I'm basically a philosophy professor, but I'm a philosophy professor who writes a lot about sex and writes a lot about language and communication and has spent a lot of time in the kink world and the poly world and at sex events. And what I'm trying to do right now is finish a book on sexual agency and communication and negotiation that does not center traditional heterosexual, bio-body essentialist relationships, but takes a broader view than that. And do you wanna do one sentence on you before I go on? Just very briefly, I think the moderator covered it well. I have a law degree, I work in information technology, primarily on issues of privacy, and I think through a lot about what the compliance requirements are, as well as the ethics requirement of information systems. So that's how I come to this issue. Okay. So that said, we all know that lots of people fuck online and have for a long time, right? Lots of people use online digital space to have sex and erotically engage in various ways, various kinds of online spaces, games, social media, dating apps, all kinds of spaces. And we also know, and we'll go into a little bit of the evidence for this, but I think we all know this, that people often fuck online using a persona that in one way or another does not exactly match the persona that they have offline, right? That there's a fair amount of identity play that goes on online when people erotically engage. Sometimes this is explicit role play, right? Everybody knows that they're playing a role. This happens both online and online. But also people build online personas that are not exactly role playing, but are extensions or transmutations of themselves in one way or another. They build different selves to use online. And one of the cool things about virtual space is it gives us this potential to transcend our physical and social limitations and to imaginatively extend and multiply and curate and fragment and just generally play with our identity and our desires. There's all sorts of ways in which online space is a great place for this kind of erotic identity play, right? There's all sorts of ways in which online space is a great place for this kind of erotic identity play. There's less risk of STIs, there's less risk of physical harm, it's easier to disengage if you get in over your head. But importantly also, being online gives you a wider array of possibilities for how to be, and it also gives you a wider array of possibilities for how to be and it also gives you a wider array of possibilities for who to meet and who to engage with. So basically we think there's enormous possibility for what we think of as an enhancement of sexual agency through something like cyborg sexual play online. And last point just to set things up, some of the literature on this talks as if online sex is disembodied sex where it's all happening just textually or visually and we think that's wrong. We think it's mediated but it very much involves the body, right? It involves bodily attractions and bodily responses. So you're not escaping the body, you're playing with and transforming the body. Okay, so again, just to hammer home the point about how this isn't always just fake role play, right? People who come to a conference like this are going to be super familiar with the idea that we all have identities that are not settled or unified or the same in every context. The virtual identities that we build might be ones that we're just trying on. They might be on their way to being more filled-in identities, emerging identities of some kind. And it often happens that people feel, for either physical reasons, because of the limits of their flesh bodies, or for social reasons, unable to explore and build an identity offline, like a queer identity or a trans identity, for example, and they might feel like they can only be authentic in an online space. But also, even more subtly, people don't always know exactly who they are, right? A lot of us are ambivalent and unsure about who and what we are. And so playing with identity online can be something that's neither quite just fake role play nor the expression of your true authentic self, but an experiment in figuring out what it's like to be a certain kind of person. And because when you're online, you always have to actually actively represent yourself, right? You don't just sitting there for people to see. There's always a process of curating and building your identity, and that opens the way to all kinds of interesting play. We're going to go back and forth. Okay. Okay, so having established that lots of people have sex online and that having sex online offers certain advantages, let's go one step more specific, and that is a lot of people explore trans identities or sexual preference identities online and this offers several advantages, especially to folks who have not expressed those identities in other forums before. First, if one is exploring a trans identity, one's physical appearance does not need to match one's gender identity. So, for example, if you present as one gender and you're in a medium that is text only and doesn't require your physical image, then one can be fully expressed in the gender in which one is exploring or is more comfortable. And unfortunately, I mean, there are, even in 2023, there are plenty of places, especially in the states where we come from, where it can be very unsafe to explore those identities. And online, you can find find community and like-minded people. You can assume an entirely different identity, including masking your name and such details as where you live. And in that way you can avoid sort of the social consequences, ostracization, the threat of transphobia and homophobia and physical violence. But another really interesting thing about adopting a trans or a gay identity online is, in our view, neither of those things are necessarily permanent. They can be temporary, and we use the word malleable, changeable. So these are ways of trying on these identities, and people do. We've dipped into the literature and found that there are folks of all ages who do this kind of exploration. There are older people, very common among teens. And in