PassW0rd – 14 February 2024 (Owning and Being Owned in a Virtual World)

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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. In this month’s program, we dive into the virtual worlds fast being developed in the internet and ask the question: who owns what when you are online? We would like to warn you that this program does contain some graphic sexual descriptions. Who owns you online is a question that dramatically came to the fore at the end of last month following the outrage that occurred in the wake of the artificial intelligence-generated pornographic deepfake of the pop star Taylor Swift. Outrage that prompted US politicians to drag big tech companies into Washington to explain what they were going to do to counter the activity. Yet it’s outrage that should also be directed at the politicians too. Because this is an activity that started in the days before the modern internet, when it spread from pre-internet chat rooms that were hosted on what were known as bulletin board systems in the early 1980s. Often private members’ online spaces accessed using dial-up modems, pornography was an early commodity. In an uncanny echo of many of the websites we have become used to today, The bulletin boards encouraged communities to develop, and people interested in hardcore pornography, attracted by the safe havens and anonymity that bulletin boards offered, quickly created an underworld of seedy sites. Sites that sat alongside other completely innocuous groups dedicated to computer gaming, online chat, and computer enthusiasts. Amateur historians and academics. Sites that carried what would often become the slightly tainted title of special interest groups. It was a potentially explosive mix, as those wishing to follow their sexual interests could also plunder the other sites for computer expertise to develop their own special interests and the means to gratify them. Working hard on the means to upload, download, and illustrate images. It was an activity that with the emergence of the internet has only been amplified. It’s a tragic indictment of the technology that pornography is one of the web’s biggest uses, as instead of having to go to the trouble of finding a backstreet shop in a dimly lit street, it was now available at the click of a button. Since those early days, over 40 years ago, online pornography has undergone a high-speed mutation. It has rapidly evolved to use the internet to pander to the tastes, demands, fetishes, and fantasies of its audience in ways very similar to those used by conventional marketing. One of its most repellent current trends being to seek particular body types and use computer software to take faces from social media and posts and render the victim into pornographic scenes. Essentially, taking someone’s face without their knowing, morphing it onto software recreations of their body, and then inputting them into images and video scenes, all without the victim been aware. It was a process that happened to Noel Martin and one that she says that has scarred her for life. Here she is in a TED Talk describing what happened to her. This audio clip does contain some graphic sexual details.

Speaker C: Nameless, faceless sexual predators had published highly explicit sexual commentary about me and what they’d like to do to me. They also published identifying information about me—where I lived, what I studied, who I was. But things got worse. I soon discovered that these sexual predators had doctored or Photoshopped my face onto the bodies of naked adult actresses engaged in sexual intercourse, on solo shots of me being ejaculated on by two men. Sperm was edited onto my face. I was edited onto the COVID of a porn DVD. Perpetrators had edited my images to give the effect that my blouse was transparent so you could see my nipples. Perpetrators ejaculated on images of me, took photos of their sperm and penises on these images, and posted them onto porn sites. “Cum on printed pics” is what they call it.

Speaker A: Noel Martin describing in a TED Talk how she discovered that she had unwittingly become a pornographic product. Many possibly hearing about this developing trend for the first time are bemused. If it did not happen, how can it hurt you? All you simply have to do is dismiss it as something that is quite literally made up. But is that the case? Password caught up with Noelle this week in Australia to ask her how how the experience had affected her. Here she is again.

Speaker C: It was literally a, a Google search, a Google image reverse search, and like in an instant my life has completely changed. And it’s been an 11-year journey since that point, and it’s just been escalating and ongoing and getting worse and worse over time. And I think part of the reason it’s getting worse is because I’ve spoken out publicly about it and tried to, you know, fight for justice around the world. And I think that puts a greater target on your back for perpetrators who think they can get away with it, which they can, sadly, to keep targeting, to keep targeting me.

Speaker A: Why do you think you were targeted? This must have come out of the blue as far as you were concerned. Some of the people that I’ve seen information about, that’s been the work of revenge porn by ex-partners and things like that. But so why do you think you were targeted?

Speaker C: Well, I ultimately don’t know because I don’t know who’s responsible to this day, but I can infer from what I understand to be the case, which is in the beginning I think it was a situation of perpetrators had found me on social media and they sexually fetishized me and my body. A lot of the pornographic sites that they were posting the doctored images on were on sites dedicated to busty women, and then over time they were posting on more mainstream sites. And I think because I started speaking out and fighting back, the motivations changed, and they almost continued to target me in a much more severe way because I think they wanted to intimidate and taunt me because I was doing something about it. And I also think there’s layers of not only deep misogyny involved here, but like racism, because I think that part of the reason why they targeted me was because I think to them I was an easy target. You know, being a woman of color, and especially an everyday woman of color, you know, I think there’s a level of just a lack of protection and a lack of social capital that is afforded to people in, you know, in my circumstances. And I think they thought I was an easy target and I wouldn’t get the protection I needed if I spoke out and I wouldn’t get the sympathy and the empathy. And so that is what I believe is, is also part of the reason.

