Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Deep space radio Gothic

Here's a good story about the radio-mad Italian brothers who snooped on Cold War space missions.  Hollington catches some of the eerie moments very well:

[O]n 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.

“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.

And:

somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.

There's a fine Warren Ellis passage here:

It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.

Previously on Infocult.

Does eQaeda use iTunes?

Apple protecting iTunes from terrorists?

(via Kevin de Mulder via Twitter)

Mystery monument in Georgia

A mysterious public art work still stands in a remote corner of the American south, almost 30 years after their completion.  There is Gothic grandeur in the Georgia Guidestones, immense stone slabs covered in cryptic inscriptions.

(image from LEOURSA)

But there's a second layer of mystery, beyond this experiential sublime.  The Wired story goes into the weird background of the thing's construction, starting with its designer.  "Mr. Christian" (generally accepted as a pseudonym) brought designs, a huge amount of money, the claim of representing a shadowy group, and the following explanation to an Elbert County quarry in 1979:

[he] claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument...

Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself.

It's like the world's greatest rabbit hole, or a stupendous art project, or an offshoot of American Christian public art.  Read the full story. 

Infocult needs to meet there.

(via Todd Bryant and the horde)

Sneaking storytelling by mountweazel

What do you call the storytelling trick of smuggling fiction into nonfiction references? 

Mountweazel is one term.  That's the name of a character, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, described by a fake biography (mailbox artist, died by an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine).  She ended up in the 1974 New Columbia Encyclopedia.  The New Yorker explains this as a deliberate trick, aimed at foiling copyright pirates.  "“If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

That's actually a genre, the copyright trap.  Think about that, a surreptitious literary genre based on hoaxing, and going back some time.  Also from the New Yorker:

 “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day.

Copyright traps have a sibling in cartography, the trap street.  Along with the copyright angle, Cecil Adams notes at least one map prank. 

Has anyone written a history of these?  When was the first - did Diderot's crew do it, or Mercator?

There are examples of mountweazeling fiction in fiction.  The Borges story, for example, and Grant Morrison's comic riff on it.

This historical practice is clearly fine alternate reality game (ARG) antecedent fodder.

(via Meine Kleine Fabrik, which everyone should read)

The rise of the machines: another battle, in Sweden

Robot worker attacks human worker in Sweden, while science fiction writers worldwide cackle gleefully.

[T]he industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

Sf writers write science fiction; we just live in it.

(thanks to Jim Barrett!)

Creeping out Classmates.com

One high school alumni class received an email from a fellow alum via Classmates.com... except that the student had been dead for some time.

[Mary Cronin] disappeared April 12, 1992. Her skull and part of her remains found a year later in a field in Cass County.   A cold case with no closure.

Uncanny social networking, plus a horrific flavor for a widely-suffered popup ad.

Then there's the creepiness of one theory:

Debbie [McGrew, President of Westside's Alumni Association] wonders who sent it and with Mary's killer still out there, could they have signed up under her name?  She says, "That is what I thought as well what if it was the killer? It is close to anniversary time."

(thanks to Ian Campbell)

Using Twitter to get informed, XKCD

In response to XKCD, Twitter is also great for learning about the things people panic about:


That's Chris Millet, Laura Blankenship, Sarah Robbins, Maria Anderson in a little more than one hour.

Twitter murder mystery from Brent Spiner

A Twitter-based murder mystery comes from the feed of actor Brent Spiner.  He's positioned himself as the main character, bringing in his acting career (Star Trek references, of course) and frequent flashes of wit.  He's also an unreliable narrator, with missing memory and dubious relationships.


(thanks to Karen Hanson and Gabor Por)

Revenge on the fail whale

Speaking of fearsome Twitter:

"I murdered the Fail Whale!", Nick Bilton

(via NerdWorld)

Microblogging terror: Twitter threats and an arrest

An Oklahoma man Twittered about fighting and killing police, and was arrested for it.

"START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!," read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!," he added five minutes later. Then: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps."

From his most recent, pre-arrest feed:


One way of understanding this in terms of the fearsome internet is as a descendant of the digital terrorist theme.  That reaches back into the 1990s (remember militias?), then advances to the 2000s' e-Qaeda meme.

Another approach concerns the building narrative about Twitter as a scary place (or service, or object).  We've already noted some examples: scary people following you, or whom you can follow; a suicide threat; "ghost Twitterers" (authorship, not ectoplasm).  All of these are classic scary-technology themes: stalking, suicide, dubious authorship, communications from the dead.  Now we can add e-terror. No one theme has emerged as the leading fearsome-Twitter meme, so we're probably seeing a gestation period now.  Perhaps this summer will see some major meme emerge.

(via MetaFilter)