some cases, people adopt these identities online and then come out, sort, that this is their first step to exploring those identities. There's one scholar that we found, a communication scholar named Marciano, A.V. Marciano, who notes that there are three different ways, or he categorizes three different ways that people use their online identities. They can be preliminary, that is a way of sort of testing out a new identity that you later adopt offline. They can be complementary, in other words, you may be living both online and offline with that identity. Or they can be, what's the word that you used? Alternative, yes, thank you. Or they can be alternative. I mean, maybe you're expressing that identity online and have no intention of ever expressing that way offline. An interesting point that he also makes is that a lot of folks who are trans online have sexual encounters and don't necessarily inform their partners of their trans status. More on that later. But when he interviews those individuals, they don't believe that they're being deceptive or fake or in any other way that that interaction is not real. Thank you. I think on some level... Okay, I see a lot of smiles. A lot of you have seen this meme before. On some levels, we're all familiar with the fact that we use different platforms for different purposes, and everyone explores different aspects of their personality in those spaces. But we also can explore different identities in these spaces, and trans folks and teen folks often do this by maintaining separate accounts, having a presence on different platforms that aren't necessarily aligned. And there's one scholar that found that a lot of trans people keep two social media accounts, including on the same platform, one expressing their preferred gender and the other in the one that perhaps they express offline every day, and that who has access to those accounts may differ. There's one scholar who also writes that it's important for teens in particular that they're able to compartmentalize different identities and different accounts to craft selves through storytelling. And perhaps most importantly, you know, we don't believe that gender and sexual preference is necessarily permanent. It may be shapeable or malleable. so maybe you need to be able to retract an identity that you've explored that it turns out doesn't sit well with you. It's been noted that some folks begin to explore an identity by using dating services, perhaps with no intention of ever actually dating, but needing to see what it's like having a first personal experience, not just reading about others' experiences or reading stories, but actually going through the world and navigating in a social space as a different gender. This raises a little bit of, I go as far as to call it a moral panic. And this raises a little bit of, I go as far as to call it a moral panic. I mean, there's a trope out there, a very transphobic trope about folks who have one gender but don't reveal their transgender status. And I don't know if this term has made it over to Europe, but I mean, it's a pretty common term at this point to call this catfishing. Catfishing also refers to using a fake identity for any kind of purpose where you're using another individual or individuals for exploitation. One can say that, say for example, the Prince scam that we've all seen on email is an example of catfishing. It takes its name from a 2010 movie in which a young man from New York, a photographer, had an online relationship, or believed himself to have an online relationship, and when he went to go try to meet that person uninvited, he discovered that there was no such person, that it was an identity that was crafted by this person's supposed half-sister. And there's a lot of ways to view exactly what happened, but you can pretty much make the case that she was a stay-at-home wife and mother who was taking care of two kids with special needs and was using this identity for a certain kind of fulfillment without letting the other person know that that was the role that they were playing in their lives. So I think most people would agree that that's sort of an unethical use of exploring a different identity online, but the use of an unethical identity does point towards the fact that there should be an ethics of engaging online, using another identity, including having sex online. So, and this is important because we don't think that sex online is frivolous or adopting another identity is necessarily cruel or wrong. We think that there certainly can be gaps between your online and offline lives that are ethical and appropriate and understandable. So we wanted to explore a little bit how we can analyze and go through that ethics. Yeah, so when we started thinking about what a sort of rich ethics of erotic engagement as a cyborg self online would look like, it occurred to us there was like this huge variety of kinds of ethical issues that had not been really mined or talked about. And I want to make clear that especially for me, when I talk about an ethical issue, I really don't mean like a set of things not to do. I mean in a positive sense, if we want to have happy, pleasurable, fulfilling, agential sex lives online, how do we do that well and respectfully in a way that protects others' agency as well? in a way that protects others' agency as well. And when we started thinking about it, we noticed there was this whole panoply of issues around consent, deception, authenticity, privacy, exploitation, trust. There's no way that we're gonna be able to give detailed arguments about all of those. What we wanna do with the rest of this talk is really sort of spark your imagination about what it would mean to go into online cyber sex as a sex positive, ethically engaged, ethically aware person. There are online sex communities, like role playing sex communities, like in particular the very old Gorian community on Second Life which is like a horrible misogynist community but there are such communities that have come up with like sexual codes of ethics for how to engage online they're very shallow there are lists of rules like don't rape anybody don't torture anybody but there