Digital Dualism and the Cannibal Cop, Continued

Gilberto Valle

[[ See Amendment at end for clarification of the original version of this essay. ]]


Score one for digital dualism. The Cannibal Cop is free.

As I explained in this space last year, the twisted imagination of New York City police officer Gilberto Valle — aka “the Cannibal Cop” — provided a lurid opportunity to examine the question of where the line can be drawn between fantasy and reality in the era of the Internet.

To recap: By chance one day, Valle’s wife happened to sneak a peak at the browser history on her husband’s computer. She discovered to her horror that for some time he’d been engaged in a series of online chats in which he discussed detailed plans to rape, torture, murder, dismember, cook and eat a number of women he knew, including her.  A computer-forensic examiner subsequently found evidence that he had searched the web for human meat recipes.

Valle was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, a felony that could have put him in prison for life. At trial prosecutors argued that, although no woman was ever attacked, by making plans to carry out the deeds he’d discussed online, Valle had “crossed the line” between fantasy and reality. The jury was convinced, and for the past year and a half Valle has been incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, his sentencing on hold pending appeal.

On Monday Valle won his appeal, and yesterday he was released. Judge Paul Gardephe of Federal District Court ruled that, contrary to the prosecution’s argument, at no point did Valle’s crimes exceed the bounds of “fantasy role play.”

“Despite the highly disturbing nature of Valle’s deviant and depraved sexual interests,” Judge Gardephe wrote, “his chats and emails about these interests are not sufficient — standing alone — to make out the elements of conspiracy to commit kidnapping.”

This affirmed the argument made during the trial by Valle’s defense attorneys. As one of them put it yesterday, Valle “is guilty of nothing more than very unconventional thoughts. But, as Judge Gardephe has validated, we don’t put people in jail for their thoughts.”

My blog post last year characterized the positions of the prosecution and the defense in the case as representing in fairly clear fashion the topographies of “digital dualism’ as defined by the best-know critic of that stance (and coiner of the term) Nathan Jurgenson. To think that there is some fundamental distinction between online reality and offline reality, Jurgenson argues, is to construct a false dichotomy.  In truth, the digital and the physical are “enmeshed.” We carry our offline selves into our online encounters and vice versa.

Although they presumably didn’t know it, the jurors who convicted the Cannibal Cop affirmed Jurgenson’s view. Judge Gardephe’s decision rejected it. No doubt questions over where the line exists between online fantasy and offline reality will continue. I personally believe there is such a line — I confess, I’m a digital dualist — but I don’t doubt that by spending more and more time absorbed in our devices, we will increasingly be unable to distinguish between the two.

Amendment added:

After I'd posted this, I got a nice message from Nathan Jurgenson telling me that I had overplayed his definition of digital dualism. He never meant to argue, he says, that there is no difference between digital reality and physical reality.

As I told Nathan in reply, I think I failed to adequately explain my own take on the digital dualism question, which is an existential one. That is, the ideas, convictions, and conceptions we project out into the real world, in our behaviors, are based on or derive from a consciousness that tends to blur fantasy and reality, more so than ever with the help of the Internet. Nathan responded that this is completely in line with his own thinking.

I probably should add an admission that I couldn't resist the temptation to use the Cannibal Cop case to play around a bit with these questions, and maybe its sensationalism doesn't bear too serious a look at the digital dualism issue.

Thanks to Nathan for the correction!

Digital Dualism and the Cannibal Cop

Gilberto Valle, the "Cannibal Cop"

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine

                   Bob Dylan, It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

I've been slightly surprised by the lack of attention paid in tech theory circles to the Cannibal Cop case, now in the hands of a jury in Manhattan.

Certainly it's a remarkably lurid story, but its luridness shouldn't distract us from the fact that it places in stark relief what at first glance might seem some relatively esoteric questions regarding where the line can be drawn between fantasy and reality in the era of the Internet. Specifically it relates to one of the more hotly debated topics in the philosophy of technology at the moment, digital dualism.

For those who haven't been following the headlines, the Cannibal Cop is a New York City police officer named Gilberto Valle. Valle's wife, stealing a glance one day at the browser history on her husband's computer, discovered to her horror that he'd been discussing with his online buddies detailed plans to rape, torture, murder, cook, and eat a number of women, including her. He was also a regular visitor to a fetishist web site that featured videos supposedly depicting acts of a similarly horrific nature.

