Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Creepy dolls as a sales pitch

Fearsome technology as a way to sell games? Playstation uses the uncanny valley (and this is very disturbing):

We shouldn't be surprised by the use of cyberfear as a marketing tactic.  In 2006, when this ad apparently appeared, the fearsome digital technology meme was already a generation old.

(via Cracked)

Doppelgangers, artists, and burning the candle at only one end

More doppelgangers, this time in candle wax, and cast to look like their creators:

It was a performance piece:

We cast ourselves as candles in a mixture of beeswax and parafine with a wick running through the center from head to feet. We lit the candles at the beginning of our show in PPOW Gallery and we let the candles burn and run their course throughout the exhibition. Our candle bodies slowly melted away for the duration of the show.

(via BoingBoing)

How to survive after the apocalypse? The Onion reveals the secret

A new pedagogical use for computer games: teaching kids to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.  Assuming they survie:

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse? 

The Onion hits all sorts of targets in this, from teaching with games (already far enough advanced for parody!) to hardcore games, and, of course, tv news shows.

(thanks to Todd Bryantt!)

Kindle fear arrives at last: don't carry one to Thebes

It's a sign that the Kindle has achieved some sort of cultural status, when the New York Times can run editorials about how scary it is.  Roy Blount Jr., whom I admire as a comedian, offers a very strange sort of take on why the Kindle is bad.

One idea is the copyright infringement argument.  This refers to the text reading function which appears in the new Kindle: "Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights."  The Authors Guild, of which Blount is president, has already taken issue.

Others have already offered counterarguments, namely that the feature isn't likely to appeal widely enough to create noticeable royalties.  Or, if it does boost sales, it boosts sales.  But it is noteworthy for fearsome digital technology studies to see this new front open up.

Listen, too, to the odd, sad opening line:

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me. But now I am president of the Authors Guild, whose mission is to sustain book-writing as a viable occupation...

What a grim way to begin the piece.  And what an Oedipal, parricidal theme to evoke.  Blount even returns to it at the end, in a way that's charming, sweet, and somewhat scary:

no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

The death of a father, plus children's stories - these go together very deeply.

This isn't to say Blount's piece isn't (intentionally) funny.  I love this idea:

the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

The dangers of social networking sites: Lady Greenfield is concerned

A British baroness and pharmacologist is concerned about your mental health, dear readers and social network users. 

She told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

The classic argument about danger to children is wedded to the newer neurological argument.

In a Guardian podcast, Lady Greenfield combines two different charges, one about brain function (cf Marianne Wolf's concerns, uncited as far as I can tell) and one about culture (mistaking friending for friends).  Greenfield combines these into the phrase "screen life."  She goes on to wonder if autism and attention deficit disorders are caused by digital culture.

The pharmacist-baroness also offers a new twist on the language of fearsome cyberspace - it's like meat.  Not meatspace, but butchery:

She said she feared "real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction."

Fascinating, too, to see the replacement logic persist - rather than augmenting or simply adding on, the technology appears as a substitute.

Note, too, Greenfield's nostalgia for tv, as compared to the internet.  In the Guardian podcast she argues that television was social, a family gathering node.  Fascinating to see our technological back-formation going on here, with "vast wasteland" being reconceived as hearth.

(via The Lede)

The world catastrophe formula

It's something out of pulp fiction, the super formula that wrecked a world!  How insidious:

At the heart of it all was Li's formula... \The Gaussian copula soon became such a universally accepted part of the world's financial vocabulary that brokers started quoting prices for bond tranches based on their correlations. "Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus," wrote derivatives guru Janet Tavakoli in 2006.

The supervillain, or mathematician, is now in retreat:

Li has been notably absent from the current debate over the causes of the crash. In fact, he is no longer even in the US. Last year, he moved to Beijing to head up the risk-management department of China International Capital Corporation. In a recent conversation, he seemed reluctant to discuss his paper and said he couldn't talk without permission from the PR department. In response to a subsequent request, CICC's press office sent an email saying that Li was no longer doing the kind of work he did in his previous job and, therefore, would not be speaking to the media.

Probably fearing the first round of assassins, or at least torch-equipped neopeasants.

There's a lesson in futorology here.  Partly it's the problem of drawing on too small a sample (and only in boom time!).  Partly it's black swan time:

[P]people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn't have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn't have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.

How many pulp fiction and Gothic elements can we spot?  Mad science on the march... menacing super-genius from the East... insidious mind viruses...

Already the Bush hauntings commence

The White House is haunted by two girls.  The Bush daughters appear and say to visitors - oh, you know what they say:

According to White House security documents, Sasha told Secret Service agents that the ghostly twins spoke to her in unison and repeatedly beckoned her by chanting the phrases "come play with us," "come play with us, forever," and "Daddy's making fajitas."

Presidential Gothic: it never goes away.

(thanks to Steven Kaye!)

Mysteriously mobile grave

A funeral monument is on the move in Holland.  Translated from Dutch via Firefox Ubiquity:

Residents of the Frisian village of Dokkum Aalsum to a mystery. Four times was a tombstone in the cemetery beside the grave. ...

The police put cameras and what shows? The stone itself is shifting. A small meter within a few seconds. Spokeswoman Yvonne Bijman of the police in New Jersey has seen it.

We consult the mandatory scientist:

But according to Paul Andriessen, Professor of Geology at the Free University in Amsterdam, this may not at all. In principle, tombstones, according to his move by movements in the soil - but not so fast, and certainly not one stone but not that of the neighbor. "Yet it is true. I've seen the pictures. You see the grave stone of the buck. He does not jump, he slides more. "

(thanks to Arnaud Leene via Twitter)

Artifacts from a parallel world

Another fine bit of Gothic art from Alex CP, "Infant lycan dissection" - one part hoax art, one part alternate history, one part gorgeous design:

(thanks to Sara Grosky)

From tales of Gothic Detroit

Yet another sad tale from Detroit, concerning the abandoned Belle Isle Zoo.

 Earlier this year a pack of wild dogs were harassing us, keeping their distance. They were smaller dogs than the ones that attacked us at the playground years ago, and once we started chasing them they led us right into the abandoned zoo. Inside the zoo, we followed their tracks through a maze of fences and walls. I could see that everything remained much as it had been left.

Previous Infocult Gothic Detroit: the body.

(via MetaFilter)