isn't any kind of actual probing about what does it mean to engage respectfully when you're doing so in a way that is detached in a certain sense from your fleshy, offline body, right? There are, in the Goryan community, they have developed a little bit of machinery like this, so they do have, like, safe words. They use fade to black as a safe word, but there isn't any kind of interrogation of what does trust mean in that context, how do we show respect, how do we develop consent, and so forth. So what we're hoping to do with the rest of this talk is raise some of these issues, not to resolve them, but so that if you want to go off and play online, that you have sort of in your head a toolbox of things that you might want to talk to a partner about or think about in terms of how to engage well. So first issue is we think there's really rich ethical issues around the entanglement or lack of entanglement between people's online and offline selves, right? And one thing that's obviously important is that consenting to something online does not imply consent to anything offline, including it doesn't imply consent for that person to have any claim over your offline life in any form, right? So if people are going to engage as personas that are online personas, they can't then impose on one another expectations that that relationship is going to bleed into their offline life. And drawing on what you know about somebody's offline life or intruding into their offline life or trying to use your online relationship to shape and push at their offline life, all of these seem ethically troubling. There was some of you, how many of you have read the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? Anybody? Oh my god, if you have, hardly anybody's right. Please read it, it's absolutely fantastic. If you guys are here and you're interested in technology and you're interested in sex, you absolutely have to read this book. It's so, so, so good. It's like two years old or something like that. Wonderful novel about game designers and sex and love. Anyway, one of the things that happens in the novel is that there's a big rupture between these two characters that have been friends and off and on kind of sort of almost lovers for decades. And they're not talking to each other and they haven't talked to each other for years. And one of the characters designs a game specifically in order to seduce the other character inside the game in another persona. So the game designer builds a persona, sort of expects that the other character is going to want to play the game. The other person builds a persona. And the want to play the game, the other person builds a persona, and the whole structure of the game is actually designed to build a relationship with her online because she can't have one offline. And I mean, there's something deeply ethically troubling about it, but I don't think we have the ethical apparatus to talk about exactly what's wrong about it, right? But something that seems to be wrong about it is that it's unethical, even though everything inside the game is consensual, it's unethical to sort of, without somebody's knowledge or consent, to drag your offline knowledge of them or your offline relationship of them into the online scene. So there's complicated issues there. Where's my issue two? I need to borrow your issue two. Oh, there it is. Everything is out of order. Okay, second issue. And this is probably my favorite of all of the issues, to be frank, in terms of just I'm a philosopher. I just think this one is absolutely philosophically fascinating. Are there limits to what kind of persona you can, in fact, adopt online? And one thing I want to just not offer an argument for, but just sort of put my foot down about as an intuition, is that any kind of gender or sexual orientation identity is fair game. You are allowed to play with any of those. You know, why? Roughly because that's kind of how we find out what we like when it comes to gender and sexual orientation is to explore. And I'm also committed to the idea that there's no sort of fixed, settled fact of the matter about what gender or sexual orientation anybody necessarily has. So being able to expand your repertoire in that domain seems not only harmless but exciting and fun. But I do think that there are some categories of identities that it's interestingly like not ethically okay to take up. And I've thought of three and there might be more and this is the kind of thing we might want to talk about. One is there seems to be something ethically troubling about appropriating experiences of marginalized groups that are really not yours to appropriate, right? So if you're white showing up online with a black persona, or if you're Christian showing up online with a Muslim persona, or whatever it may be, feels off, because there's something about how it's important for those kinds of marginalized experiences and perspectives to be authentically represented rather than co-opted by the very groups that are across them. So that one feels troubling. It also seems like it's troubling to take on an identity that's going to actively mislead your online sex partners about the true power dynamics that are going on behind the scene that they don't know about. So for example, it's problematic for a child to go online and pretend to be an adult and play as an adult with the other person having no idea that they're playing with somebody who is offline a child. It's problematic to be somebody's boss or a police officer where there's a huge power imbalance and go online and play in a persona that doesn't disclose that. And actually when we were writing this paper, Dan asked me, well, what if it's as part of a sting and the police officer is trying to use, is trying to like, you know, get information to make an arrest. And I thought about it for a few minutes because it was a good question. And I was like, my response to that is fuck the police. No. I think that's just unethical. Don't do that. You don't get to, like, have... And it's part of our original point. I want to make it clear that when I asked that question, I sincerely was asking the question, not just asking questions. But