Speaker A: And as you say, this is many-layered. If you find out that the person who’s done this is someone you know, then you feel a sense of terrible betrayal. But it’s also just as bad if it’s somebody that you don’t know, because it must induce a sort of feeling of paranoia. You must feel as though you’re being stalked.

Speaker C: Yeah, that whole psyche and the experience of not knowing is— it’s a hustle in itself because you do wonder if it is someone that you know. I don’t believe it is in my case. I think it is— I think it’s strangers halfway around the world, but you, you are paranoid. And I think even just having recording devices or cameras. I get worried that people might be recording things, you know, if I go out in public or even in, in my apartment. These things really have an impact.

Speaker A: Noel Martin on the very real impact of the digital kidnapping of her image on her life. So what happens if we take this a little further? Earlier this year, a young woman stated that she had been raped in an online game, an incident that again was dismissed by those in the high street as an impossibility. But is it? To find out more, we spoke to Professor Alison Atrell-Smith, a psychologist at Wolverhampton University specializing in cyberpsychology.

Speaker B: There are a lot of reasons that people engage in online shaming. We’ve moved away from using the terminology revenge porn because it’s not always about revenge. Sometimes it’s about oppression, it’s about extortion, it’s about blackmailing, financial blackmail, emotional blackmail. There is no longer one-size-fits-all explanation as to why people share sexual images that they’ve been sent, that they’ve stolen. There’s lots of reasons. It’s very complex psychologically as to how people obtain that imagery or video, whether it’s real, whether it’s AI, and why they then share it and where they share it. So some of the reasons touched upon there are revenge, the person who has been left, dumped, relationship breakdown. We see a lot of this where there has been cheating going on. So if we look at people who are sharing images for revenge, it is usually because they want to evoke an emotional reaction in the victim, and the victim will then experience that shame, especially if those images are shared around people they know, or workplace colleagues is another area where these images are often shared. The psychological impact of that is that that victim, it’s not only shame, it’s embarrassment, but it’s the betrayal, breakdown of trust, that they trusted someone with their most private details. And that that person has broken that trust relationship even after a relationship breakdown. If the perpetrator in this instance has then also stolen those images or that video or fabricated in some way, that is an even bigger breakdown in trust because here’s someone who they thought loved them, would cherish them, support them, look after them, and now all of that is broken down, and that can evoke a really devastating spiral into anxiety, depression, not trusting in the future. So all of those complex psychological emotions come into play. That is very different to a situation where you may have a male blackmailing another male for financial gain. Now, the, the outcome for the victim is much the same: shame, embarrassment, how did I fall for that, I’m silly, I’m stupid, I shouldn’t have been so naive, and that self-blame then is actually often substantiated in the mass media where we see a lot of victim blaming and that ‘I would never fall for that, how were they so silly?’ So that kind of attitude around victim blaming can equate with self-blame. If we see sharing of images, video, fabricated content for financial gain in a male-on-male situation— or actually in a male-on-female situation, gender doesn’t necessarily come into it in terms of self-shame, because that shame is actually quite strongly related to the mass media portrayal of people being silly, falling for these things, falling for a scam, falling for the betrayal. And a lot of the time we see people being blamed for sharing content in the first place,, and that then plays into that self-blame and prevention from reporting of the incident, reporting of the extortion or blackmail as well. So it’s far more complex how that self-shame and self-blame comes about than simply saying, ‘I was silly, I shouldn’t have shared that content.’ And it is somewhat alleviated if the perpetrator has stolen or fabricated the images or video, but actually it’s still very dangerous because there’s still somewhere then it becomes not necessarily about self-shame but about public image, public portrayal, how my family sees me, how my work colleagues see me. So it becomes more about reputation and social standing, social comparison, all of those things that we value as human beings when we interact with others. The level of shame, embarrassment is very dependent on how this actually comes about and what the purpose is of the exploitation.

Speaker A: But surely with this, you have the option of being able to just say, oh, that wasn’t me, they made it up. People make this stuff up. They surely now there is the option of this defense where you can just ridicule your attacker. Absolutely.

