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creativecommons.org/by davemc500hatsSince the news broke in April of the arrest of “Craigslist killer” Philip Markoff, I’ve been obsessed with the idea that we’ve reached a tipping point with real life blurring with online. I crowdsourced opinions on online safety; people’s experiences using Craigslist, Facebook and Twitter for goods and services; whether cyber ads for face-to-face sexual hookups should be banned. I debated with lawyers and psychologists, exploring the convergence of real and virtual life and how the criminality of the physical world plays out in cyberspace. I wondered: Is the Internet giving criminals a way to locate new victims, or is it cultivating an entirely new breed of bad behavior?

I kept thinking back to the early 1990s, when I helped organize a Welcome to Cyberspace event at Chiat\Day. A speaker referred to a Time magazine writer’s theory that cyberspace was simply the real world in a new format. When a lawyer and I debated the Markoff case, his argument reinforced what I call “that time-truth of modern life”: Prostitutes and others offering erotic services have always been victims of heinous crimes; the online world just facilitates access. A basic truth pre-Internet, and still one a decade and a half later.

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