this is part of the point that we started with, that, like, online sex is not frivolous. It's real sex. So if you're a police officer, you don't get to go fuck somebody just to entrap them, right? Okay. So that's another one. A third one is it seems really troubling to take on the identity of some specific other real person who you're claiming to be, right? Because then you're embroiling that real person in relationships that they haven't consented to and don't know anything about, right? So I can't go online and actually present myself as, I don't know, Elliot Page, I don't know. I'm trying to think who I would want to, who I wish I could present myself as. would want to. That you can't do because then that person is embroiled in all kinds of relationships that they didn't pick. Really important point though we put it in yellow. What we're talking about here is actually taking on and performing a persona. We are not talking about explicit fantasy roleplay. We are not here to judge anybody's explicit fantasy role play. We are not here to judge anybody's explicit fantasy role play. So if you have a negotiated agreement with somebody that you're going to pretend to be a police officer or pretend to be a kid or whatever it may be, the ethics of that are a separate question. We're not judging that. We're talking about what kind of identities or personas you actually get to build and take on as your own. Okay, how long have we been? Does anybody know how long we've been talking? I think about... 20 to about 15 minutes. Perfect. Okay, we'll talk for like no more than 35 minutes, Thomas. Okay, so third issue. How much does your partner need to know about your offline flesh self when you are having sex with them online? And in particular, the complicated ethical situation we think, if you agree to sex with somebody and the person is quite different offline from who you are guessing they are based on their online persona, when might that or might it not invalidate your consent? So there's a really famous paper, and I'm going to nerd out and talk about a little bit of contemporary analytic philosophy right now. There's a really famous paper that came out about 10 years ago by a philosopher, Tom Doherty, where he argued that it doesn't actually count as valid sexual consent. If you consent to have sex with somebody who has a feature, where if you knew they had that feature, it would be what he calls a defeater. That would be a deal breaker for you, and you would not want to have sex with them. And part of his point is you can't like write up a list of official defeaters because everybody has different defeaters, right? Somebody might just be revolted by the idea of having sex with an American Republican, right? You just don't know. You don't know what people's deal breakers are, right? Different people have different deal breakers. But his point is that when you consent to sex, you're not just consenting to an abstract act. You're consenting to an act with a particular person. And if that person is sufficiently relevantly different from who you thought, it might not be consent. We think that in an online virtual space, all of that has to be nuanced quite a bit if you're in a space where there's an expectation of identity play there's a limit to how much people have a right to know about you even if some of the things that they might have found out about you would have been defeaters for them so for example an obvious really charged case is, you know, if you're about to have sex with somebody online, you're presenting as a femme woman, that's the persona that you are coming online with. And the other person says, hey, wait, before we have sex, I need you to know, I would never have sex with a biological male. So I need you to tell me if offline, you're actually a biological male. That is in fact a defeater for a lot of people right we live in a transphobic society we want to suggest that even asking that kind of question in the right kind of online space where a certain amount of identity play is already understood to be going on, might be inappropriate. That it may just be that when you do this thing of cyborg sex play in virtual space, you are giving up your right to have that kind of knowledge about or fixation about somebody's fleshy body, right? But then, I mean, there are limits to that because, for example, we do think you have the right to know if you actually know that person offline, right, in a way that you didn't realize you did. So going back to the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow case, if you're actually fucking your ex-boyfriend and don't know that, that's probably a thing that you deserve to know, right? So there are some limits. Okay, passing it back to Dan. All right, thank you. We've got three more issues to go, and then we're done. Okay. I have to be extremely careful with this slide because we wanted to try to hit each slide for about two minutes, and I could talk for a solid, well, week about this topic. Don't do that. Dare me. So let's talk about privacy. I don't have time to go into a good, solid definition of privacy because I was asked this recently, and my response took seven minutes, so I'm not going to do that. But I think most people understand privacy as consisting primarily of confidentiality, Most people understand privacy as consisting primarily of confidentiality, that is, controlling who has access to the data, making sure it is secure, but privacy is a much bigger and richer topic. For example, privacy is inextricable with ideas about reputation and self-representation and how we choose to be perceived, And that's about all I can have time to say about that. I can say that that approach to privacy is reflected in at least some laws in the United States as well as in Europe, which has a much more thorough and useful privacy law. But, of course, we're not here today to talk about the law, we're here to talk about ethics which ideally drives and shapes the law and often it does. But one privacy principle that has been widely agreed upon and is used in a lot of different places and is reflected in a lot of laws is that data reuse Is not permissible without