The Death of LambdaMOO/The Relative Nature of Signs

I wasn't considering putting this up, but hey, I've got it typed out and placed in a post already, might as well. My post entitled "Play" has a bit of an explanation as to why this is so unfinished, but hopefully you can get a sense of how I imagine the text will look like when completed.

1) The Death of Lambda Moo
LambdaMOO was eerily quiet. I wandered through the rooms, examining and playing with the various objects found within, transporting myself into odd places (at one part walking through a mirror into a Pub), yet never running into any avatar awake and aware of my presence (I even waved at a few people marked as "asleep," hoping they were they on the other side of the network, waiting for someone to wander through and "wake" them). Eventually, desperate to find an opening that would allow me a glipse into the community of LambdaMOO and perhaps passage into the interior of the community, linking me with LambdaMOO despite the small period of time spent within, I typed @who and cued up of a list of the 99 avatars. Looking at which were awake (indicated by small idle times), I decided to transport myself into a room containing people conversing (perhaps transporting myself into the conversation as well), but "La Cantina," the site of the only conversation I could find, would not allow me enterence, instead throwing me out as soon as I entered.
I was left stunned and rather frightened: how has a community once numbering 10,000 been reduced to somewhere between six and twelve active members, 87 members logged on but not active, and somewhere between 1000-2000 members completely absent from the system? What happened to the network of interactions described by Dibbel? Unsure of a response, I turned to another network, the world wide web, for an answer. I found this:
LambdaMOO -- an open letter to students and researchers
I'd like to focus on particular implication of this letter, summed up nicely in the section entitled "The Moral":
"There were some tragic incidents many years ago, which the world will not let us forget. . . . This, it seems, is our best advertisement."

This statement seems rather disturbing; the very necessity of notifying the outside of its presense in order to assure the growth of the community eventually created the events that led (or rather, are leading) to the eventual death of LambdaMOO. But keep in mind that part of the problem lies in the representation of LambdaMOO; in the minds of the "world," LambdaMOO is defined by "A Rape in Cyberspace"; the myth that has developed has fundamentally defined LambdaMOO by the rape that occured there many years ago. While Professor Chun seemed to be aware of the dangers of this myth, notifying us of the contents of the rest of the book, trying to highlight the tension between the "real" and "virtual" explored within, it is already too late: the community has already been redefined and destroyed as a result. In this case, I believe this is because the chapter we read was originally published in several magazines before the publication of the whole book; since those who had spent all their life in "RL" did not have the "background" (that is, they had not constructed signs with which an understanding of "VR" could be reached), they seized upon the one sign they did possess: rape. Thus, students, unprepared and unwilling to enter the world of LambdaMOO (or rather, to attach a new sign to their definition of themselves) found themselves asking anyone they came across about rape. LambdaMOOers found themselves attempting to resist this forced definition by continuing to foster the growth of culture within the system, closing it off to those newcomers unwilling to leap through a giant series of hurdles (thus, my experience with the locked room), but without newcomers, without some sort of connection to the exterior, the community begins to wither away, drawing ever closer to death.
Now, there are a few problems with that argument: for starters, I applied for a username, hoping to revisit later during peak hours (whatever those might happen to be, and what I assume are not the hours during which I visited) and begin to investigate, and I eventually got it, but when I first applied I was number 3 on the waiting list. Now, the other two may have been from our class, and neither of them may have any intention of giving themselves over the the community, spending hours there helping to build the culture, but there's no way of knowing. There are a couple other points of contention I can see from where I sit, but again, I'd rather choose an element of the argument and explore its meaning.
In this case, that element happens to be the nature of the definition of LambdaMOO; I want to focus on the nature of its definition by association.


Notes:
Well, this post began as "The Death of LambdaMOO," but ended up very very long and unfinished. I decided to hold onto it in order to fully give it the time and energy it needs for construction. I've posted the first section; the second section, "Linking (Hypertext)" was half-complete and has been taken out here; it is a discussion of the structure of the Internet and the nature of hyperlinking; the final section, which I am/was planning to title "Deconstructing Revolutionary Speech; Relations/Signs; Within/Without" would have looked at Barthes' admittance that myth is impossible to escape, fundamentally collapsing the notion of the separated semiological systems, meaning that it is impossible to consider the sign without the myth placing it within culture, within ideology (as the fundamental base of the sign cannot be separated from myth), meaning that signs are fundamentally relations/connections/links. I did write this: "Like hyperlinks, signs are that which bind together bodies; signs provide us with a way to relate ourselves to the external, the Other; signs are connections, and it is only by examining these connections along with the individual bodies that we may find meaning/definition." I feel as if there's more needed to really complete that statement, but it's the basic point. I've also been thinking a lot lately about Web 2.0's assertion of "separation of form and content," but I'm not sure if (or how) that fits in to my argument yet. Hopefully, what I have just said is sufficient for the creation of an understanding of the intent behind what is above.