Speaker B: And I think in defense situations, we are going to see more and more of, it’s not real, it was fabricated, it’s not real, therefore it cannot harm. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s fabricated or not. It’s still a personal attack on someone. It’s an attack on someone’s self-image, their self-portrayal, how they are viewed by others. In that situation, it’s still an attack on someone has gone to the extent to create that content to cause harm or damage to another person. And it’s that harm or damage that the self-blame absorbs.

Speaker A: Wolverhampton University’s Professor Alison Atrell-Smith on the very real harm that can be inflicted on you online. It’s worth noting that in a 2019 study into cyberbullying, researchers at the universities of Swansea, Birmingham, and Oxford found that victims of cyberbullying are almost 2.5 times as likely to self-harm and have suicidal thoughts than their peers. And it’s appropriate that in the same week as Valentine’s Day to note that yet another source of blackmail and sextortion known as catfishing was also recognized by the police, again in 2019, when they warned lonely hearts to take care when dating strangers online. Because what if that attractive-looking person in the photo is a fake? Why are they asking you for money? Indeed, In that same year, Marcel Kuta, an oil industry consultant from Woolwich, won back more than £180,000 in a court case from a woman he met on Tinder who claimed to be single and an investment banker. The City of London Police say one dating scam is reported every 3 hours in the UK, and in 2018, and I quote, cybercriminals scammed lovestruck Brits out of £27 million. So how much of a problem is this? Was the Taylor Swift incident simply the latest example of a tacky internet underworld trend that will soon be nipped in the bud as politicians move quickly to close down the unpleasant development? When the online rape incident was released, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children championed the victim James case. So we asked them if these were simply a few isolated cases. Here’s Rani Govender, Senior Child Safety Online Policy Officer at the NSPCC.

Speaker D: We are absolutely concerned with the, the growing use of deepfakes online. There are a number of risks that we know that they are already posing to children and only have the potential to, to grow in the risk. We know, for example, that offenders are already using deepfakes as a way of blackmailing and coercing children. For example, creating deepfakes of children suggesting that they’re posing in nude imagery or sexual photos, and then they’re being held against the child as a form of blackmail and extortion to get the child to send, for example, other images or photos. We have also seen cases as well of children creating images, for example, of their peers, and these being shared in schools, for example. We know the children that have featured in these images have found these cases extremely distressing, and they’ve had a real impact on their own, their own confidence and their own sense of safety as well. So it is a growing concern that we’re aware of.

Speaker A: One of the problems with all of this is that some people think it’s not serious. They don’t actually think that this is a big deal to have these images made. Yet, as you say, we’re aware of a guy in the US who committed suicide because somebody was trying to extort money from him. He was a school child. And we interviewed a police inspector who had been looking into a case in Glasgow where somebody else had also tragically taken their lives by throwing themselves off the Glasgow Bridge because they were being extorted. I mean, it’s a very real threat, isn’t it? Absolutely.

Speaker D: I mean, it’s incredibly important not to underestimate the impact that online abuse has. I mean, this must be seen as a form of image-based sexual abuse that has to be tackled in the same way that the other forms are. We know that Like I say, in many cases, children and other victims have a strong sense now that people have seen these images, have seen them naked, and that is an incredibly distressing thing to experience. We know there’s worries about how is it going to impact their relationships with their friends, with their family, for older victims on their career prospects. So it’s extremely disappointing when we know how devastating online abuse can be that we’re still seeing these harms underplayed, and that’s certainly a narrative that must stop.

Speaker A: And there’s another issue here too, isn’t there? Because a lot of this does seem to be very gender-based. The prime culprits do seem to be unfortunately male.

Speaker D: Well, that’s, that’s an interesting point. So I think in terms of the gendered impacts of this sort of abuse, we’re seeing it play out in similar ways to other forms of image-based sexual abuse. So when it comes to financial extortion, we know that does particularly impact boys and men, and the evidence indicates that these images when they’re being used to financially blackmail the victim, that they are focused on boys and men. But I would say in the vast majority of cases, deepfakes are actually being used as a form of sexual harassment. And in those cases, those forms of sexual abuse, they’re particularly targeting girls and women. And that’s something that the evidence widely suggests. And those trends are also reflected in our calls to Childline as well.

Speaker A: Is there also an age factor in this? And some children would actually think it’s quite funny to render each other naked and to taunt and annoy each other.

