"Pussy" became a real problem for us.
We were supposed to monitor screen names and
profiles for vulgar content at America Online. Four of us shared
this position, warning members and even canceling their accounts for
violating the company's Terms of Service (TOS).
In AOL's campaign to keep the Web safe for
surburbia, we stood as the first line of defense. This month, the
Florida Supreme Court ruled the corporation couldn't be held
accountable for its customers' behavior, but we took that
responsibility to heart. Or at least, modestly, to the bank.
There in the Albuquerque foothills, we toiled in a
row of gray pods like the hundreds of others lining the call center.
Photographs of nature scenes and slogans like "There is no 'I' in
Team" dotted the walls. Our supervisors sat along the perimeter in
open cubicles. When I began in 1997, the building was sparsely
populated and the low partitions separating one space from the next
were decorated with personal effects. NASCAR images were popular
among the Techies, who showed each other up with their ever
increasing gigabytes of memory and knowledge of technology. The
Member Saves, a group that offered free months of service to corral
customers who wanted out, were mostly college students and had
pictures of their dogs, friends, and Pamela Anderson. Their
boyfriends came at lunch to pick them up in ragtops with country or
hip-hop blaring, speeding off for a punctual hour at Arby's or one
of the other fast-food joints along the strip nearby.
I landed with the Community Action Team—the CAT
Team, we called it— through a twist of post-college whimsy. On the
drive from Brooklyn to California, I broke down in New Mexico and
ended up clerking at a chain bookstore—a job I soon ditched for
glamour and $7 an hour at AOL's new center. The group was an
eclectic bunch of fetishists and people looking to start over. In
our section, pictures of Tupac Shakur and injured Asian women filled
the pods. A husband and wife, who moonlighted as a slave-dominatrix
team, worked together. She had jet black hair and a birdlike face
and was as tiny as he was tremendous. Both were pierced, tattooed,
and gruff in tight black leather. They tried to recruit new slaves
once workers fell into social patterns and began spending time in
bars downtown. Nobody made enough money to buy a spanking.
After two days of schooling, four of us were pulled
from the class to form a minicorps, TOS Names/Profiles. We would be
the ones canceling accounts the rest of the CAT Team would later
reinstate, except in cases of severe violation of AOL's Terms of
Service. A corporate trainer flew in from the Virginia headquarters
to teach us how to define vulgarity. He took us out to lunch and
acted like we were very lucky and special to have been chosen. Then
he reminded us we were never to use our own judgment when
determining what crossed the line.
We worked together until we came to a common
understanding of the TOS, furnished by the company along with a
stack of worksheets. He took us, still dazed by the royal treatment,
into a conference room and told us to circle the vulgar names. I
chose only a few while Samantha* picked practically all of them.
Erika circled about half the page and made marks next to a few
questionable entries. Juan circled a bunch, too.
*Names have been changed.
Some cases were clear-cut and some were simply a
matter of context—like "liquor in the front and poker in the rear."
It turns out there are a lot of little old ladies
in the world who adore their feline friends. So they give themselves
a name like Silkpussy and join a cat lover's chat room, then act
shocked and sickened when they get warned for having a dirty name.
Sometimes "pussy" was vulgar and sometimes not. What mattered was
motivation. You could have a chink in your armor but not in your
bed, and big balls, as long as your profile didn't include
descriptions of having them licked, sucked, or fondled.
Screen names and profiles serve as the
primary methods by which strangers become acquainted. The sudden
appearance of JewKiller in a chat room is akin to spotting a bicep
tattooed with a swastika. Both are announcements of intent. But
anonymity emboldens people who would never introduce themselves this
way at a job interview or on a first date, unless they happened to
meet at a Klan rally.
So it is with AOL profiles, which are like the
telephone booths in which Clark Kent becomes Superman. A 400-pounder
with a beard could never otherwise pass himself off as a 14-year-old
girl.
Our job was to read the complaints that filled the
TOS mailbox. We were aided in the endeavor by do-gooders who
sometimes patrolled all night, producing hundreds of handles and
profiles that might violate the rules.