consent So if you collect data for information about people if you share information about yourself for one purpose that it shouldn't be Repurposed without permission so you can go into a sexual engagement online and you can reasonably expect that that person will not reshare, screenshot, or otherwise expose what has transpired in your sexual encounter. There is a major exception to that, of course, and that is if in the course of your conversation you discover that your partner is potentially a danger to themselves or others, and this is just sort of a classic exception to general rules around confidentiality, attorney, client, doctor, patient, that yes, in that situation, it may be the ethical thing to do to share as much information as possible with an authority that can prevent a future harm. So the ethics shifts rather dramatically and sharply in those circumstances. Another ethical concern, we already talked about the fact that you don't want to entangle the online and offline worlds, and that too is also a privacy issue and it can be amazingly easy to re-identify people who are interacting anonymously. I mean there is so much that can re-identify you to the point where you might be able to be contacted or even harmed offline. Your hobbies, the general area where you live, your preferences, your affiliations, the products that you've bought. So alone, those things may not re-identify you, but in conversation, if multiple issues or multiple clues come up, then people can be re-identified. And part of my job involves reading horror stories about re-identification under really regrettable circumstances. And there's very little that you can do about that. There's no technological feature that can prevent that kind of betrayal. So all you can really do is, A, negotiate with a partner and reveal your preference for not entangling your online and offline lives, and, B, for people to go in knowing that even seemingly innocuous information may be exploited in ways that you didn't expect. Just so you know, we've already done half an hour, so we should go a quick few minutes. Okay. Our next issue is authenticity in the sense of aligning your online and offline lives. You may get cues from the forum that you're in or the application that you're using that you are expected to align your online and offline lives. And our example is the straight-edge community. Discussion forums often insist on a certain kind of authenticity. Hands, can we have hands as the straight-edge community? Is that familiar over here? I'm seeing a few little nods. So it's a punk subculture where the members do not use drugs or alcohol. I think it was a bigger thing in the 70s and 80s. In other environments, your authenticity may consist of, you may not be expected to live offline the way you're living online, but your engagement needs to be sincere. So you can't be joining those communities just out of a desire for appropriation or fetishization or mere curiosity. Curiosity here meaning voyeuristic curiosity, not curiosity of self-exploration. Can I just take one more about the straight-edge thing? The reason we like that example is because when we looked into it, it turned out they were doing all kinds of gatekeeping to like test whether people actually were living the lifestyle, otherwise they weren't welcome in that community, which is really different from what tends to go on, for example, in queer communities. I just want to make sure that came out. Sure. So this is mostly an in our experience thing, but in our experience, most queer communities don't demand that you be out in your offline life, but do expect you to be sincerely part of that community and not merely some kind of ironic tourist. There are other communities that don't require that degree of authenticity. I mean, obviously, fanfic forums are a great place and a place where a lot of online sex occurs. And if you're pretending to be a fictional character, that might just be part of the set of expectations. Okay, I am going to try to skip forward a little bit. I do want to make the point, though, I don't want to drop this point, that consent, when you're having a discussion about consent, that has to be authentic. You can't be, for example, you can't be, say, a leering, ironic bigot who consents and maybe the exchange happens exactly as you promised. We do find something unethical about giving that consent but not being sincerely engaged. So we've already argued that you don't always owe people the full truth about your offline persona, and that authenticity can be a messy concept and a shifting concept. It might be different depending on which form or environment you're in. But consent has to be both authentic and sincere. That is, you know, meant and that you are not just performing in character, but you're making promises about your future behavior and embracing certain values. I think it's important to recognize that sex online is still sex. There's no asterisk there. We talked before about this being a bodily experience. So consent online is still consent. Violating consent is still a violation of consent. Betrayal is still betrayal. Degradation is still degradation. So the apparent unreality of virtual space doesn't change any of those things and any of those considerations that also apply to offline sex. Yeah, I just want to, as I suspected, I want to jump in one time here and just point out, I'm sorry, they're recording, so we need this. Right now, and some of you are probably aware of this, there's just this flowering of really fantastic literature on the complexities and subtleties of what sexual agency means. People talk about ongoing consent and enthusiastic consent, but then also people are talking about things other than consent, like exit conditions and good quality negotiation before you start and all of that. And what we want to make sure is that people think about how all of that complexity applies to online virtual sex as well. And the fact that you're playing online and that you have the body of a furry alien or whatever it may be doesn't give you any kind of exemption to narrow consent down to something boring and formulaic. All of the same nuance about how