Speaker D: It’s definitely important to think about the different ways and reasons children might be creating these images. As you say, we know that there is a risk that this could just be seen as another funny part of online life. Maybe they know it’s not exactly the right thing to do, but don’t have a full appreciation of the really serious consequences that this can have. And that’s why in these cases we always really encourage all children to have safeguarding support to make sure they’re able to understand the impact of these images. But I also think it’s a good point because when we think about how these images are becoming so widespread online, if when children are going on their social media profiles and they’re seeing these types of images pop up regularly, that’s also going to really mislead them in terms of understanding the severity of harm that these images can cause. And that’s why it’s so important that tech companies are really doing more to stop everyone being able to see these images so easily.

Speaker A: I mean, that’s the other thing that we have to take into account, isn’t it? This is not going away. This is not some new trend that suddenly occurred that we will suddenly be able to disable. This is going to be with us now, probably for the very, very foreseeable future.

Speaker D: It’s certainly a risk that, like you say, has been around for a while. AI technology has made it more accessible and more easy as a form of abuse to carry out. We would always emphasize, though, that online abuse is not inevitable and it is something that can be prevented. Whether that’s the AI companies building in better safeguards into their tools or social media platforms doing more to stop the posting and spread of these images. There are absolutely tools and powers that tech companies have to make sure that this abuse isn’t built in and easy to facilitate through their services. And so as we’re getting much greater understanding of the harm that’s caused by these deepfakes, we’d like to see a similar recognition of the seriousness by tech companies and see them take action.

Speaker A: Are you seeing that recognition from the tech companies? One of the things that has been said quite frequently about the tech companies is they don’t seem to be enormously reactive to the issues that they’re generating. Absolutely.

Speaker D: It’s a real challenge. We’ve seen these types of harm happen again and again without tech companies taking the issue seriously. In this case, it’s taken a global icon, Taylor Swift, speaking out to really galvanize the attention and force some sort of action. And even that hasn’t really been enough. It was incredibly reactive and didn’t get to the root of the problem of how can these images be created and uploaded in the first place. So as with unfortunately so many children’s safety risks online, tech companies have been too slow to act. They haven’t thought about the risks that their companies could present, and they haven’t listened to all the experts who’ve highlighted those problems. So no, it’s certainly an issue that needs to change, and we’re hopeful the Online Safety Act is going to play a part in that.

Speaker A: The NSPCC’s Rani Govender on a trend that’s not going to go away. Indeed, it is a trend that has gone largely ignored for some time now, as you can hear from these clips that we took from the website My Image My Choice.

Speaker C: I was a child in these images, from a time when I was carefree and more trusting of the world. Someone I knew, stole my images and posted them online. They found the forum created by you to facilitate the sharing of intimate images across the world. In every town, every state, every region, every country. Thanks to your website, my private images all over the world on the screens of strangers.

Speaker A: A while back, my social media got hacked.

Speaker C: A picture of my face was taken and then deepfaked onto someone else’s private images It was used 3 separate times to blackmail me. I now live in a situation where that image could pop up at any moment and ruin the life I’ve worked so hard to set up. And I’m only 17. The thing is with image-based sexual abuse is that survivors get re-traumatized over and over because every time the content is viewed, downloaded, shared, reposted, It’s furthering the trauma. And you should know that if you’re a person who views this content, then you’re contributing to it. You’re guilty. You’re contributing to the re-traumatizing of a victim of a crime. You know, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for you to exploit me. I didn’t give you permission. I didn’t give you consent. So on that, to Pornhub, fuck you for allowing this to happen. And for the legal system not protecting me. I’m in the United States. I’m in Massachusetts. We have no laws. I have nothing to protect me. This has changed my entire life.

Speaker A: So is this a trend, or is this our new world? Earlier in the week, it emerged that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had been deepfaked to make it appear that he was making pro-Palestinian statements. The clip again used AI, as ever, artificial artificial intelligence to create a replica of Mr. Khan’s voice saying words scripted by the faker, disparaging Remembrance Weekend with an expletive and calling for pro-Palestinian marches planned for the same day last November to take precedence. While again this week, following on from the success of the Abba holographic experience, it was announced by the immersive VR company Layered Reality that they will bring Elvis Presley back to life in November of this year in London in an event they are billing as the Return of the King. Though, while it may be a case of the king is dead, long live the king, the move to virtual reincarnation could also have some disturbing repercussions. As the original cartoons of Mickey Mouse are now out of copyright, plans have also been announced for a horror film that will use the original artwork. Here’s Reading University’s Associate Professor of Filmmaking Dominic Leese, an expert on deepfakes and the community that seeks to use them to present these very different and disturbing views of reality.

Speaker E: Deepfakes have been understood as a way of changing the face of someone in a video. So a digitally recorded video image can be manipulated. Deepfakes is a process of using machine learning to learn about the face that is seen in the video and recreate a new face in place of that one through a process of teaching using AI.

