Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Babies dancing right out of the uncanny valley

Today's visit to the uncanny valley involves babies. Dancing babies, and Evian. Is it cute, or creepy?

(via MetaFilter)

The dark side of Twitter: Jamais Cascio broods

Jamais Cascio explores Twitter's dark side.  Because the author is smart and well-informed, the points are good ones.  Cascio starts from the case of the Iranian election aftermath, and wonders:

the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.

One key idea concerns the possible use of Twitter to help organize violence against people.

Consider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news.

Compare with Rwandan radio, which was used to organize genocide - and whose role can easily be exaggerated.

Cascio takes pains to hedge his argument as an exploration of possibility, not likelihood.  We can note it here, though, under the fearsome internet rubric, for two reasons.  One: the criticism is useful, especially when one is immersed in euphoric hype.  Two: other voices might pick up on this idea, and run with it into less well informed contexts.

This coda is good, especially in its ambiguity:

I asked--in a bit of gallows humor--what the hashtag would be for something like genocide. The audience's nervous laughter reflected my own recognition that this wasn't an entirely rhetorical question. I'm sad to say that we're almost certain to get an answer, probably far sooner than we'd like.

More economic crisis Gothic: phantom realty

Forbes tries its hand at economic crisis Gothic this week, reporting on phantom realty.  No, not homes owned by ghosts:

There is a "phantom inventory" in the United States housing industry, hidden from the eyes of analysts and investors, and distorting the market's landscape.

For a further twist, the article considers time-release phantom realty:

Steven Hagenbuckle, managing principal at TerraCap Partners, a distressed real estate private equity fund, expects to see the beginning of the release of the phantom inventory in the next 90 to 180 days, though the inventory influx will come in different waves throughout the country.

So these properties are Gothic in two senses, being both hidden objects (a classic horror trope) and dangerous (to the economy).

(thanks to my Gothic wife)

Behold the lurking tubifex!

Here's a nice bit of mystery wrapped around real-life monstrosity.  Start with this video, which purports to be from a "sewer snakecam in North Carolina".  The YouTube header dubs it "Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer!", while the info tab suggests "Believed to be of ET origin."

Creepy, yes? The clip became a massive YouTube success.  Cryptids plus mystery plus ick apparently equals viral success, in this case.

The things turn out to be clusters of tubifex worms.  Tubifex has other charming names, says Wikipedia: "sludge worm, sewage worm, or lime snake".  A Charlotte outlet calls them "bryozoans".

One Gothic storytelling possibility: Wikipedia also claims tubifex (what's the plural, tubifexes? tubifexen?) are sold for critter food in pet stores.  Now recall the old flushed alligator tales, and ponder what happens to sludge worms growing for a while - unnaturally - underground...

There's a kind of desperate poetry in the YouTube word cloud tags:

ufo  alien  north carolina  unknown  lifeform  macleod  studiomacleod  uforadar  et  michael jackson  star trek 

Empire of the ants!

Insect fear alert: "A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world," according to the BBC. "[B]illions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony."

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

As supervillains around the world cackle in delight ("The colony... could rival humans in the scale of its world domination"), consider the highlights of this fearsome achievement, each creepy in its own way.

They attack our agriculture, even animals:

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

Imagine them swarming over your liberty gardens, or your puppies.

As much as we hate insects, we've been helping these creatures out.  See, we're the best friends of this budding, crawling global empire:

What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.
Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

Yes, they devour our food, threaten our cats, and we made it possible:

it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.
"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write.

Unlike most villains, these guys cooperate quite well.  Uncannily well:

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another...

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart.

Don't forget the criminal angle.  These ants are like the mob, with a protection racket:

Argentine ants also cause problems in agricultural areas by protecting plant pests, such as aphids and scale insects, from predators and parasitoids. In return for this protection, the ants receive a sweet excretion, known as "honeydew". Thus, when Argentine ants invade an agricultural area, the population densities of these plant parasites increase, and so too does the damage they cause to crops. 

"Fools!" shouts the mad scientist who unleashed them.  "Why must my pets be misunderstood?"

Fearing MySpace, favoring Facebook

Popular fears of MySpace appeared in danah boyd's recent talk.  It's important stuff for fearsome internet discussions.

She focuses on race:

MySpace has become the "ghetto" of the digital landscape. The people there are more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society. And many of us have habitually crossed the street to avoid what is seen as the riff-raff.

