DOTLAN EveMaps

Recruiting players, zero tax, zero hassle, zero friendly fire. Fly your own way.

In today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. Cyberspace's virtual reality simply generalises this procedure: it provides reality deprived of substance. In the same way that decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real thing, my online screen persona, the "you" that I see there, is a decaffeinated self.

And the same goes for my partners in cyberspace communication. I can never be sure who they are: are they really the way they describe themselves, is there a "real" person at all behind a screen persona, is the screen persona a mask for a multiplicity of people, or am I simply dealing with a digitised entity which does not stand for any "real" person?

And therein lies the threat of cyberspace at its most elementary, these discrepancies between what "you" really are and what "you" appear to be in digital space can lead to murderous violence