Speaker A: And so with deepfakes, what’s happening with them? Why are people making them and what are they trying to achieve with them?

Speaker E: So the deepfakes have been with us since 2017, and the purpose of them created by its originator was to create non-consensual pornography. So the user on Reddit showed off to his friends saying, look how I can swap the face of a celebrity into a pornographic video. So the vast majority of deepfakes that are circulating are pornographic, and the vast majority of those are non-consensually using the images of women in those pornographic videos.

Speaker A: So does it split exactly like that? They’re always women, or are they occasionally of men too?

Speaker E: We might as well say always of women. I mean, in terms of this majority use of deepfakes, yes, it’s It’s entirely— however, the technology can be used for lots of other purposes, and there are plenty of people looking for creative and ethical ways of using deepfakes. We have to understand that is a really important part of the technological environment and the creative adoption of those, but we must always remember that the majority use of deepfakes is to victimize women using non-consensual porn.

Speaker A: Right, so it is to victimize. This isn’t somebody saying, oh, this is an extension of pornography.

Speaker E: They’re definitely targeted. Well, I mean, victimized is obviously a value-laden word that I’ve used. Those making non-consensual deepfake porn, they see it as a form of play. They’re gaming around using technology to make something that they find witty.— or in the case of porn titillating, they don’t see any problem in terms of the ethics of what they’re doing because they silo themselves in what they understand as a kind of playful world of techie user-generated technology. However, the reality for women whose face is taken and put into pornographic videos is quite different. And there have been Hollywood stars who’ve found themselves deepfaked into pornographic videos. It’s enormously damaging to professional reputations in that case, as well as personal reputations in terms of ordinary non-celebrity women who find themselves in those videos.

Speaker A: You know, I mean, I would have thought you could just deny it. You can just say, “That wasn’t me. This is one of those fools, those idiots who are out there on the internet just being malicious.

Speaker E: The problem is the believability. When deepfakes began in 2017, they were only believable at quite low resolution. It takes quite a lot of computer hardware to generate a face change of this sort. And at that time, only kind of tiny little images that you might see on your mobile phone were possible. But they were still able to fool people. And quite recently, we found that high-definition deepfakes are possible. And so we’re getting into the realm of the way we communicate and the way we see each other online. What we are looking at online might not necessarily be what it actually is because of these machine learning technologies.

Speaker A: So is there an element of power here? I mean, you talk about these people enjoying what they’re doing, that they see it as witty. They see themselves as being in control of a technology. I mean, I suppose you could say it’s a form of bullying.

Speaker E: There must be a great pleasure in that for some people who need to exert that kind of power over others. It can be used in revenge terms. A spurned boyfriend can use the technology to embarrass and defame their ex. So yes, there’s a lot of power involved in that. And that’s why I think understanding this in terms of gender is really important. It’s almost always men who are using the technology in this field of deepfake porn.

Speaker A: But there is this other interesting split, isn’t there? Because there are also In terms of some of the victims of this, in terms of sextortion, for example, quite often the victims are male.

Speaker E: It can be, yes. And of course, it’s a— the technology is entirely flexible. It can be used to change voices as well as faces. It doesn’t matter whose face you’re changing.

Speaker A: Associate Professor Dominic Leese of Reading University on the world of of the deepfake makers and their motivations. And as the NSPCC’s Reena Govender says, this is an issue that is not going to go away because of deep underlying trends in technology development. Already, metaverse and games environments are taking us further and further into virtual worlds to carry out both work and pleasure. Worlds where we will increasingly interact with people with virtual versions of ourselves. Developments that the Silicon Valley-based gaming billionaire Shurik Agabitov says will only accelerate.

Speaker F: I think in the future we’re going to apply video games technology to not only for entertainment purposes, as you mentioned, but also to do the education, e-commerce, and maybe social interactions and many other sort of things. Basically, I believe in the future the internet is going to look like a video game. And you hope from the— so today when you go on internet, you have the websites, or later we start having the web apps or apps on iPhone. That’s all internet. In the future of the internet, what I call, which is some people call the metaverse, is, um, you’re gonna hop from the one virtual world to another virtual world. So, uh, and those virtual worlds is, think about as a mini game. Those mini games could be represented a brand or, uh, represent the institution or represent the basically replaced the websites and have an additional version of the websites. Those spacious 3D virtual environments are going to be in addition or replace completely the websites.