According to the Terms of Service, this included
names and profiles that were "unlawful, threatening, abusive,
harassing, defamatory, libelous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of
another's privacy, tortious" or contained "explicit or graphic
descriptions or accounts of sexual acts (including but not limited
to sexual language of a violent or threatening nature directed at
another individual or group of individuals)." The rules further
forbid any ID or profile that "victimizes, harasses, degrades, or
intimidates an individual or group of individuals on the basis of
religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or
disability." The same went for a handle that "infringes on any
patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or
other proprietary right of any party or impersonates any person or
entity, including any employee or representative of America Online."
This last prohibition became a real source of
contention. Vigilante members resorted to mimicry, adopting names
like CAT John for the sake of civilian policing. They wanted to
administer online warnings of their own, with authority. Most AOL
members didn't take kindly to this sort of horseplay. Neither did
members of the CAT Team. Sometimes we canceled such accounts on the
spot, only to see them activated again once the cowboy called in and
got a stern talking-to.
We mostly left the job of explaining infractions to
people on the CAT Team, who delivered the sermon while we sat in
silence in our pods, reading complaints. In a pinch, we could always
recite the Terms of Service, and we were told to stick by it. These
were not personal judgments, after all.
Try telling that to NGGERHATER or THROATSLITR.
Through online chat, people test out their
most secret impulses. The segmentation of rooms and sites allows
them to find one another like rapists in a prison. Just as playing
Dungeons & Dragons doesn't turn a kid into a wizard, pretending
to be a homicidal maniac online doesn't make a man a killer. But
determining what it does make him is one of the biggest ethical
dilemmas facing modern society.
The novelty quickly wore off of even the most
unexpected combinations of words in member profiles, like "snatch
fangs." Hobbies: "I like a good orange up my ass." Quote: "I'll
f:u:c:k for a buck and do something strange for some change." Quote:
"Stop changing your lipstick, my dick is starting to look like a
rainbow." Quote: "You could drive a truck through my ass crack." The
same lines appeared in thousands of profiles, the lack of
originality making the task even bleaker. Hobbies: "k-9 sex, violent
sex, bondage, anal, anything I'm a sub and I could be dominant too,
if you are a sub email me with a fantasy and a slutty pic and I will
respond to all I will cyber for anyone who can make me wet." Over
and over and over.
Online, people write what they wish they could say
to a stranger at a club. They slip the shackle of accountability,
set free by a box of unsigned words. They give themselves character
traits created by the illusion that this kind of behavior can be
carried over into real life without serious consequences. These
online provocateurs would remain safe, if only their activities
stayed in the realm of make-believe.
But they don't.
Occasionally we received a letter via snail mail,
like the following, postmarked from Texas on April 21, 1997:
"Dear American Online,
"Your service that you
provide mostly chat rooms is really bad. For one people get
scammed, people get raped, people get their lives ruined. Your
chat rooms destroyed my life and my marriage. I am broke, getting
divorced and am very depressed. I may need professional help and I
may never get my life together again."
Some of the mail we received contained
descriptions of decapitation and the sexual violence that would be
done to our lifeless bodies if we didn't reinstate the account,
indicating that some members don't realize their actual identities
are attached to their names. All we had to do was look up an account
to get the address, name, and phone number of the author.
We were contractually bound to resist using member
information. One day a guy from Member Saves, with bumper stickers
on his wheelchair and an angel face, could not fight the temptation.
A terrified member complained that someone had announced her home
address in a chat room. She turned in his screen name, and when
management brought up his account, marked "employee," they called
him to the boss's office on the spot. By then personal effects were
not permitted in pods, so there was no reason for him to return to
the call floor. He was gone within minutes.
We received e-mail from parents every day. "You can
imagine my son's surprise," I remember one woman writing, "when he
searched on basketball and the first profile up had the sentence,
'If I knew it was gonna be that kinda party I woulda sticked my dick
in the mashed potatoes.' "
Some people like to cocoon themselves in plastic
wrap to crap and screw. Some fathers barter their daughters in
exchange for the children of other men. Some women are looking to
serve cocktails on their hands and knees at Super Bowl parties, butt
plug in place. All of this became the business of our little crew.
