Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Shutting down cell phones in San Francisco

Fears of technology lead to policy: San Francisco's train service blocked out cell phone coverage on Thursday, to ward off an anticipated protest.  (A job they should have outsourced to AT+T, which is experienced in cutting Bay Area coverage)

Said protest was aimed at a police shooting.  It's hard to say if crowds would have turned dangerous, but police had a term for what they expected:

Andy Alkire told Bay City News that while it was unusual to kill cell phone service, it was "a great tool to utilize for this specific purpose" with the agency facing a potentially volatile situation.

BART itself used different language:

Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on August 11, 2011 stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police. A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators. 

Were fears of London-style riots in mind?  What about anxiety concerning cell phones' various effects?

Interestingly, this might not have been a police plan to start with:

KTVU reported that BART's media relations department suggested cutting off the cell service during the protests.

Which might backfire, if Anonymous gets going.  If something happens from that source, then this story obtains another level of digital fear!

(thanks to Ryan Brazell, Steven Kaye and others)

Riotous Canadian mobiles

Fear the Crackberry: maybe the best way London riotors organize is through Blackberry smartphones.  Specifically, angry Londoners are relying on the device's short text function,  Blackberry Messages‚ or BBMs.

FastCompany notes several recent encounters between RIM, protestors, and police in other countries, including Egype and India.

Note, too, how unfashionable the Brits are.  Clearly they didn't get the memo about RIM being dead, and smartphones being all Android and Apple:

BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week's Ofcom study... 

"Unlikely", says one surprised blog, who then goes on nicely;

“BBM is standard issue.” One said to me. “Of course. It’s all about BBM. This is our network!” I was told. The fact that journalists have just woken up to this fact is interesting in itself, but it has led to some sections of the media coming to bizarre conclusions.

Is this connection between riots and tech enough to spur a wave of fearing Blackberries?  Maybe, if official sanctions occur, and have any effects on popular imagination:

Mike Butcher, a technology journalist and adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said it was "unbelievable" that the BBM service had not been disabled.

Maybe not.  RIM is cooperating with police.  And it's a Canadian company.

(burning man photo from Guardian; some links via John Robb) 

Fearsome Foursquare

Fearing Foursquare: after checking in to a restaurant, a man gets a phone call.

Everyone paused while he handed me the phone.
Me: “Hello?”
Them: In a voice that was clearly masked “Is this Brad Feld”
Me: “Yes, who is this?”
Them: “I wrrrr whrrr your rrrr.”
Me: “I’m sorry – I can’t understand you. What are you saying.”
Them “Brad Feld – I know whrrr you rrr.”

The masked voice is a nice touch.  

Fears about mobile, connected devices have been around for a while.  

(via KurzweilAI)

Floating bodies on the land

Here's a new project for creepy augmented reality (AR) art.  "Proyecciones en el Exterior" by Ibon Mainar.

Manair's setup looks like this:

The results look like this:

Is this an example of William Gibson's "locative art"?

(thanks to Glenda Carl!)

Pop up sex offenders in your neighborhood

Checking out a neighborhood for sex offenders?  Why, "There's an app for that".  

Users can adjust the range of their search from a tenth of a mile to several. A map mode identifies registered offenders as pins on a map, while an augmented reality view allows users to look through the camera lens of their smartphones to pull up addresses in any given direction.

Users can click on each of the pins or red dots to draw forth detailed information about the offenders, including their names, addresses, photos (if available) and the offenses they were convicted for.

Just in time for Halloween, if we remember that holiday fear.

 

(thanks to mid-Pennsylvania's own Todd Bryant and Ed Webb)

This story creeps around the reader

A fine use of augmented reality for unsettling stories, AR Jekyll and Hyde:

(via Bruce Sterling)

Mobile phone wars turn Gothic

A fine use of mobile phone logos:

Nice work contrasting the charmingly cartoonish logo outlines with the blood stains and smears.

The full-size image looks sadder and grimmer, with all the isolation:

The internet of things vs the internet of humans

"Remember this day": more machines activated Verizon accounts than did humans, this quarter.

We humans are reaching full market penetration and growth in subscription sales to us is slowing down, but there are more potentially-connected objects than there are human beings, and those objects are coming online faster and faster

(via the EdWebbdroid)

Augmented reality and the great fear of bugs

Gregor Samsa awoke after uneasy dreams, to find augmented reality covered with insects.  This is about a new therapy (article behind paywall) for people suffering from fear of cockroaches.

Participants in the study sit at a desk with a computer wearing a virtual reality headset.  The headset has a camera attached, such that the person wearing it will see a video representation of the desk that they’re looking at.  But with cockroaches.

That’s right.  You sit at a desk, wear a virtual reality headset, and then see the desk that you’re sitting at covered in cockroaches.

Your nightmares may commence... now.

The therapeutic possibilities are clear, but never mind that.  Think of the horrors!  For one, this has got to be an AR prank waiting to happen.

For another, this sort of thing will surely crop of in fiction involving AR.  One character sees insects crawling through their handsets, but nobody else does.  A bug appears, then shrieks, because it's holding a handset, through which it can see a gigantic human being.  Etc.

And, as with so many things, the way has been blazed by a classic X-Files episode.

Here's a great Gothic line from the paper's abstract:

testing the correspondence between the inclusion of feared stimuli and the induction of anxiety.

Hey, that would make a fine blog subtitle.

(via Slashdot)

Haunted augmented reality

How will we fear augmented reality? This conference description offers one uncanny suggestion:

There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.

This AR ghost sense depends on being already connected to someone else, or at least being aware of them.  It's the flip side of stalking, being shaken by your target's misbehavior.

Perhaps AR ghosts will become associated with glitches, such as rendering delays or databases slow to update.  Like uncanny Second Life rezzing/

We've already seen a version of AR hauntings with Ghostwire.  Ghostwire is safer, more mannered, in that the ghosts aren't socially connected to the user (presumably).

We've covered other likely forms of AR fear previously, like porting the classic fear of violent computer games onto homes.  

(thanks to Sean Connin; ghost photo by mattwi1s0n)