It's partly a function of media panics:

the press... narrated MySpace as the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior. 

boyd explores this at length, challenging her audience directly.  For example, on sexuality and fear:

Fear of the "other" is core to white flight; it is core to suburban attitudes about urban life. But the same thing holds online. Take for example the moral panics around MySpace and online sexual predators. The data has consistently shown that MySpace is not a site of increased risk for youth and that risky behavior is more likely to occur in chatrooms than on MySpace. Yet, if you're a parent of a teen in this room, you're probably scared shitless of MySpace. Why? What are you scared of? Are you scared of the site or the possibility that your child might be exposed to values that are different than yours? Are you scared of the display of sexuality or just the display of working class sexuality? Needless to say, that's a topic for a whole different conversation.

People are eating children in this area

A nice bit of elegant sign alteration:

Or, "When the economy gets really bad, pets still matter."

The Gothic afterlife of Michael Jackson continues

As most of the world goes into internet-choking spasms of grief, there's a counternarrative from the Gothic side of culture.  Or, at least, from people who just didn't like the music.

Maybe he's not dead.  No, not undead - he did that already - but has faked death with a doppelganger:

Many devoted fans watching world tour announcement and other recent appearances commented that his hands, face, stature and general demeanour and mannerisms were unfamiliar (beyond any consequences of physical surgery), leading to rumours of a body double.
(hat tip to Jesse Walker)

Or perhaps Jackson' death makes his life look even more necrotic in retrospect?

He existed strictly on image, an anorectic figure nourished by moonbeams of attention, famous for saying that he loved his worshippers when the truth was he merely sucked the life out of them.  In his last years, he even looked a bit like Nosferatu, the personification of the un-dead, and his fascination with ghouls was the basis for his biggest hit way back in the last century.  A zombie nation deserves a zombie mascot.
...America was a fat man jerking off on the sofa watching a vampire of no particular sex vogue deliriously on the boob tube.
(James Kunstler, continuing the economic crisis as Gothic theme)

And there's yet another perspective, from some of the religious.  Satan whacked Jacko, or, as the best headline of the week puts it:

The Ark of the Covenant and the Death of Michael Jackson – A Couple of Interesting Coincidences
(thanks to Jesse for this one, too)

First post on the subject is here.

Persian poetry by Twitter

More Twitter storytelling: Persian poetry written and shared by Twitter.   Parham Baghestani seems to be using the 140-character limit as a helpful constraint.

So far as I can make out, these are lyrics, rather than pieces of a coherent narrative.  Anyone else have further experience with Farsi, or these poems?

Google as vampire

Google is a vampire, claims one publisher.  The guy works the analogy in some detail:

Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton raised the rhetoric a notch, calling the Internet search giant a vampire “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper business, and promised that new developments would level the playing field.

Hinton seems to be thinking of vampire bats, perhaps:

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

Of course, it's all about the plummeting business model of newspapers:

By offering its content free on the Web, the newspaper industry “gave Google’s fangs a great place to bite,” he continued. 

Does this make publishers wholesome victims, preyed on in their innocence?  Or fearless vampire hunters, fighting the great parasitical evil?

Strike another blow for the fearsome Google meme.  We've been observing it for quite a while.

One Michael Jackson death, two Gothic triumphs, and a whole bunch of monstrosity

Forget pop - Michael Jackson's death reminds us of his great contributions to the Gothic.  As the obituaries swing into motion, death is burnishing the man's reputation in its customary ways.  Media outlets are delighted to change the subject from Iran and the economy, to have something to cover with ease and authority.  We shouldn't be squeamish about poking at the freshly dead corpse.  Now is the time instead for us to recall Jackson's Gothic roles, most notably his life's.

First, some of his songs are classics in horror music.  The best of them is "Thriller" (1983), which brought werewolves (or werecats) and zombies back to pop.  It also returned to us the sweet tones of Vincent Price.  It's also a date movie, where the decent girl's guy turns out to be a monster - an ancient trope, and one fine antecedent to Twilight. 

There's also the historic link to that classic 1980s American fear of the occult - remember this opening title card from the singer, then a Jehovah's Witness?

Ah, for the glory days of back-masking and Satanic panic.

