Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Beaten to the desired grave: a dead doppelganger in Ohio

More Ohio Gothic: a man examining his intended burial site found it already occupied by a dead body.  Which is a fine idea for a scary story, the reverse of fears about missing bodies.

The story also has fine doppelganger and Oedipal themes:

David L. Bingham says someone who shares his name has taken over his would-be final resting place. He says he hadn't visited his mother's grave since 2005 and was surprised to find someone had been buried next to her in 2006.

(thanks to dark-eyed Barbara Sawhill!)

Charges filed in MySpace suicide manipulation case

After months of legal exploration and widespread disgust, the state of Missouri filed criminal charges against Lori Drew.  Drew led the creation of a fake MySpace identity, the actions of which drove a teenage neighbor to suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Unusual location for missing person

A missing Greek girl was located... inside her twin sister's stomach.  Today's Gothic-in-real-life story combines body horror, anxiety about dead bodies, and doppelgangers.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long.
...
Andreas Markou, head of the hospital's pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

(thanks to Neal Grigsby for reminding me)

The Times really stretches to find fearsome internet

A London-based girl gang apparently blew up a house by pouring a liquid explosive into its mail slot.  Which is Gothic enough, or at least pulp-ish.  But trust The Times to hunt for an internet connection, no matter how slight, or simply hypothetical.  Their report begins with this:

A gang of girls may have used the internet to make a bomb that killed a man and destroyed three homes in their feud with another teenager. [emphasis added]

Or maybe they didn't.  There's no proof, which doesn't stop anyone from lunging at cyberfear.

Put another way: "A gang of girls may have gone to the library to make a bomb."  Or "A gang of girls may have driven a car to get to a shop where they bought bomb supplies."  Doesn't have quite the same ring, eh? 

The article helpfully lists likely ingredients for such a liquid explosive, should the reader be so inclined.  And if you read that on the Web, then maybe you really have used teh internets to make the b0mb.

After those strong opening moves, the article, or the police officers it cites, reaches even further, stretching towards that classic internet-terrorism meme:

“We have seen with recent terrorism trials that there are plenty of things on the web but it would obviously be a disturbing development if a girl gang has decided to settle a dispute in such a dramatic and tragic way.”

(thanks to CoriS, via Twitter)

Spying robots invade English town, or "Skynet-upon-the-Green"

The British military has invited mad scientists to inflict their robotic creations upon the English village of Copehill Down, Wiltshire.  It's a Ministry of Defense contest to spur development of spybots.

Not only will the robots strut their stuff, but they'll engage in Terminator-like wargames:

The robots must find snipers, armed vehicles, armed foot soldiers, and improvised explosive devices hidden around the village, and relay a real-time picture of what is happening back to a command post.

This is the technoGothic future.

Extra Cold War Gothic bonus points: Copehill Down was "built for urban warfare training during the Cold War."  The bots will intrude upon old structures of war and power.

(thanks to Jesse "Karla" Walker)

Another ARG antecedent: Rennes-le-Château

Once we start reexamining cultural history for alternate reality game (ARG) antecedents, examples keep popping up.  Today's example is "ARG as a new model for Rennes-le-Château phenomenon", which reconsiders that French archaeological nexus as a protoARG. 

Mariano Tomatis Antoniono starts by noting the insertion of story documents into everyday life:

The absence of solid documentation about any treasure found by the priest led to the creation, by different groups of people, during the 20th century of a number of false documents, artifacts and apocripha [sic], for reasons upon which modern researchers still haven't reached a consensus.

The most frequently quoted example is the literary production of Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey, who created - and deposited to the French National Library in Paris - a great number of documents regarding the survival of a hidden Merovingian dynasty...

Tlön, Uqbar, Rennes-le-Château.  Antoniono then identifies the puzzle content:

the alternate versions of the history of Rennes-le-Château describe its priest Bérenger Saunière as a member of secret societies, a wizard of old egyptian cults, and the area is full of hidden tombs, chests full of treasures and clues on their trail, all linked through complex geometries, anagrams, and mysterious inscriptions; all the characters involved show a double personality: the public and the esoterical one.

The article also notes one ARG project or story management problem: other players becoming puppetmasters on their own terms, forking off new games.  This is one basic dynamic of open source storytelling (but not at automatic one: see here).

This reinterpretation bears comparison with another French hoax from a previous generation, the great Taxil scheme.

(via the Wikipedia ARG article)

Gothic highspeed: lighting Bournemouth sewers

A project is afoot to run broadband cables through sewers under Bournemouth.  Nice move, really, taking advantage of preexisting construction.

