After months of legal exploration and widespread disgust, the state of Missouri filed criminal charges against Lori Drew. Drew led the creation of a fake MySpace identity, the actions of which drove a teenage neighbor to suicide.
Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
A London-based girl gang apparently blew up a house by pouring a liquid explosive into its mail slot. Which is Gothic enough, or at least pulp-ish. But trust The Times to hunt for an internet connection, no matter how slight, or simply hypothetical. Their report begins with this:
A gang of girls may have used the internet to make a bomb that killed a man and destroyed three homes in their feud with another teenager. [emphasis added]
Or maybe they didn't. There's no proof, which doesn't stop anyone from lunging at cyberfear.
Put another way: "A gang of girls may have gone to the library to make a bomb." Or "A gang of girls may have driven a car to get to a shop where they bought bomb supplies." Doesn't have quite the same ring, eh?
The article helpfully lists likely ingredients for such a liquid explosive, should the reader be so inclined. And if you read that on the Web, then maybe you really have used teh internets to make the b0mb.
After those strong opening moves, the article, or the police officers it cites, reaches even further, stretching towards that classic internet-terrorism meme:
“We have seen with recent terrorism trials that there are plenty of things on the web but it would obviously be a disturbing development if a girl gang has decided to settle a dispute in such a dramatic and tragic way.”
(thanks to CoriS, via Twitter)
A project is afoot to run broadband cables through sewers under Bournemouth. Nice move, really, taking advantage of preexisting construction.
One detail caught my eye:
Conventional cables are normally laid a mere 45 cm below ground. Utilising the sewer systems means that the cables lie a full 10 metres below ground, decreasing the likelihood of damage and increasing security in potentially dangerous situations.
How long until someone comes up with a story about awful intrusions upon the cable, along the lines (sorry) of the old Twilight Zone story where a telephone cable droops over a cemetery? Either a person hacks into the cable, or something intervenes from below...
One response to last week's fear-the-aliens-or-lack-thereof story comes from Jamais Cascio, who offers a series of ways to be less terrified of SETI's failure to find aliens. One way is to imagine other species having gone through a Singularity experience, which means that our pre-Singularity sense of galactic colonization might not apply.
There's an interesting connection to the fearsome internet here, bearing in mind that the Singularity concept is based in part on computational advances so breathtaking as to sometimes instill fear. On the positive, eucatastrophic side, such runaway cyberculture (for aliens) saves us from interstellar invasion fleets, since the ETs wouldn't do anything so recognizable. On the dark side, one can easily imagine ways by which superadvanced aliens calmly wipe out the solar system, say, en route to turning this spiral arm into computronium. That gulf in scale between us and Them is a Lovecrartian abyss.
Cascio's great line yoking urban legend to posthumanism, "The Singularity is Calling from INSIDE THE HOUSE!", reminds us that the Singularity could happen to us, too. Cue the full, traditional barrage of cyberfear on this score.
Commentators to that post note other cases of cyberfear. Consider, for example, microaliens from the other side of the Singularity, and who are already here because they're too small to be seen (or take the shape of spiders; cheers). And don't forget the classic fear that we'd simply get too wrapped up in virtual worlds to notice the moon, much less colonize Tau Seti.
Why does digital fear persist? Don't forget this reason:
The name is funny, referring to accidentally dialing a phone number by squeezing the device between body and clothing. But we should expect scary stories of butt-dialing, like this inadvertent recording from a war zone:
Stephen Phillips and other soldiers in his Army MP company were battling insurgents when his phone was pressed against his Humvee. It redialed and called his parents in the small Oregon coastal town of Otis.
Most the sounds were gunfire, but shouts can be heard, including, "More ammo! More ammo!"
"At the end, you could hear a guy saying 'Incoming! RPG!' And then it cut off," said John Petee, Phillips' brother.
Variations on this story could draw on other haunted media tales: last call from a now-dead man, a photo taken of an approaching killer, an awkwardly-angled video clip of the monsters talons dragging on the floor.
(thanks to my wife)
Another layer of Wikipedia-fearing comes from some American conservatives, who see the site as,,, purveying hardcore pornography.
Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural Issues with Concerned Women for America (CWA), said, "Perhaps Wikipedia should change its name to Pornopedia. Providing clinical images that may assist people in research is one thing, but many of the images and videos featured by Wikipedia are gratuitous and obscene..."
Note that CWA hits on both classic registers of digital porn fearing, exposure to "children" (minors of all ages) and general readers (presumable leading to the corruption of adults, etc).
A call for federal regulation follows.
(thanks to Argus-eyed Jesse Walker)
Sexual exploitation of children in Second Life: such is the fear of an Illinois Representative. It's a classic case of digital fear, with a focus on children and sexuality.
It's an argument breezily free of evidence:
Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but...
"but." Can you see where this is going?
... he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.
Note the persistence of extremely inflated numbers for Second Life "residents" - 13 million, in this article! Which makes the article's emphasis on Second Life being new (it isn't) curious.
(thanks to Jamie Prince, via Twitter)
The Austrian true-life Gothic story gets worse and worse.
And so far there is no mention of digital technology. I've been waiting for it, for the father to have maintained a blog, or for the children to have coordinated escape by MySpace.
Imagine if this story were told from the point of view of a typical fearsome internet account.
"Incest father's secret basement: blueprints were involved."
"Small town says nothing. Can a village be a real community?"
"Father bought food from a grocery story; grocer offers no comment."
From New South Wales comes this poster, a warning against too much multitasking while walking busy streets:
(thanks to CoriS, via Twitter)
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction
Daniel J. Solove: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
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