Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

One cyberphobic law dies: COPA expires

One American law conceived in the full flower of cyberfear died a natural death this week. The 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was the successor to the similarly bad Communications Decency Act (CDA), aimed at keeping pornography away from children. 

The First Amendment objections had been raised since Clinton signed the thing, not to mention the definitional problems (imagine quotes around "pornography", "away", and "children").  The Supreme Court didn't even bother going through the motions of ruling.

One good thing, looking back: "in the ten years since the law was passed, it has never been enforced."

Cold War Gothic: the hidden letter for the end of the world

It's like the ancient manuscript in a Gothic tale, the one that reveals secrets and changes everything, but brought to life for the Cold War's nuclear potential: an apocalypse message deep under the sea.  It's The Last Resort Letter, and listen to the ghost story language here:

In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."

The Gothic is always about power:

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

And the haunted voice of posthumous media:

the safe containing the safe containing the Letter of Last Resort is to be opened only in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain that kills both Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a second, not identified person—the person he's designated as his alternate nuclear decision-maker in case of his death.

Assuming the death of his second as well, Brown's letter, the voice from the grave, from a person most probably reduced to radioactive ashes, will (theoretically) condemn to fiery death tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of innocent civilians.

(via MetaFilter)

Abandoned places, fine LiveJournal Gothic

This LiveJournal community offers beautiful Gothic places from around the world.  One example is a late medieval Ukrainian fort:


(via Warren Ellis)

The Onion officially ends the 2008 campaign on notes of shrieking horror

The Onion winds up the 2008 presidential campaign Gothic with several hysterical stories.

• Cheney lured into steel box by trainers.  "Cheney only eats what he kills."
• Spiders lay eggs in Bush's brain, then eat their way out.
• Bush is repeatedly killed.  By a plane ("According to the FAA report, the nose of the Cessna 350 impacted with the president's face at 110 mph").  By natural causes, followed by bodily defilement ("Plans for Bush's funeral have been postponed indefinitely following an unexpected incident in which the president's corpse was sucked through an Air Force One jet engine").
• Bush is repeatedly tortured.  The Onion sees his eyelid nailed to a wall, or being dragged behind the presidential motorcade for 26 blocks.  And did we mention Bush having spiders eat his brain?

Zombie banks keep on shambling

More economic Gothic language, this time from Paul Krugman:

Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust...

[M]any influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.

Krugman even adds a zombie bank antecedent, along with an innovative way to kill the shambling dead:

A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders.

He wants us to avoid another zombie defense tactic:

Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

It's interesting to see rhetoric usually assigned to a marginal cultural position - pop horror - coming from an elite source (Princeton academic, writing for the New York Times).

Previous zombie bank posts: back in October.

Environmental Gothic: planet Medea

A new book about Earth science offers a distinctly dark view of the world.  "Life is toxic," Peter Ward explains.

[L]ife isn't naturally nourishing - it's poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another...
The story of life on earth, in Ward's reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts.

Charmingly, he calls this "the Medea hypothesis."  As in not being Gaea, not that Harlan Ellison book, either.

GPS unit fear

A new urban legend about dangerous GPS units appears.  Snopes reports:

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me that someone she knew had their car broken into while they were at a football match. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans.

Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard.

When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen.

The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house.

Expect to see more of these.

Personally, I've enjoyed the creepiness of being led to odd locations via GPS, like abandoned sites.  This happens when places move before the GPS databases update.

Creepily silent YouTube

Here's an interesting effect of copyright on social video:

YouTube has been testing a new way of combating copyright violations on the site - removing the audio, leaving the video. The result is a wasteland of music videos that are creepily silent.

It might be interesting to compare the user experience of such videos with the Second Life phenomenon of exploring large, built spaces without any other avatars.

Death by World of Warcraft

Another suicide and cyberspace story comes from Wired.  This time it's a teenager obsessed with World of Warcraft, apparently.

During an online conversation with a representative from Blizzard Entertainment, the unnamed teen said "he was suicidal and that the game is the only thing he has to live for." The representative subsequently contacted local police who, along with paramedics, responded to the claim.

Even if it turns out to have been a joke, this could well turn up in 2009 discussions about the evils of computer games.

(thanks to Ed Webb!)

NPR gazes upon the Twittersphere and despairs of echoes

An NPR story on moms gone wild - er, mothers Twittering offers an interesting slice of mild internet anxiety.

The article smacks at cyberculture with passages like this:

Who is telling the truth and what can you believe in the echo chamber that is the Internet?

First, notice the shocked sense of discovery, the avoidance of any sense that anyone else has ever worried about this.  This appears as a noteworthy observation.  Second, observe the total condemnation of the net: "the echo chamber that is the Internet."  It's a blithe assessment bereft of nuance, much less realism.  Imagine an alternative phrasing, "the internet's tendency to sometimes act like a series of echo chambers."  Or describing another medium: "the echo chamber that is tv news," "the echo chamber that is political book publishing."

Linton Weeks' condescension then descends to specific technologies:

Twitter lives up to its tree-full-of-sparrows name. There's a ditzy quality to the microblogging, a sort of say-whatever-pops-in-your-head capability that is the application's draw and its drawback. It is like thinking aloud in front of strangers. It is a marketing tool and a me-me-me medium.

Ditsy quality, marketing, egotism - Twitter is just lame, isn't it?  And that's what Twitterers like about it.  Weeks doesn't leave a lot a lot of room for positive uses beyond marketing (it's hard to say if the author's mention of marketing is a condemnation or just neutral description).  That entire world, well-documented, accessible, and easily grasped, is absent from this article.

If we read further, the piece carries on with microblogging, narrowing from the Twittersphere entire to the mothering part in particular.

Such is the attention-deficit nature of online mommy blog chatter that, mixed in with the expressions of anguish over Thordora's tweet and suggestions on how to respond on Feelslikehome, are comments about cats, Foodsavers and a nest of baby rabbits.

Mothers who Twitter are not just ditsy, but ADHD-enabled, and a bit obsessed with animals.  Is Weeks complaining that Twitter is too cute?  And one wonders about the link between ADHD and Foodsavers (is the latter bad, here?).  Perhaps it's not a surprise that "Thordora... declined a request by NPR for an interview."  Did this cyberphobic, sexist approach come across in the request?

Carrying on, Weeks moves back out to the general Web, riffing on the echo chamber idea, to see the whole thing as exacerbating political badness:

Because social media allow for public commentary, like a town hall debate or a city council meeting, "it fosters increasingly extreme opinions the longer it goes on," says Evans [Psychster Inc.], an effect "which has long been known to make people express radical views."

The Web can exacerbate that effect, he says. "The Internet can bring people who post radical actions as much global attention as rare talents or accomplishments, which creates a strong motivator for them to do so."

Is this generalization supported by social science?  Town hall meetings, at least in Vermont, tend to be mainstreaming rather than radicalizing platforms.  We spend most of our time on budgets and details - kinda like what most people use the internet for, actually.

The article concludes by explaining responses to Thordora's tweet in terms of protecting children.  To Weeks' credit, he doesn't follow up on that in the classic cyberfear direction.

Overall, why do we still publish this kind of stuff in 2009?  Is fearing the internet so deeply ingrained that casual dismissals of it from a first-rank journalism source are to be expected? 

(thanks to Ed Webb)