Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Fear the Easter eggs!

There are many ways we've generated to fear digital media.  Today the New York Times offered an usual one, urging you to dread... Easter eggs.

No, not the actual eggs, but the practice of hiding clever hints in stories.  

Nick Haramis offers an interesting historical sketch, touching on Britney Spears fans, Atari history,  and including one of my favorite strange books, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).  Then things turn dark.

Scouring for these narrative tricks is addictive — for one thing, they flatter consumers’ sense of themselves as nobody’s fool. In today’s media landscape, across the political spectrum, it can seem as if only dupes would take what they’re shown at strict face value.

Swiftly we see addiction raised, which sounds like a serious charge in these days of fearing social media and mobile devices. Added to that is flattery, which, from my reading of the New York Times, is a good thing aimed at celebrities and the rich, but a problem when pointed at the hoi polloi. 

Then Haramis wraps things up with a full charge:

Really, an Easter egg enthusiast is often just a conspiracy theorist with popcorn. Toeing the line between fandom and fanaticism, peering safely down the rabbit hole into the QAnonification of mainstream culture, can be thrilling. That is, until it’s not...

It seems staying after a Marvel movie's credits to glimpse Thanos is just the first step on the way to rioting on January 6th. Looking for an obscure game level is how you become the Q-shaman.  Consumers beware!

Another day, another set of internet-dreading media

We're almost done with 2022, but people still like creating stories about the scary digital world.

Today's example comes from The Incidental Economist, who notes a set of disturbing headlines about digital technology threatening our children!  Until we look at the actual study, that is, if we can. Enjoy:

(thanks to Ted Major)

Dreading the darkweb

A new scholarly study finds that British media painted a deeply skewed, and scary, view of the darkweb.

Here's from the abstract:

Through an extensive content analysis conducted on 833 articles about the deep Web published between 2001 and 2017 by six British newspapers, we demonstrate that these technologies were predominantly associated with crime, crypto markets and immoral content, while positive uses of this technology, such as protecting privacy and freedom of speech, were largely disregarded.

They go on very well: "The consistent association by the British press between the deep Web and criminal and antisocial behaviors is exemplary of a recent “apocalyptic turn” in the imaginary of the Web, whereby Web-related technologies are perceived and portrayed in more negative ways within the public sphere."

Recommended.

Another mysterious severed foot appears

Another severed human foot has appeared, and police turn to the public for assistance with a very Infocultish mystery.

Sgt. Aaron Pomeroy with the Richmond Police Department said the foot was found Saturday at 2:45 p.m. on Point San Pablo Beach, north of Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It's a right foot, likely a size 6 or 7 that belonged to a woman or small man, he said. 

We at Infocult have been following mysteriously separated body parts for a while.

(thanks to Steven "No Achilles Heel" Kaye)

Wisconsin Gothic

The American state of Wisconsin offered today's case of real-life Gothic.  Police arrested a "renegade nurse" and charged a facility with cruelty over horrendous and fatal mistreatment of a man.

The summary:

a renegade nurse cut off a man's foot without his consent and wanted to have it stuffed in her family's taxidermy shop and put on display to warn children to "wear your boots" in cold weather.

The details make things worse.  The unfortunate man was already in awful shape, as "frostbite... left his feet blackened and necrotic."  In the facility, it was time for horror:

According to a criminal complaint, the man's foot at that point was hanging on by a tendon and roughly two inches of skin. However, a nurse who changed his bandages said he could still wiggle his toes the day Brown cut off his foot, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Still, nursing home staff failed to notify hospice or a doctor of the man's condition after the fall, even though the man was so delirious he could not take his morphine pills, according to the inspection report.

On May 27, Brown unilaterally decided to amputate the foot for his "comfort," despite other nurses advising her against it. When Brown entered the man's room with two nursing aides to change his bandages, she "cut the victim's tendon, which amputated his right foot completely," using bandage scissors. One of the nursing aides would later testify to state officials that the man "felt everything and it hurt very bad."

Things got worse from there.  First, what the nurse wanted to do with the... materials:

Brown reportedly put the foot in a biohazard bag and placed it in a freezer. A nursing assistant at the facility told investigators that Brown later pressured her to retrieve the foot because Brown wanted to preserve it in her family's taxidermy shop and display it with a sign saying, "Wear your boots, kids."

Then how the enterprise responded:

Leadership at the nursing home, meanwhile, failed to respond to the incident properly, according to the state report. According to federal regulations, the nursing home should have reported the incident to state authorities within 24 hours. But, it took the nursing home a full week to report the incident. At that point, an anonymous complaint had already alerted the state, and the man had died.

Such a cluster of horrors in one horrendous story: body horror (both the decay and the amputation), violation of deep trust, and inhumane treatment of the sick.

(thanks to Steven "no scissors" Kaye)

A vampire's face, reconstructed, allegedly

What might a vampire look like?

A partnership between a business and the military offered an interesting answer to this Gothic question.  Parabon NanoLabs and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory started with the remains of a 19th century Connecticut man whose unusual burial suggested the locals considered him a vampire.  Researchers then proceeded:

Based on DNA analysis, the researchers predicted that Barber had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, and brown or black hair, per a statement from Parabon. Then, using the predictions and a 3-D image of the skull, a forensic artist reconstructed Barber’s face.

Behold the resuit:

 

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Denying devil worship, or today in Gothic politics

Today in Gothic politics, a note from Brazil:

Take a look at point 2.

A quick run to Google Translate for "Lula nao tem pacto nem jamais conversou com o diabo" yields "Lula has no pact nor has he ever talked to the devil."

Why deny it?  Apparently rumors and slurs flew. There was at least one metaphorical charge of devil dealing.  Lula's present campaign has had to deny any Faustismo.

