Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Newsweek dreads Facebook

How can we fear Facebook?  Let us count the ways, says Newsweek, and they number ten.  

"10 Ways Facebook Can Ruin Your Life" does what it says on the label.  Facebook leads to kidnapping, prison, illness, physical pain, creditor pressure, relationship stress, financial losses, depression, unemployment, stalking, sexual embarrassment, lawsuits, molestation, rape, and murder.

Here's a sampler of Newsweek's take on Facebook's "sinister side":

in an even more horrifying story, Aimee Sword was sentenced to nine to 30 years in prison recently for sexually abusing her 15-year-old biological son, whom she tracked down on Facebook. 

It can cost you a job. 

It can make it easier for your stalker or abusive partner to follow your movements. ... In one particularly sad case, a woman who changed her Facebook status to "single" was killed by her husband, from whom she had separated. After seeing her status, he broke into her home and stabbed her repeatedly. 

Your kids could be targeted by predators.

Weirdly, copyright infringement is missing from this catalog of woe.  Nothing about al-Qaeda, either.  Apparently Facebook can lead *your* children to rape, sexual embarrassment, poverty, and depression, but not to file-sharing, nor a place in the virtual caliphate.

Overall, this is a very useful listing for digital fears, and a handy example of the meme.

(thanks to grim-eyed Todd Bryant)

Digital photography as historical haunting

"Ghosts now official exist" is the title of this piece on a form of digital photography. That's "computational rephotography".  Sergey Larenkov is a master of this stuff, smuggling WWII into the present.

This one chills me every time I see it, not just a ghost walking today's streets, but two ghosts carrying their own dead, ghosts themselves already haunted:

 

(via Andrew Plumb via Twitter)

Fearful government restricts gaming and PC access

One government has decided to restrict gaming services and online access, due to Web fears.  This time it's the Vietnamese state, Ministry of Information and Communications, and the reasons are classic, familiar to Infocult readers:

The crackdown on online games follows a public outcry about their negative influences on the youth. Local reports have blamed an increase in juvenile crime and school truancy on the influence of and addiction to online games.

(thanks to Ladi)

Web site piles fear upon despair

Web horror tweet of the month:

Ours labs just found a suicide prevention website infected with malware. Boy, if you weren't depressed enough already.. 

Creepy doll goes video, or Barbie has an eye in her chest

A new Barbie doll has - is - a video recorder.  Preparing to trigger mutligenerational nightmares, "Barbie Video Doll Girl" has a display screen embedded in her back.  Her camera is located, ah, "in her pendant" (says the Times) or "hidden discreetly in her necklace" (Mattel). 

This videographer-Barbie-robot summons up two kinds of anxieties. One is the usual set of fearsome doll and little robot woes, a la Little Talking Tina. That's the usual flip side of adorable little humanoid-things, which Kleist nailed so well two centuries ago.

A second anxiety involves fears of surveillance.  Note that the Mattel site celebrates that "this Barbie is a hidden camera!"  There's a sousveillance delight here, as we imagine little girls videorecording bad authority figures, say.  But we can also tremble at the thought of little Barbiebots spying on families, including their dreaming girls.

The combination of these two, the anthropomorphic YouTube feeder, produces a nifty nexus of desires and fears around bodies and technology. For instance, the Times helpfully notes

Because the doll can be posed, she doubles as a pretty good tripod.

Is this collapse of subject (the way kids dream dolls to life) and object (media tool) a nice illustration of Kristeva's theory of the abject?  Desiring and the desired re-swap here.  Imagine one kid saying to another "I want to shoot with your Barbie", or "Can I look through your Barbie?" 

Romantic readers, or Ken Russell fans, or readers of Tim Powers' Stress of her Regard might recall the odd Percey Shelley eyes-in-her-breasts theme.  Alternatively, it's a reversal of boys staring at girls' chests.

Clive Thompson adds:

The best part is where Mattel hid the batteries: One in each of Barbie's thighs. It's almost mythopoeic. *Hours* on the therapists' couch!

Choking hazard?  Yeah.

(via Derek Bruff through Twitter)

Device killing, the Bateman method

One leading technology blog has fun with [device]-killer rhetoric.  That's when something is described as, say, an iPhone killer, an email killer, etc.

TechCrunch pushes the metaphor to a wall built from American Psycho (2000):

 

The article does a decent job of tearing up such rhetoric.  "[thing]-killer" rarely describes reality, either in terms of market analysis, product capabilities (the device in question has yet to appear!) .  Calling something a "[thing]-killer" is better marketing, too:

it’s a hell of a lot sexier than saying something is a “XXXXX competitor.” That’s boring (and longer, to boot).

We could also add to the critique the way that technology often works by devices complementing each other, or even overlapping a bit, a la imbrication.

But the appeal of murderous market rhetoric is joyously Infocultish.  It's a fine case of using horror rhetoric to talk about technologies, mobilizing anxieties and excitement.