Second, Jackson turned himself into a figure of Gothic horror, with his own life as a monster-in-progress.  Perhaps having his head set on fire for a Pepsi commercial was the start.  Repeated surgeries kept reshaping that very public body: rhinoplasty, facelifts, artificial clefts, skin color changes, what else was used to alter his appearance?  Such a shape-shifting, mutating, fluid creature. 

Splendid rumors kept bursting to the media's surface, like noisome gas in a swamp: this Gothic artist buying up the Elephant Man's bones, hanging out intimately with a chimpanzee, or sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber.  Not to mention the repeated accusations of pedophilia.  Charges of antisemitism.  Stories of drug addiction, weight loss, hiding from the public, the deepening cult of childhood.  And now the weirdness of a death at 50, depite access to the best medical care. Forget whatever biographic truth might lurk, somewhere down there, buried under strata of media, promotion, fear, and cult workship: the story has been one of monstrosity.

But getting at this is impossible without wading through tabloid culture, vast swamps of pop adoration, machines of publicity and sleaze.  When was there before such a context for a Gothic character?  An artist widely lusted after and also loathed for perversion.  Is Lord Byron really the best comparison?

[D]oesn’t his life embody not just the Hero-Villain, but the Gothic itself?

(No Fear; hat tip to Steve B)

Maybe not.  If the Gothic is marginal, Michael Jackson was always ever canonical.  If the Gothic is about the powerful ruins of history, Jackson fashioned himself out of one group and family alone.  If the Gothic is politically subversive, then the fellow wasn't (note pic) (nor can he serve as a one-man argument for horror being reactionary).

PS: I don't like his music much.  It's got to be said, some of us never did, no matter the eulogies and the onrushing pitchforks.

Economic crisis meets horror movie

The global economic crisis turned Gothic horror in reality, as a group of retirees kidnapped and tortured their investment advisor.  This British account reads like a revenge fantasy for 2009:

"I was led into the cellar," recalled Mr. Amburn, "I saw a folding bed and a WC reserved for me. They immediately went on about their money. I told them what I had told them before, that due to market conditions, unfortunately it was gone.
"I was struck. Again and again they threatened to kill me. The fear of death was indescribable. I never thought I would make it out alive."

The furious investors got medieval on Amburn's hide.  The details are right out of Gothic, pulp, or suspense fiction.  A sample:

Two of his kidnappers are said to have hit [James Amburn] with a Zimmer frame outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, before he was bound up with duct tape, bundled into the boot of a car and driven 300 miles to the home of two of the abductors on the shores of Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria.
 
"I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth," he said. "But the nightmare had only just started."
During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken was hit with a chair leg and chained up "like an animal."

Unless the global economy magically turns around, expect more stories like this.  And anticipations: higher security measures, more concerns about peasants with torches retirees.

(thanks to my dark-eyed wife!)

World Gothic spaces from abandoned places

More haunting images of ruins, depeopled cities, and Gothic landscapes come from this gallery of abandoned places.

Some remind us of the classic European Gothic, silent figures of wasted power:

And the American Gothic takes a turn, too:

(via MetaFilter)

Germany to try out expanded Web censorship

Sometimes popular fears about digital technologies end up as government policy.  Today's case in point comes from Germany, where that country's legislature approved a law allowing one police agency to block Web sites proffering child pornography.

The Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) is to administer the lists of sites to be blocked and the internet providers obliged to erect the secret censorship architecture for the government.

Hopefully German courts will chew this one up and spit it out.

Once again, the constellation of fears around children, sexuality, and digital technologies drives public panic.

(via MetaFilter)

Death by Twitter! Morbid media microblog fascination continues

Death by Twitter!  Or so this newspaper account suggests.

Twitter bath death

(We start off by mixing the salacious with the cybercultural)
The Austrian Times goes on:

A teenage girl was electrocuted after dropping her laptop into the bath as she twittered in the tub.

Police said they believed Maria Barbu, 17, had tried to plug in her laptop with wet hands after the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak at her home in Brasov, central Romania.

Several fearsome media details to note here.  First, the association of youth with new technology.  The unsettling powers teens and younger have is a classic anxiety form.

Second, the emphasis on one technology (Twitter) over others equally important for the event (laptop, indoor plumbing).  Part of this involves freeing up the event from history - i.e., no mention of the standard death by combining electrical appliances with bathroom water.

(thanks to Ton Zylstra!)