we negotiate, how we talk to one another, how we treat one another applies online as well. Okay, thanks. And we are almost done. Okay, so the last item that I wanted to hit, and I suspect this is going to be of special interest to a lot of you in the room who are technologists, engineers, policy people of one kind or another. And that is that in addition to these other issues that we've hit on where it's very much a matter of individual action and negotiation within a sexual encounter, there are some things that might be required of the scaffolding for how the sex takes place. So for example, the forum that you're in or the application that you're using might need to have certain features that enable some of these behaviors. I will try to go through these very quickly. There might need to be a recognition that sex really is sex, that this all means something in the sense of is governed by or should be governed by a set of ethics. There should be a notification of expectations. We talked before that some environments have a different level of expectation about authenticity than others. And maybe that's something that can be scaffolded in the environment that you're in. It can be an explicit statement about the expectations of authenticity. Really critical, disengagement. There should be a way to to withdraw from a situation that makes you uncomfortable or even to say, okay, I want to abandon that identity. You need to be able to close your account. You need to be able to no longer subscribe to the service. These are things that apply for a lot of technologies, but you need to be able to have complete exit conditions. The next one, when we were writing this, Quill said, do we have to call it redress? No one knows the word redress. Well, I insisted, yes, technologists often call it redress. If something goes wrong, you may need a way to take action, whether that's flagging an account, giving a negative review, speaking to an admin that can block that account, or otherwise take action against the individual who violated a set of rules or expectations, whether that's the rules and expectations set by the platform or by your interpersonal agreement. Respectful treatment, that kind of ties tightly with the redress idea that you still owe, I mean there's a lot of talk these days about civility and sometimes civility is weaponized. It's a way of not exploring, of keeping people from seeking redress. But there are certain kinds of expectations of interactions that are reasonable, that one shouldn't be degraded or insulted or belittled, except if that's what you've negotiated for. And finally, there needs to be some kind of a mechanism where consent and negotiation is possible, and perhaps your environment will give you cues as to how that can be done. We talked before about the gorean community in second life where there was an expected code about how one approaches i don't want to say the term yeah now that i've said that okay if someone was sexually available in the gorean community they were referred to as i'm sorry a free woman it was a very misogynistic community so but there may need to be a set of rules around how consent and negotiation can be initiated and take place. Yeah, so just to conclude, we want to argue that on the one hand, we think this kind of cyborg sexual spaces are sexy and exciting that they've expanded the possibility for sexual play for agency for fulfillment and for exploration that they overcome some of the limits of our meat sex and allow us to have bodies and have bodily experiences that we couldn't otherwise have and to meet and interact with people in communities that we couldn't otherwise have and to meet and interact with people and communities that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. Whoops. Sorry. There we go. We've also argued that sex online is not necessarily or typically fake or pretend, but that it's often a legitimate technological expansion of our sexual capacities and our identity, and it lets us curate and control our identities in exciting ways. But like all other actual sex, it involves vulnerability, it involves the possibility of harm, it's ethically complex, and it comes with potentials like betrayal and degradation that we have to take seriously. Both the individuals who have sex in virtual spaces and also the people who are responsible for building and controlling these spaces in which we have virtual sex should really take seriously the need for a sex-positive, rich sexual ethics for virtual spaces and cyborgs. And what we hope to have done here is to have opened the door to this kind of inclusive, sex-positive, anti-bioessentialist reflection on what a cyborg's sexual ethics might look like. And we'll stop there. Thanks. Thank you. Sorry. Okay, we want questions. Questions, please. Should I? I can also, like, quickly summarize. Yeah. Oh, for the what can you take on? Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So as to the gay hetero thing, that one is a different issue because we think you get to take on any sexual orientation you want online in any direction but Because that's how some people try to be gay right is that way but yes in In terms of the other point that you made yes This is probably overly simplistic of both me and my response to you, but roughly yes We think that if there's a group that is marginalized and struggling to have its perspectives and experiences fully respected and included, then appropriating them is problematic. Playing around with dominant perspectives that you don't usually have access to, that seems to me to be fair game, or that's at least the first cut intuition. Yeah. Other questions? Question. You spoke about privacy and exceptions, exceptions to when it's okay to share information or something that happens in an incident interaction. And you spoke about notifying authorities. I'd like to connect that to the police that we heard before. Where does it again share with the community if someone is displaying predatory behavior or where do you draw the line? Yeah, that's a really good question, and I'm going to decline to answer it. So our plan for today was to talk about what the spheres of ethical topics