Perhaps "[thing]-killer" rhetoric will eventually deepen, get more Gothic.  Then the next company will create a "[thing]-killer" in, say, an underground lab, or lair.  "[thing]-killer"s will be built from dead bodies, laced together with steampunk devices.  It will surface in the rooms of children, both teenagers and toddlers.  It will be used by al-Qaeda, copyright violators, pornographers, and gamers.  "[thing]-killer" will threaten everything we are told to hold dear, and fill us all with trembling desire.  Then it will be... ordinary.

 Yes, I'm referring to the movie, rather than the novel (1991).  Because 

a) that's what the story was using, and

b) the movie is much better than the book.

Parasites attack Goldman Sachs: irony is well-fed in New Jersey

Some mild Gothic horror afflicts Goldman Sachs, as employees are afflicted by insects.  Yes, the Goldmine Jersey City tower has been invaded by blood-sucking bugs.

ABC News reports that employees "have been moved from certain floors and ordered out of the building at times because exterminators have been in checking and spraying for bed bugs." 

One imagines some satisfied schadenfreude behind lines like these:

These critters cannot be taken lightly, as they crave human blood. They are "notoriously hard to eradicate because they can hide in tiny cracks and go up to a year without feeding. When they do find a host, they pierce the skin with two hollow feeding tubes, one of which injects its saliva, and the other for extracting its meal of blood. They feed for several minutes, then scurry back to hide."

Party game: imagine other headlines for this story?

"We were talking about the insects, not the company!"

"Vampire squid attacked by bloodsuckers"

"Parasites gnaw on parasites! they know their own!"

 (thanks to bloody-minded Charles Cameron)

One very bad death

An Austrian man dies badly:

A paralysed Austrian man was eaten to death by maggots in his bed while his partner slept beside him, police said Wednesday.

Sometimes the real world simply is Gothic horror.

(via Warren Ellis, who has a fine title for the story: "Your Day Is Unlikely To Be This Bad")

Information terrorism: fearing Wikileaks

Of all the different Wikileaks reactions that have emerged this week, one in particular is of Infocultish interest.  That Web 2.0 whistleblower project is really about information terror, says one reporter.

WikiLeaks seems to me to to be functioning less in the tradition of good old-fashioned muckrakers, and more like anti-privacy terrorists.

Jamie McIntyre sees no social benefit intended by Assange et al.  Instead, this longtime CNN reporter thinks the information is, at best, "BFOTO", "a blinding flash of the obvious."  At worst, well, things will be hard for public relations people and journalists.

I don’t envy the government spokespeople who have to argue for perspective in the face of skeptical media and politicians more interested in inflaming than informing the public.

(Shouldn't news media be skeptical?)

But McIntyre doesn't stop there, with professional stress.  Instead he ties WikiLeaks to a larger issue of secrecy and politics:

Well it certainly more difficult [sic] to live in a world where there are no secrets, where nothing can stay private.  How do get sources to help the U.S. fight terrorism, when there’s no guarantee that they can be protected?  How can governments quietly cooperate on diplomatically sensitive matters if everything has to be done in public, where posturing and political gain have to be part of the calculus?

Quick, someone send him a copy of Brin's Transparent Society!  

This is a key argument to make in the fearing digital media universe, that the technology corrodes social order, ultimately threatening human life.  

McIntyre goes even further, brooding about privacy in general, drawing attention to what he calls "The Naked bottom line":

It’s not any one particular disclosure that bothers me. It’s the idea that nothing can be private. There are no state secrets, no matter how important, or how vital to our collective security and well-being.

In a way, it’s like those full body scanners at the airport.  They produce grainy, indistinct, black-and-white images, but with basic image-enhancement software they can easily be converted to full-color pictures that leave nothing to the imagination. And you know somebody, somewhere will store them, and somehow, despite the best efforts of those in charge, someone with no respect for privacy will obtain them.  There are only two things you can do: rail against the loss of privacy, or just get used to walking around naked. Increasingly for governments and private citizens alike, the only option is the latter, metaphorically speaking.

There's an easy, delicious irony in McIntyre's concern for governmental privacy, when those are the same governments peeling away our personal privacy.

(via Howard Kurtz @ Washington Post)

Creepy tales from a lost cartridge

Here's a story about a creepy computer game.

Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. 

Nice mix of audio with (lack of) visual.

There was also the specter of dead cute critters:

[W]hen the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.

The implication was that the Pokémon died.

Note, too, the Gothic habit of dubious provenance.  Instead of finding a wormy manuscript in an ancient chest, we get

I’ve been able to find most of the ones that I’ve played online, but there’s one that I haven’t seen any mention of. I bought it at a flea market about five years ago.

Here’s a picture of the cartridge, in case anyone recognizes it. Unfortunately, when I moved two years ago, I lost the game, so I can’t provide you with screencaps. Sorry.

 

...

I think this originated from 4chan, so I’ve no idea if this hack actually exists. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a great concept/tale!:

It's fun to see another case of 4chan becoming an urban legend source.

Previous haunted/legendary computer games on Infocult: the tale of Polybius.

(via BoingBoing)