherwise - especially regarding society and gender. Female-presenting folks get harassed online all the time, and it's almost a certainty that they will get real penis pictures instead of ASCII representations of them (was that a thing? Dunno, but probably).

Overall, this was a trippy time-capsule. (Interesting side-note: the author gve up journalism and is now an attorney at Mayer Brown. Wild)!