Virtual violence

 

Image from Pixabay

A conference is successful if you have heard at least one thing that you had not previously considered. The longer you have been in the profession, the more difficult this is, but the ONE Conference has once again managed to let me have that experience. Not on a subject in my direct line of interest, but when choosing my parallel sessions I try to make a healthy mix of contributions that are interesting to me now, that seem fun/entertaining, and of which I think: hey, what’s that about? A warning in advance: this will not be a light-hearted blog. The contribution I am referring to was about violence in the virtual world, and that this violence can even penetrate into the real world.

You only need a TV to escape reality, although you are usually not really immersed in a fantasy world. In the cinema it becomes more realistic, especially if you are watching a 3D film (or one with even more dimensions). However, the virtual world that this presentation was about goes a few steps further: you wear a virtual reality headset and you may even wear a suit full of sensors and actuators, so that the computer feels you and can also make you feel things.

It was about that kind of virtual reality (a contradiction in terms?). And more specific: about violence in such an environment. Killing people in films and games is more or less socially accepted: in the westerns of my youth, quite a few cowboys and Indians were shot from their horses. Computer games, in which you have to shoot around to reach your goal, have also been popular for a long time; Back in the 1990s we had Wolfenstein 3D, in which I shot a lot of Nazis, while the blood dripped from the walls. These games have only become 'better' and a link has often been made between violent computer games and players who then started doing very wrong things in real life. I'm not going to rehash that discussion here.

The focus of Anne-Sophie Fritschij and Vien Germawi's presentation was on rape. In an artificial but very immersive world like the one outlined above, rape can have an effect on the victim comparable to physical rape, they explained. In this immersive virtual world, haptic feedback plays an important role – it is not just a matter of hearing and seeing, but also of feeling; you are almost literally immersed in that other reality. Reportedly, the number of sexual abuse cases in the metaverse, as this shadow world is known, is increasing at an alarming rate. There's even a game that revolves around rape (and I don't think it's necessary to mention its name).

The comparison the ladies made between virtual murder and rape revealed a clear difference, both in experience and in consequences. We don't make a fuss about murder in a game, but we deem rape morally reprehensible. An important difference was not discussed: murder in a game does not actually kill anyone, while with the current technology remote rape - or at least the sensation of it - is apparently possible. And that can have lifelong psychological consequences for the victim, according to the speakers.

In an earlier Security (b)log I wrote about the metaverse, with a quote from Winn Schwartau: “We are digitally terraforming the future cognitive infrastructure. We have ONE chance to get it right.” Schwartau painted a less than rosy picture of the metaverse. Fritschij and Germawi's presentation supplements that image with even more dark tones.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. I read the book half a century later, and last year I watched some episodes of a TV series based on this famous novel. Huxley describes a cinema in which you can watch a feely: a movie with not only 3D image and sound, but also feeling (by grasping two knobs on the arms of the seat). If a sex scene appears in a feely, the viewer's experience goes a long way. Huxley's fantasy from almost a century ago seems to be coming true. Or should I say: is threatens to become reality? Let us take Schwartau's call to heart.

(Possibly) no Security (b)log will appear in the next two weeks.

 

And in the big bad world...

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• the Red Cross has drawn up rules of war for civilian hackers.
• an attack on a Spanish aviation company began with a fake recruiter on LinkedIn.
• deepfakes of famous people are used to deceive you.
• the US government's top 10 configuration errors are not very surprising.
• it is not a good idea to program a password into an application. [DUTCH]
• the conference has put a major burden on my agenda, so I don't have time to include any more links here.