Cyber-Race and the Furries

Historically, much justification for racism is purportedly based on some faux science proving one race's genetic superiority over another's. The notion of racial discrimination in cyber space where race can be comprised of only zeros and ones then, opens a whole new realm for thought about why people tend to discriminate and persecute.

I once met a fox-man and his skunk-man friend on Second Life (an online virtual reality complete with its own time, landscape and currency which the user interacts with through a personalised avatar), who told me he was a 'furry'. A furry, he said, was a sub-group of avatars on Second Life who modeled themselves on human-animal hybrids (you can check out some images here) and who were hated intensely by groups of other human avatars.

He told me that when furries had appeared incidentally on promotional footage for Second Life, human avatars had successfully campaigned to have them edited out. Even the club the fox-man owned on Second Life (an industrious feat, by any avatar's standards) had been 'vandalized' on several occassions as a result of his identity as a furry.

The fox man showed me (showed my avatar rather) archived images of the vandalism on a screen in his bar where we were standing (the bar was empty, being the middle of the virtual day). Virtual boards had been erected by the vandals all over the club with various non-sensical abuse, but the most prominent scrawling around the place was the hammer and sickle in red and yellow, and I would hazard a guess that the perpetrators were not making reference to modern communist movements that may use that image.

I asked him if people who used furry avatars had any real-life characteristics in common and he said no. He also had no idea why the furried were so hated. This raises a myriad of questions about race, identity and the internet.

Why would people choose to persecute a minority on the basis of what is essentially a bit of binary? or is that question no different to asking why people choose to persecute others on skin colour or religion? Is discrimination and group-mentality conflict intrinsic to the nature of organised societies? And is the internet a means by which people will neutralize their identities? or express their differences more prominently?

These are a few of the questions this episode, and the week’s reading by Kang raised for me. And please excuse any discussion doubling up - I didn't attend the workshop or tutorial this week because my real-life self was in Brisbane.