Speaker A: I call them metasites. In fairness, we’re in the metaverse already, aren’t we? I mean, I’m talking to you. A couple of hundred years ago, we would have been killed for talking into a piece of plastic. So I’m talking to you. We can drop out of this. If I go on to some company websites now, they’re becoming more and more interactive. So as you say, you’re already getting these metaverse experiences that are already being developed. And companies are going to pride themselves on how interactive their websites are, aren’t they? They’re going to want you to really understand what it is that they do.

Speaker F: Using their content. You’re absolutely right, but we don’t call the telephone call when it was in bell times metaverse. It was a great communication device. Now we have much rich experience. So video game technology is much more immersive experiences when you and I not only can talk and see each other But we also can run together and navigate together the digital environment. And we can interact with the digital environment and see that presentation of the brand or educational materials, not through reading, but 3D video games-like quality interactive environments and scenes. So it’s, you’re right, it’s just the next level of the interactions. It’s an additional extra step to make the experience more immersive.

Speaker A: So as Agabitov points out, in this new virtual world, as we have found out, there are very real problems lurking in the virtual shadows because our remote virtual world can be accessed by the whole world. Something that means that anonymity, one of the much-trumpeted virtues of the internet from its early days, is now being questioned because in the virtual world people are demanding that others prove who they are and what their intentions are.

Speaker F: Child safety on the internet in general is a very hot topic in the media and it’s, uh, very important and concerning topic. And I think as every social media company testifying in front of Congress, and I do believe that’s a very serious issue. I do believe as any community, they have the bad actors, right? So it’s a— if you have a big city, there’s crime in a big city. So some of those community watch over the city. So you can expect some amount of the bad actors out there just because that’s who we are as humans and as a society, not perfect. And of course we have the police in the real world who, who manage how to fight with the crimes. And the government and the tech entrepreneurs also United their forces and, and thinking how they can prevent some of those crimes. And it’s not unique for the video games, it’s more, it’s for the any social groups. And, um, to have them, uh, people anonymous or non-anonymous, it’s a very much a debate and it’s a very much different path. So, um, Elon Musk decide You want to have the more verified people and give them more visibility. Community like Discord and video games, they choose to allow people to hide behind the nickname and allow them to be anybody who they want. But the trade-offs, they monitoring every conversation and trying to detect any abusive behavior with the nonprofit organization on the government structure. I think those two models is going to be pretty much applied for the online community, as you can have completely verified and then you’ll reserve the rights to— for private encrypted conversation. So if you’re talking with somebody who is also verified, you deserve to have those messages being encrypted. If you’re anonymous, so you know your conversation is going to be screened and read by government and agencies. But that’s— I’m not an expert in that, but that’s, I think, two scenarios where currently online and social society and our social groups is is offering, and video games is not exception for that.

Speaker A: No, but there is some interesting avenues here. I, for example, ages ago, one of the most, I suppose, encouraging interviews that we’ve done, also a very, very sad interview, was with the father of a boy in Norway who called Mats. And Mats was terribly disabled. He was in a wheelchair. He basically couldn’t move his hands, couldn’t move his arms. And his father was shocked when Mats died. He knew his son was going to die very relatively young because people came from all over the world to be at his funeral because of the friends that he’d made. Obviously, the avatar that was impersonating him, or his personification, he saw as some way of freeing himself from the terrible prison of disablement that he was in.

Speaker F: Well, we heard a lot of the stories like this when, as I mentioned, when you have the limitations such as disability or COVID, the only way how you can interact with others and absolutely every Human need to have that social interaction because we are social creature. We can die in the longest very quickly. In fact, when you ignore the people or when you shut down from the people, that’s the most harmful way what you can cause to your loved ones and friends. Or a lot of the stories when the parents and the kids kids feel not important for the parents, and that’s become a very serious issue with serious consequences.

Speaker A: So it’s a world, Agabitov says, that will more and more begin to reflect the way that we feel about things in the offline world. Things that are online, as we found out from Noel Martin, really matter to our lives and our future?

Speaker F: Nobody can predict what kind of apps is going to emerge, but we can imagine some of them is going to be specifically for this device and some of them become the popular and valuable and nobody knows. And that’s what’s also exciting. So that’s what I don’t want to miss, that super app which is gonna, like Instagram was for the iPhone 4.

Speaker A: So what you’re saying is that you can have a houseplant in virtual reality and that houseplant could be an enormously rare plant and that you could say to your guests, look, here you go, look at this, nobody else has got this and you can appreciate it in virtual reality and that it’s not particularly that different from a houseplant in reality because a houseplant is just a plant in your house.

Speaker F: Yeah, that’s a kind of the profit from your adventures. Which could spark the conversation and it’s to give you a sense of the belonging. In my school, you donate the money and they give you a frame for the license plate. And I’m very proud dad of the Buckley School. So I have that on my car and everybody in the neighborhood knows I’m the proud dad. It’s kind of the same flavor, I think.