One supervisor erred on the side of caution,
advising us to flag monikers as jumbled and innocuous as Smotpoker
and Fuhq. Ours was not just a struggle against unruly impulses and
desires. Names, once they were called to our attention, were picked
apart for hidden violations.
My coworker Samantha, married to a cop, was truly
stunned by some of what she saw. She stumbled across the Rubber Nun
one sunny afternoon, introducing us all to a world of latex habits,
gas masks, and torture devices. Felching, which includes two
cardinal sins of online sex references, asses and cum, not to
mention drinking straws, really knocked her for a loop. Her liberal
cancellation of accounts necessitated further training for the team.
Erika quickly became our leader. She showed up for
work every day wearing clothes embroidered with the company logo,
ecstatic at the opportunity to work for America Online. She spent
hours chatting with other people who had autistic children or loved
Def Leppard, and she followed the company line. AOL provided a lot
of incentive to do so, given the high rate of promotion. Fellow
trainees with nose rings and shaggy hair turned into clean-cut
corporate executives as soon as the keys to the new Jeep hit their
palms.
Juan had a fuzzy moustache, a blond girlfriend, and
a yellow Camaro. He didn't take the job too seriously; he was just
tired of working the oil rig. He did what he had to do and didn't
get too involved in disputes with people furious over the loss of
their online identity.
When DrEnema was warned for his name, we engaged in
a battle that lasted several days. He was an actual doctor and
stated in his profile that he administered "sadistic enemas to men,
women, and children." We couldn't have a kid going into this guy's
office for a stubbed toe, leaving with a butt full of coffee beans.
Cases like his blurred the border between fantasy and reality. His
was not the only one.
"There is a simple explanation for why this
happens," says a supervisor at America Online who does not wish to
be identified. "People are able to completely transcend what they
are in real life and live a different life entirely.
"This is such a paradoxical time right now. It is
the age of information and the age of misinformation. There was a
time when people thought that something printed in a newspaper must
be true. It's not like that online, but it almost is. You go through
an urge when you see a screen name and a profile and you immediately
think, oh, it must be true, but then you realize that it's just
words, and that anybody can say anything at all."
Ours was one team at America Online, but
there are others, monitoring violations in e-mail, on member Web
sites, and throughout the company's staple, instant messages.
America Online is no longer a string of call centers against lonely
backdrops like the Sandia Mountains. AOL/Time Warner, setting up
shop now in New York City, has access to nearly every line of
communication in and out of our homes.
The gravity and absurdity of the situation became
clear when, having answered every complaint in the box, I took a
call. A woman frantically explained her catastrophe. Her young son
had been chatting online, and when she went to get him for dinner,
she found his room empty. A last instant message was posted on the
screen: "See you soon, can't wait." She begged me for the name and
address of the person behind the dangling screen name. I had the
information right in front of me, but I couldn't give it to her.
My heart flipped in my chest. What had started as a
job wide with possibilities had narrowed to a pinhole through which
I could see the messy corners and anguished moments of so many
ordinary lives. I had the power to protect her, or at least to
help—a mission my employer had made clear. Yet here the interests of
customer and corporation collided.
I put her on hold and sought the supervisor's
advice. There were no options. Only a subpoena warranted release of
that name. According to the rules, he was right. And I had to tell
her, in turn, as firmly as I could, that I could be of no assistance
in the matter. She grew tired of pleading and slammed the phone back
in the cradle. I like to believe her child came waltzing home, arms
full of roses, within moments of that call. I like to believe it.
Even now, I understand that America Online is no
more responsible for a stranger getting in than the phone company is
when a latchkey kid answers a call from the creep across the street.
But if there is anything more alluring to a developing mind than a
blank slate on which to etch the symbols of adulthood, I can't
imagine what it is.
I left AOL within days of that call, unable to
shake what I'd learned: From a strictly evolutionary perspective,
the eggs that hatch online, in the imagination, grow wings and claws
behind the closed doors of real houses.
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