An AI dreams of the Isle of the Dead

AI drawing programs are all over the place today, and naturally some have turned them to dark ends.

As a sample, let me share some versions of "Isle of the Dead," drawn by Stable Diffusion.

The rise of Loab: an AI generates a new monster

An AI wrangler created a monster, which apparently kept haunting their subsequent work.

Her name is Loab.  She appears as a "devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks."

Apparently Loab persisted in a lot of the creator's work: "her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab."  And it became an obsession:

I was ripping Loab apart, and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don't know how to locate with text queries. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was usually stronger!

One commentator sees Loab as a historical horror moment: "I knew it was only a matter of time before someone found the first cryptid in latent space. . ."

Loab may be with us for a while:

Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the "Loabness" of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.

Welcome, you terrifying creature, to the haunted internet.

The dawn of the necrobotic age

Some technological advances spring from natural inspiration. We can look to flora, fauna, and the inanimate world for all kinds of ideas.

It was only inevitable that some mad robot scientists decided to imitate spiders.

Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people's idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip large, delicate, and irregularly shaped objects firmly and softly without breaking them. 

So, in collaboration with mechanical engineer Daniel Preston, Yap and her colleagues at Rice University discovered a way to make a dead wolf spider's legs unfurl and grip onto objects.

 

To try out the idea, the team modified dead spiders to grab each other.

Naturally, "[t]hey called this new type of robotics 'necrobotics'."

A sinkhole claims a human victim

A man perished in a sinkhole, seemingly continuing Gaia's earthly war against humanity.

The event took place in Israel, and involved a sinkhole opening up within a swimming pool:

Mobile phone video from the scene shows floaties and water being sucked to the bottom, at the center of the pool, as people sitting by the poolside shout in Hebrew. A man is seen approaching the sinkhole, slips and is almost pulled in before he backs away.

A dreadful way to die.

(thanks to Steven "No Floaties" Kaye)

A machine issues prayer from the uncanny valley

For today's holiday, we consider The Prayer. This is a Parisian art project using AI to create prayer texts, which a robot then speaks.  The robot mimics part of a person's speaking apparatus:

How does it work?

We implemented a deep neural language model (based on a pre-trained GPT2 model) that learns the probability distribution of word sequences in text corpora. The system infers word meaning and grammar rules from word distribution, by encoding this information in tensors, which are then utilized to generate natural language. The deep network is fine-tuned on sacred texts, and as such it abstracts key features from this specific genre to generate original prayers, with their peculiar lexicon and syntax. The original prayers are generated as texts and are post-processed to clean structural errors (e.g. extreme punctuation) and introduce intonation indicators, such as speed or volume variations. The resulting post-processed text is then synthesized as voice by Amazon Polly, a neural text-to-speech AI module which reads the text aloud, taking into account the intonation tags. Finally, the voice is synchronized to the lip movements, to simulate the articulation of the prayers. The prayers are the original creations of the machine.

In theoretical terms, "An experimental set-up to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software."  

More:

A robot – installation operates a talking mouth that is part of a computer system to try to connect to ‘the divine’ the supernatural or ‘the noumenal’ as the mystery of ‘the unknown’, using deep learning, a method of machine learning, that attempts to mimic human brain circuits with a self learning software.

According to the conviction of most scientists within the research about artificial intelligence, robots as self-learning software running on so called neuronal networks of deep learning should in principle be able to mimic or generate any form of human consciousness even in a superior way. We want to test and explore this ability on religious experiences, thoughts and behavior with a long term experimental set up.

How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The question may sound absurd but the focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between human and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and reflect on the potentials and implications of deep learning AI within both its narrow setting and general state.

(via MetaFilter)

The earliest cannibalism

Researchers claim to have discovered evidence of the oldest known acts of cannibalism.  The creatures eating each other were trilobites, roughly 500 million years ago.

The paper documents damage caused by trilobites whacking and chewing on each other from different directions, then digesting the gnawed off bits.

Evidence for cannibalistic violence:

A total of 38 injured specimens exhibiting various healed cephalic and thoracic injuries are documented, in addition to the mangled remains of two individuals that probably resulted from the activities of a durophagous predator or scavenger. Specimens of both species show that most injuries are located on the posterior portion of the thorax, indicating that predators preferentially attacked from behind and/or prey individuals presented the posterior of the trunk towards the predator when threatened or fleeing. The larger sample of injured R. takooensis shows that while unilateral injuries are more common than bilateral ones, there is no evidence for a left- or right-side bias, contrasting with previous suggestions that Cambrian trilobites exhibit right-sided injury stereotypy. 

Nature: Gothic from the very start.

 

Real-life Gothic headline of the day

The American state of Ohio continues to offer real-life Gothic evidence, as seen by this story:

Man arrested while dismembering ex-girlfriend, police say

That headline actually describes the article's contents pretty clearly. 

Police responded to a domestic call Friday morning at an apartment complex in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania. ... Clifton Heights Police Chief Timothy Rockenbach says a neighbor called 911 after hearing “loud screaming” and other noises coming from the couple’s apartment....

When they went to the back of the home and looked inside, authorities say they found 32-year-old Nicholas Scurria decapitating his former girlfriend...

The world is Gothic, when you look at it the right way and at the right time.

 

New lifeforms invent new form of reproduction

The annals of horror include more than a few tales of mad science.  Some are fictional; others are not.

To begin with, scientists created life, again:

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Then that life created a new way to reproduce itself:

the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms...

Download Xenobotsparentrotatingalargeballofstemcells

Naturally science took a hand:

With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.

We can leave the possibilities to the reader's imagination.  Well, with this extra detail: "The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."