Valle's wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, testified during the trial about what her husband had in mind. "I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit," she said, "and they would have fun watching the blood gush out of me because I was young."

Valle had also discussed online plans to rape two women in front of each other "to heighten their fears," as well as the logistics involved in roasting another woman alive. A computer-forensic examiner subsequently found evidence on Valle's hard drive of searches for “human meat recipes” and “how to cook a human.”   

Courtroom sketch by Jane Rosenberg, New York Daily News

The question at issue in the trial is straightforward: Did Valle really intend to carry out these acts, as the prosecution contends, or was he merely indulging in online fantasizing and role-playing?

Although he did drive by the home of one of the women he'd talked about killing and visited another, no one was ever physically attacked. Nor was there evidence that Valle possessed the tools he would need to carry out the deeds discussed. The jury, which is set to resume its deliberations tomorrow, must decide whether Valle would have acted had his plans not been discovered. If convicted he could face life in prison.

Prosecuting attorney Hadassa Waxman told the jury that Valle's plans were "no joke" and that the evidence showed he had “left the world of fantasy and entered the world of reality.” "The law," Waxman added, "does not require that we wait until he carries out his crime.”

Valle's attorney, Julia Gatto, responded that as "disturbing and disgusting" as her client's online habits might be, they did not constitute a crime. “This is Gil’s porn," she said. "He’s had this unusual fetish for a long time, and no one was ever hurt.”

It seems to me that these two positions articulate in a fairly clear fashion the topographies of "digital dualism" as defined by the best-known critic of that stance (and coiner of the term), Nathan Jurgenson. 

Jurgenson's basic position is that it's a mistake to think there's a fundamental existential distinction between "online" and "offline." There's nothing more "real" about being offline than there is about being online, he says, despite what many popular writers (Sherry Turkle being a favorite example) would have us believe. In truth, he insists, the digital and the physical are "enmeshed." We carry our offline selves into our online encounters and vice versa. Jurgenson calls our current state of digital/non-digital enmeshment "augmented reality."

In a recent essay Jurgenson expanded this central argument by defining a spectrum of four basic positions people typically adopt on the question of digital dualism: 

Strong Digital Dualism: The digital and the physical are different realities, have different properties, and do not interact.

Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact.

Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact.

Strong Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality and have the same properties.

It's a fair guess that the attorneys in the Cannibal Cop case have never heard of digital dualism. Nonetheless it's also fair to characterize the prosecution's arguments as articulating a Mild or Strong Augmented Reality position, while the defense is arguing a Mild or Strong Digital Dualism position.
 
The Cannibal Cop case and digital dualism both resonate with a number of other troubling issues, from the concerns of women that pornography objectifies them in degrading and dangerous ways, to the claims that habitual exposure to violent movies or video games may help provoke some individuals to act out violently in real life ("IRL," as Jurgenson abbreviates it). Warfare from a distance via drones (or, for that matter, from conventional aircraft) fits, too. 

What constitutes "distance" in an age of high technology is one aspect of what I think is the central question, which is not only what the conceptual, theoretical relationship between online and offline might be, but what we can say about the influence of that relationship on actual behavior.

This is not a question the digital theorists have ignored. To the contrary, the roles social media might or might not play in the promulgation of political movements has been, from the outset, a central concern. From what I've read, however, the question of inter-personal violence hasn't garnered as much attention.

Gilberto Valle's fate presumably depends on specific points of law, points defined, no doubt, long before the introduction of the technologies involved. Regardless of the verdict, it certainly seems reasonable for his wife to divorce him, and for her to be extremely careful about the circumstances in which he spends time with their young daughter. Criminal or not, it would be hard to argue that fantasizing about cooking and eating women falls into the range of what we'd consider desirable mental activity.

When and why mental activity crosses over into physical activity, and the role digital technologies play or don't play in blurring the line between the two, are questions that will be with us for a long time to come. That's why the digital dualism debate is important, whatever the Cannibal Cop jury decides. 

©Doug Hill, 2013