are, and there are untold numbers of ethical issues that we could sort through there there are some you know in America there are some legal cases that tend to control and standards that have been set one of the most famous one is more V regions a case in which the California University system did not warn an individual that they were in imminent danger from an ex-boyfriend who talked about their wish to do violence to them in a therapy session. So, I mean, the standard is often imminent risk of harm to self or others. But of course, I mean, we have not thought through all the possible ethical implications there, and there are many. Including that, what is deemed to be an imminent risk may involve some subjective judgment and can't be broken down into something algorithmic. And so I'm sorry I'm not prepared to do that today, but it's a fascinating question yeah I'll give back to you in a second that actually picks up on exactly what I wanted to add to Dan's answer because I want to reconcile Dan's answer with the very important fuck the police thesis, which is oftentimes to me in an ideal community, there would be collective mutual processes for figuring out how to deal with wrongdoers. And so the sharing might not necessarily be a carceral sharing to authorities, right? The sharing might be bringing something to the larger community where hopefully there will be processes in place for the community dealing with that. So yeah, there's lots of kinds of moving away from the privacy of the one-on-one encounter that are short of the nuclear option. Yeah, I do agree with that, but I also believe that that's appropriate. Certainly that would be my answer for a violation of norms, a violation of consent, of trust, and so on. I don't have a... I wish there were another way to intervene when someone is threatening, believably, I don't have a, I wish there were another way to intervene when someone is threatening believably physical harm to themselves or someone else. Right now we only have, I don't know who else I would call and that's unfortunate. I have a question. Would it be a violation of a specific sex platform policy if a person with disabilities showed up on the platform and wanted to perform, like interact sexually, erotically because very often people with disabilities, they go on those cyber, like, persona platforms just to be themselves. Right. Just to avoid this appropriation of, like, normalcy. Absolutely. And you're expected to. I used to research this. Me too, yeah. For instance, like, you know what I'm talking about. Yes. So they present their persona to be a persona with disabilities. There is a consent, but somehow the person gets revealed that in real life they're also a person with disabilities. Would it be a violation? Should people be explicit about their real-life person when they introduce the persona to match the real-life person? I, yeah, so I have two, like, very separate answers to your question. I think that these cases are really interesting. I actually, I'm a philosopher, but I'm also the director of disability studies at my university, and this is a huge interest of mine. So I certainly don't think it's any kind of violation. So two separate points. One point is I think that the whole, I don't want the take home from our paper to be that the only way of playing creatively online is by changing your persona. Sometimes the way of creatively playing online is by getting to be who you are offline in a community where that's possible in a way that it isn't possible offline, right? So that's also like one of the agency enhancing excitement, exciting things about this is that you can take what might be a stigmatized property in in meat space and be like here this is going to be something that I'm holding up as sexually attractive and exciting and find a community in which that happens so I definitely don't think it's a violation in that sense and I think it happens all the time but the other thing I want to say is when you asked like do you have to disclose who you are offline part of what we were trying to bring out and unfortunately we had so many points in so little time that they all went fast, is that like this what the standards for authenticity are really vary from community to community, right? So some communities like it's part of that community that you have to be explicit about who you are offline. Some communities, it's explicit that you don't. Some communities are like, well, you don't have to tell us who you are offline, but you have to be here sincerely and not voyeuristically. And it varies from community to community. And ethical engagement in those communities is not just about following the rules of consent and all of that. It's also about respecting those within community standards about how authenticity is being negotiated. One of the ways of being an asshole in that kind of setting is you might get consent for everything you're doing and following all the rules inside, but you are deceiving people about whether you have the right kind of understanding of authenticity that that particular community wants right so like that straight edge community they all honestly they kind of all seem like douchebags to me but whatever they've made very clear that they don't want you in that community unless your offline persona matches what you're saying online and so then that needs to be respected in other communities it doesn't work that way. But you asked in general would that be a violation. I know of no law that requires, if you're asking what the requirements are. I will suggest though that if you demand that someone demonstrates that they have a disability before they adopt an identity online with a disability, that's exactly the kind of potential risk of re-identification that I'm talking about. Plenty of disabilities are uncommon and introduce a major clue to who someone is. And if that is the rule you enforce on your platform, all the other users will know that you genuinely have a disability. So it gets very complicated in terms of a risk of re-identification and real-world harm. Yeah, and I'm asking this because, absolutely, I mean, just like, you know, academically, like, being