Speaker A: I mean, you could arguably be some sort of explorer in virtual reality, the Charles Darwin on the Beagle, and say, look, because I managed to attain this level within the game, I was able to pick up this particular plant and I’ve brought it back and it’s in my living room. Exactly. That does actually, because that would then be a talking point because people would then say to you, kudos to you, you managed to go and get this plant that flowers only once every 7 years, and there it is.

Speaker F: Yeah, yeah, they can relate to it and say, oh, I also been there, and it took me, I don’t know, 5 times to get it done, and it’s a sense of the belongings also.

Speaker A: The gaming entrepreneur Shurik Agabitov, and that notion of ownership is very very real. A point made by Professor Atrell-Smith, who highlighted the recent case of a German man who traveled to Portsmouth to confront and murder another game player who he thought had stolen wares from him online. Here’s Joep Gommers, the chief executive of Amsterdam-based cybersecurity company EclecticIQ, talking about his algorithmic artwork. And what we can do to try to force some proof and meaning out of the people and things that we will meet online in the future.

Speaker G: If you would go to a concert from your favorite rock bands or your favorite techno artist or whatever, it’s, I think, going to be very normal to see more media being live-generated there. So visual media or something like this, but also just take something away. You want a t-shirt from your favorite rock band? Great, you’re going to be able to have a t-shirt of your contribution to the event or of the moment that you enjoyed most that was generated for you, or you can NFT mint your moment and now that moment is forever yours. 3 seconds of the concert you were at is now imprinted on an NFT and it’s yours forever. There’s going to be more of this trading, I think, as well. Art in general is quite an interesting space where now there’s more generative art, meaning The art is an algorithm and the algorithm outputs different versions of itself and you buy those versions and you mint or you safeguard that that’s your version forever. And those are then also traded like pieces of art, but the artist didn’t make 5 paintings. He made one algorithm that created 5 paintings. And there’ll be more of this kind of interaction between creator, AI, and consumer somehow having a new dynamic between them. That’s one less one-on-one and more kind of living collaboration. I already have in my house actually a painting that’s not a painting, that’s an algorithm. It changes all the time based on time, based on movement around it. Simply algorithmic art, so to speak. And that’s, that’s the world we are starting to live in, I think.

Speaker A: You’re a cybersecurity expert. So obviously this presents issues for cybersecurity just in terms of this verification the ability for people to become imposters in this environment.

Speaker G: What are you doing to protect this world then? I think it starts with recognizing the full spectrum of where it plays. So as an intelligence company and as a company building technologies to manage this intelligence, we have to understand all the different categories where this problem space is playing in. And it goes really from your crime and fraud and KYC avoidance and age verification avoidance all the way to national and corporate espionage. And as a result, also on the warfare side. And as the kind of budgets go up, the likelihood of being able to get away with some of this stuff is definitely increasing. But the barrier to do some of these things is still high. So our company right now is making our customers aware of this. It really starts with awareness, just like with phishing. It starts with how can you recognize something, and there’s easily things you can do now.

Speaker A: Joep Gommers, the head of EclecticIQ, on what we need to do to cope with the new virtual AI world’s images and individuals that will represent challenges to us as we navigate the 21st century. Though it’s not completely a world of doom and gloom. There are great opportunities in this world of nothing is but what is not if we can find a way to navigate between the dangers to its potential. As our last very touching interview with Robert Steen, the father of Mats mentioned earlier in the program, shows, Mats was terribly disabled by a muscle wasting disease that tragically ended his life in his early 20s, but being online in a virtual game allowed him to live.

