My Tiny Life

by Julian Dibbell

The first chapter is his first-person perspective of how an online text-based community called LambdaMOO created what’s described as a ‘consensual hallucination’. LambdaMOO was a very early online community, just after the web started, populated initially by idealists who thought: right, we’ll reject what we have offline and create this utopian society online. It documents how this idealistic society moved from being this utopian ideal into an environment in which people decided that they needed regulations, they needed rules, they needed very fixed community structures.