born with that, all my sex is exactly like your life sex, and we should not be making this distinction. Like, psychologically, it's the same thing happening. But there are often just, like, I mean, when I research my sex of people with disabilities, this is what they were telling me that when they adopt, when they present themselves as a persona of a person, of an avatar with disabilities, and it slipped, they slip that they're actually like, you know, in real life, a person with disabilities. It gives like, you know, the other side, the uncanny valley response that they freak out. So that is why I'm asking you about like whether it's a violation of the inside. I just thought like researching this, it's so much. Super interesting. It's super interesting. Yeah. It is. I think that there's a thing that's interesting is that it's still that we, the notion of the real slips in somewhere. I think that Lexi Russell in her edition, that is really why it's, should we just talk about AFK? Right. We have like the world of the computer, we have the world of people, and real is such kind of like a... It doesn't really deal with real. Right. Well, as the philosopher, let me say... Yeah, exactly. I might have slipped up myself, but I tried really hard when I gave the talk to talk about offline personas and online personas and not to essentialize or fetishize the offline personas as the real ones. I don't think that there's no room for a notion of reality because, for example, I think there's just an obvious difference between me going online and saying, hey, today I feel like playing as, you know, a steampunk cyborg giant with three horns and that would be fun, versus me going online and saying, but hi, my name is Quill, I have a six inch cock, blah, blah, blah, and really presenting myself as being a certain kind of way, right? And there's a difference, sorry, that came out more awkward than I wanted, but the point is that we can play games with identities that are explicitly play, or we can build identities online, and those are two different things, and there's gradations between them. Yeah, and spectrums, right. So I think the notion of real still makes sense. It's just that the offline stuff isn't necessarily where the real is because the virtual version might sometimes be more real and more authentic. The qualification of the real is not being like the locale of it. Exactly. Right. The realness of it is about the sincerity of it and how developed it is and whether it's something that the person wants to entangle with their values and their sense of self. It's not about whether it happens to be made of skin or pixels, right? But yes, the notion of the real is complex here, but I also don't want to just throw it away because I want to be able to distinguish between playing things and really doing them. Yeah, yeah. Right. And real play. And yeah, and this is all multidimensional, so it can be a little of each. And like we said, it can be fragmented, so you might have eight different identities, all of which are real, depending on the context and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. depending on the context and so forth, yeah. I think you just got the time sign from the back. It doesn't really matter because we realize that you're having a film premiere afterwards and nobody downloaded it. But I also don't want to hold people hostage, so I feel like we've been going for a while, so maybe we should. That's the problem with like five people, maybe the other guys, they will. Right. So maybe one last question. One last question. Unfortunately, I missed the interesting part of the presentation, so I'm going to definitely download it later and see what's... But what is the context of cyborg in this case? One last question. Unfortunately, I missed the interesting part of the presentation, so I'm going to definitely download it later. But what is the context of cyborg in this context? For me, the term cyborg here is an acknowledgment of the... So a lot of the stuff that I read preparing for this article, or that we both read preparing for this article, talked as though online stuff is textual and electronic and representational, but not bodily. And bodily stuff is the offline stuff. And what we're trying to acknowledge with the word cyborg is that the stuff that we're doing in virtual space is a way of having bodily experiences and using our body and extending our body. So our body is spread out over the flesh bits and the online bits and hence becomes a cyborg body that we're using online. So we don't like this idea that online sex is this whole different kind of sex that just happens in abstract digital space, right? Instead, we want to see people who are entering into these personas online as actually building not virtual identities, which would be a different thing, but cyborg identities. Because a virtual identity is an identity that's only online, but a cyborg identity is one that incorporates the fleshy body and the online space, and the two are in thick bandwidth interaction with one another. But won't the term cyborg be more appropriate? Because I think in terms of cyborg, like something physical. Right, exactly. Is that saying like the natural flesh? Well, I think for it to be a cyborg traditionally, it has to be partly natural flesh and partly machine and that's what we're trying to capture. Exactly, yeah. I grew up on Haraway, yeah. Exactly, yeah. I think the original meaning or the original, I think, was coined by researchers looking for NASA. Right. Like bringing human bodies into space and that thing. Exactly. I love that resonance too. Yeah. I think it's so perfect. This notion of the ending dark, I think, of a natural world, a cyborg. Yeah, exactly. It's like as soon as you have a stick, you're also kind of a cyborg. Right. You're kind of a hybrid being which has different possibilities. Exactly. And our online life can be our stick, right? It can be a prosthesis, a prosthetic, rather than a separate thing that we're just, yeah, playing with from the outside. Yeah, exactly. I really feel like we should let people go. OK, thank you so much. we should let people go. Okay, thank you so much.