Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Print your own doppelganger

In today's story of Japanese creepiness, a Tokyo firm will make you a  doll of your very disturbed self.  3d printing horrors:

A bunch of women had themselves "cloned" around their weddings, it seems:

Some more charming details:

Kaneko-san shows us how the SEU95 is inserted in the back orifice. Clone subjects have the choice of having this inserted in the front orifice (dolphin) too.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Zombies of Glass

Here's a new way to see Google Glass as scary: Glass-wearers as zombies.  Ian Bogost explains:

While some wearers might be glassholes and some might be glassed-out (and some might be both), a better characterization of this new trend must come from elsewhere. The proper analogy for such an uncanny being is not the jerk nor the junkie but the zombie: neither living nor dead, but suspended interminably between the two. Wearers are neither present nor absent, neither here nor there, neither in-person nor on-line, neither attentive nor oblivious.

That's a very different image than the glasshole one.  It's ethereal rather than offensive.

The horror of tech company purchasing

Sometimes the buying of a technology firm can resemble Gothic horror, at least according to this New Yorker article:

[C]ompanies are so often founded explicitly for the purpose of being gobbled up and dissolved in the gullet of a gargantuan corporation, and its users are simply bait. And it is more profound still when it comes to Yahoo, which has an especially egregious track record of bespoiling the companies it entices into its purple esophagus...

Perhaps medicine is required.

(photo via Infrogmation of New Orleans)

Accidental Google Glass art

A Twitter image update produces an accidentally satirical error:

Here is the intended image, which is pretty funny.

(via Jesse Walker)

The .edu supervillain

Found on Google+, Infocult's creator as supervillain:

(thanks to jason k)

Horror of student loan debt

"The Red" is a horror short about... student loan debt.  

The heroine is haunted by all kinds of horror tropes in a few short minutes: wounds, mysterious bleeding, uncanny voices, crawling bugs, disturbing people, creepy phone calls, and oozing monsters.  Not to mention less Gothic and more microeconomic fears, like job stress, declined credit cards, dwindling finances, and stalking creditors.

 Eventually the heroine cracks under the strain and goes mad.

"You can't outrun it.  All you can do is face it.  And fight it."

Drone horror expands

How scary are drones? Pretty creepy, according to Germany's defense minister.

"We prefer to pull the plug [on drones]. That applies to the future as well, when costs get out of control. Better an end with horror than a horror without end..."

Drone fear could well grow into something mainsteam and durable.

(via Reason; image via Wikipedia)

Art in disease

A new book finds beautiful visuals in the midst of horrible medical imagery.

The imagery is horrible because it usually stems from disease or trauma: Lou Gherig's Disease, ectopic pregnancy, testicular cancer.  There's something classically decadent about the project. 

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Progress on the digital afterlife

We're doing better with our posthumous digital affairs, according to a Long Now post.

For example, there have recently been a series of Digital Death Day unconferences.  There's even a beautifully named Death Switch.

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your passwords are automatically e-mailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during a lifetime.

(thanks to Chris Worden)

Cthulhu meets MOOCs

The rise of MOOCs explained. They came from R'lyeh!

(thanks to Steven Burnett)

TMZ tries cyberfear

Celebrity gossip site TMZ discovered the scary side of cyberspace a few weeks ago, running a frantic story about hackers blackmailing the United States into war.  

As the headline shrieked, 

HACKER GROUP THREATENS

TO BOMB WHITE HOUSE

(caps and font size in original)

The story starts from the classic trope of the scary hacker: clever, secretive, powerful.  Hence their ability to attack the Obama administration.

TMZ then takes things in an odd direction by linking this political threat to celebrities.  

We're told the group -- which claims responsibility for swatting Rihanna, Diddy, Ryan Seacrest, Justin Timberlake, Paris Hilton, Chris Brown, Tom Cruise and others -- contacted authorities through 911 and threatened to detonate 8 devices around the White House perimeter if President Obama does not declare war within 24 hours.

Yes, it's about "swatting", not geopolitics.  And lets gossip-drenched readers connect their celeb-stalking tales to the White House.  Interesting twist on cyberfear.

Naturally there's no retraction or sourcing of the claim.

(via Jesse "Wouldn't Be Caught Dead Reading It" Walker)

Self-assembling printed robot inches your way

"A Printed Inchworm Robot" is mildly uncanny on the face of it.  The little thing inches along, like a metal worm.  It's interesting, too, because most of it has been 3d printed.

But where it leaps into the uncanny valley is the way it folds itself together:

Yes, it's slow and tiny.  But Infocult readers recognize the signs of uncanny robotics looming in the future.

How to use a touch of Gothic

The New Yorker quietly adds just a smidgen of Gothic to a technology essay:

The primary interface element of Now is what Google calls “cards,” which are modelled after real cards. They present a clean, trim canvas for information—one recalls the discussion of tasteful business-card design in the film “American Psycho.” 

"One recalls?"  Depends on the "one" in question, but Infocult always remembers.  "That's bone."

Here's the scene, as a refresher:

(via Bruce Sterling)

A drowned town rises into the light

A flood wiped out and submerged an Argentine town in the 1980s. Yet this year it surfaced, ruins emerging into the air.  Call it a kind of ghost town:

People come to see the rusted hulks of automobiles and furniture, crumbled homes and broken appliances...

...They climb staircases that lead nowhere, and wander through a graveyard where the water toppled headstones and exposed tombs to the elements.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Russia, home of the Gothic

Russia is such a Gothic nexus that it breeds vampire moths.

Their discovery must have been quite the surprise:

When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands this summer, the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.

Lest you think there's a global epidemic of the critters, here's evidence for an especially Russian breed of bloodsucking moth-things:

Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel at the University of Florida in Gainesville said the discovery suggests the moth population could be on an "evolutionary trajectory" away from other C. thalictri populations...

"Based on geography, based on behavior, and based on a phenotypic variation we saw in the wing pattern, we can speculate that this represents something different, something new," Zaspel said.

Russia: redefining real-life Gothic, monster by monster.

(thanks to Stevem Burnett)