One detail caught my eye:

Conventional cables are normally laid a mere 45 cm below ground. Utilising the sewer systems means that the cables lie a full 10 metres below ground, decreasing the likelihood of damage and increasing security in potentially dangerous situations.

How long until someone comes up with a story about awful intrusions upon the cable, along the lines (sorry) of the old Twilight Zone story where a telephone cable droops over a cemetery? Either a person hacks into the cable, or something intervenes from below...

If you're lucky, the Singularity is calling from inside your house

One response to last week's fear-the-aliens-or-lack-thereof story comes from Jamais Cascio, who offers a series of ways to be less terrified of SETI's failure to find aliens.  One way is to imagine other species having gone through a Singularity experience, which means that our pre-Singularity sense of galactic colonization might not apply.

There's an interesting connection to the fearsome internet here, bearing in mind that the Singularity concept is based in part on computational advances so breathtaking as to sometimes instill fear.  On the positive, eucatastrophic side, such runaway cyberculture (for aliens) saves us from interstellar invasion fleets, since the ETs wouldn't do anything so recognizable.  On the dark side, one can easily imagine ways by which superadvanced aliens calmly wipe out the solar system, say, en route to turning this spiral arm into computronium.  That gulf in scale between us and Them is a Lovecrartian abyss.

Cascio's great line yoking urban legend to posthumanism, "The Singularity is Calling from INSIDE THE HOUSE!", reminds us that the Singularity could happen to us, too.  Cue the full, traditional barrage of cyberfear on this score.

Commentators to that post note other cases of cyberfear.  Consider, for example, microaliens from the other side of the Singularity, and who are already here because they're too small to be seen (or take the shape of spiders; cheers).  And don't forget the classic fear that we'd simply get too wrapped up in virtual worlds to notice the moon, much less colonize Tau Seti.

Blog zine DNA

Fanzines are a crucial antecedent to blogs, says Roger Ebert.  It's a fun and well-written piece, as one expects from Ebert. 
Hasn't someone else made this connection?

Taking a million penguins with me on the plane

I haven't had a chance to read the Million Penguins Research Report yet (pdf), but will do so over this next trip.
It's great to see more reflections and research on web 2.0 storytelling practice, as this form/movement/platform develops.

I will show you species death in a handful of single-celled organisms

Here's one fearful look at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence:

if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a ­vertebrate-­like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis is very improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed
....
I'm hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of a great future for humanity.

Why?  The author elaborates on the theme of The Great Filter of life, and why it would be best for it to be behind us.  Read on.

Fearing computer games pays

Why does digital fear persist? Don't forget this reason:

• A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto
• 'Grand Theft Auto IV' makes a killing in first week

Austrian horror: hey, it could have been worse

The alleged Gothic monster of Austria offered press statements today.  One stands out:

“I am no monster,” Fritzl said though his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, according to the German tabloid newspaper Bild.

“I could have killed all of them, and no one would have known. No one would have ever found about it.”

A bit hard to square such calculating logic with his impending insanity claim.  And a pretty chilling thought.

Previous Infocult postings on this story: 1, 2, 3.  Bonus Mitteleuropean Gothic: here.

(thanks again to Morticia)

Scary butt-dialing: accidental war story

The name is funny, referring to accidentally dialing a phone number by squeezing the device between body and clothing.  But we should expect scary stories of butt-dialing, like this inadvertent recording from a war zone:

Stephen Phillips and other soldiers in his Army MP company were battling insurgents when his phone was pressed against his Humvee. It redialed and called his parents in the small Oregon coastal town of Otis.

Most the sounds were gunfire, but shouts can be heard, including, "More ammo! More ammo!"

"At the end, you could hear a guy saying 'Incoming! RPG!' And then it cut off," said John Petee, Phillips' brother.

Variations on this story could draw on other haunted media tales: last call from a now-dead man, a photo taken of an approaching killer, an awkwardly-angled video clip of the monsters talons dragging on the floor.

(thanks to my wife)

New twist on fearing the Wikipedia: CWA.sex

Another layer of Wikipedia-fearing comes from some American conservatives, who see the site as,,, purveying hardcore pornography.

Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural Issues with Concerned Women for America (CWA), said, "Perhaps Wikipedia should change its name to Pornopedia.  Providing clinical images that may assist people in research is one thing, but many of the images and videos featured by Wikipedia are gratuitous and obscene..."

Note that CWA hits on both classic registers of digital porn fearing, exposure to "children" (minors of all ages) and general readers (presumable leading to the corruption of adults, etc).

A call for federal regulation follows.

(thanks to Argus-eyed Jesse Walker)