Speaker H: At his funeral, it turned up a lot of people which I had no idea who was or where they came from, and then it proved that they came from all over Europe and they knew my son Mats without actually having met him. Physically. And this was kind of an eye-opener for me as for the kind of friendships, relationships, love relationships that can be built in the digital world. And from that, as a starting point, I started to dig into what kind of environment, what kind of life he had really been living in front of his computer and his screen. So that’s in a way where it started. And so, so what did you find out then? What was this life that he was living that meant so much to so many other people? First and foremost, I met with a woman. Her name was Anne. She lives in Salisbury, outside of London. At the time when I met her in my son’s funeral, she was 62 years old. She was the psychologist She was an entrepreneur and she worked as a headhunter in the European Union. She was a gamer and a close friend of my son, who at that time was age 25. And she said to me that if you are the kind of adult which I suspect that you are and which most people are, you might want to know a little bit more about the life that your son has been a part of. She sat down with me for some hours and took me through what they experienced in this gaming world, which is called World of Warcraft, together. And she said that most of the time we are in a kind of traditional social relationship. It is not about killing each other. It’s not so much about the gaming or the competition as you might believe or think. It is mostly about social relationship. We meet, we talk, we eat turtle soup together, we run around lakes, we have competition, or we just tease each other. So very much the same thing as we experience in the physical world. But there is one big difference, she told me, and that is your physical appearance doesn’t play any role at all because we can’t see each other. Which means that the color of your skin has absolutely no importance. Your makeup doesn’t matter. Your clothes are not visible. So over a long period of time, and we spent between 15,000 and 20,000 hours together over a 10-year period, and when you come into a relationship with a person over such a long period of time, the only thing that remains is what you have in your heart and what you have in your head. So for me, she said, being 62 years old from Salisbury, this is purer relationships and purer friendships than the ones I experience in the physical world. And of course, this is very important for your son too, wasn’t it? Because he didn’t have that mobility in the physical world to run around the lake. That is true, and I think that that was in a way a blessing in disguise because my son was born with a muscle disease, which we discovered when he was 4. This muscle disease is pretty well described, so we knew more or less how his life was going to develop over the next 20 years, which is both kind of terrifying but also good as for putting the practical things in place so that he can live a good life based on his pre-assumptions. So I think we were kind of liberal when he decided to spend so much time in front of his computer in this gaming world. If he didn’t have this disease, we would probably have taken the traditional approach and taken his time away from the computer. We would have been worried about all this gaming, about all the time he spent in front of the computer. We would have limited that. We would have given him an hour or two a day which he was allowed to play and so on and so forth. Most other parents and adults are doing. So as I said, kind of a blessing in disguise there. What we experienced is that he had something to spend his time on. The last 10 years of his life was more or less bound to his apartment and couldn’t go out with the rest of us, and we thought that this was a good way of occupying his mind. It was kind of a leisure activity which he what he could do. But we didn’t see beyond that. We didn’t see the real kind of relationships and how he could also set his footprint in the world and actually mean things for others. Anne told me that they also had a guy from Newcastle in this network who was bullied with at the train station when he came home from work. He was aged around 40 or something. And this This is something which he was so ashamed of that he didn’t share it with anyone else than Mats. And Mats, being 15 years younger than him, talked through with him all of the challenges that he had in his daily life and really helped him out of a very traumatic kind of situation. And from all of these stories, which we learned after Mats had passed away, we learned that he didn’t only experience relationships friendships, being in love, but also actually to be an important part in forming other people’s happiness and lives. And all of these things were the fears that we had as parents when we got this message that we would have a son with very limited possibilities of moving. But having said that, this is not the main element of the story. The main element of the story is more about we being the adults and the parents not understanding the real importance of gaming, like our parents didn’t understand the meaning and importance of punk and rock and roll in the ’70s and the ’80s. And you were completely and utterly unaware of this alternative life. I’m reading here that in this gaming world he was Ibelin, a nobleman by birth, a philanderer and a detective. I mean, sounds like quite a lot of fun. That’s true. I was of course very much aware of Iblin. I was aware of his avatar and how he played this figure, a muscular big guy who was also pretty good looking. He had a ponytail from which Mats was also given a nickname. He was called the Fox from this character. I was sitting behind my son for hours and hours watching the screen.. And this is what I have in a way wondered a lot about after he passed away. How could I sit there and watch and observe and still not understand? And I think the answer to that question is actually that I was an observer, a bystander to my son’s life. I was not a participant. If he had gone to the football field or done some other physical activities, I would probably have participated. I would have been there, I would have met his football friends, I would have met their parents, and I would have interacted and become a part of his life. In the digital gaming world, we do not do the same towards our children, our youngsters. We do not participate. At best, we are observers. And I think this is the learning and the reason for why so many people have reacted so strongly on this story. It is an emotional story, but first and foremost, I think it is a strong message to us as adults as for until we really have participated into this world and met the people in the digital world, in the gaming world that our youngsters actually meet, we do not really know what is going on there. And too fast we go to the judgmental phase and we say that this is not good for you and we want to take you away from the computer, and we don’t have the real basis and insight to actually come to that conclusion.

Speaker A: That was Robert Steen in an interview first recorded in 2019 for this program on the short but happy life of his son Mats, who managed via a virtual reality computer game to live a life that was denied to him offline, but which only goes to show that you really can live, love, and be hurt virtually. You’ve been listening to Password, written and presented by me, Peter Warren, and produced and researched by Blue Buffering. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker B: This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.