Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Fearing social media: a Huffington blogs tell us to blog less

This Huffington post offers a good example of social media anxiety.  Leeat Granek advises us to reconnect with people in order to feel better.  Lonely people feel sad.  Which isn't a shocking bit of news.

What's interesting to Infocult is the way she blames social media for loneliness.

Neighbors email and text each other instead of knocking on the door or dropping by unannounced.

We order take-out, shop online, drive our private cars, and have our groceries delivered, all in the name of "saving time."

Granek doesn't offer evidence for this model, nor does she stop to wonder if social media sometimes connect people offline.  She does describe the ultimate costs:

socially isolated people are more depressed, more suicidal, and have more mental disorders and substance abuse problems than those who are socially connected and who have frequent face-to-face time with the people they love.

Granek  - excuse me, Dr. Leeat Granek, PhD, as she describes herself - touches on other causes for social isolation besides Web 2.0, briefly:

But what are we saving all this time for?... The extra time is devoted to work-related things, spending more time online, or in the gym in the never-ending quest for "self-improvement."

Yet the cultures of work and self-image never appear again in the piece.  Calls for cultural change or political activism might be expected here.  Perhaps a shout out to Situationism.   Instead all we get is a cheery call to talk to other people.

So go on, don't just sit there. Tell someone today (and everyday!) that they make "your heart excited," because "you love them and are happy to be with them."

How much easier to step away from the keyboard (or the Huffingtons?) than to participate in social critique! 

There's a parallel here to blaming movies or computer games for social problems, easier by far than acually working on cultural transformation.  Granek even follows that genre by evoking children (in the saccharine opening paragraphs).

There's also a parallel to medicalization of cyberfear with "internat addiction."  Note the way Granek emphasizes her credentials, and offers no sign of scholarly controversy.  What she describes comes across as objective truth, rather than an argument.

...which is odd, given some weird observations in the rest of the piece:

We have hundreds of facebook friends, but can go days on end without speaking too, or seeing a single soul.

(Really?  Who is this "we"?)

Admitting to loneliness, telling people you need them, or expressing a desire to connect with others has become weirdly taboo. It's social suicide to show vulnerability and be honest with our feelings, so instead, we pretend we are "a-ok", moving along, being productive, and filling our time with more and more things to do.

(Since when?  Where is this?  Are there no alternatives?)

Watch for more of this Putnam lite type of argument as social media continues to grow, and especially as the economy grinds down.

Mysterious black spot appears on Jupiter

A black spot wider than the Earth suddenly appeared on Jupiter this week.  An amateur astronomer was the first to spot the blotch (visible on the top of the image):

Post-slashdotted site here.

So what is it?  Could it be another large, fast object striking the gas giant, a la Shoemaker-Levy, fourteen years ago this month?

Can't sleep, clowns will judge me

We haven't covered scary clowns for a while, so let's catch up.  Clown Court, Judge Pennywise presiding:

Keep a blood-shot eye open for juicy bits, like a giant Punch with an axe, a jury of clowns shrieking "guilty!", and the reveal of the judge's skull-like head.

It's from a BBC show called Psychoville, apparently.  This Yankee hasn't glimpsed so much as a timesliver of it.

(via Little Green Footballs)

Steam-powered autonomous robot won't eat human corpses, says the Pentagon

A steam-powered, autonomous, military robot that fuels itself by devouring biological materials will not eat human corpses, according to the Pentagon.

It is delightful to be able to write a sentence like that.

EATR (yes, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot) is designed to feed on plant matter, mostly.  It will chow on compostable stuff, generally.  But EATR won't eat animals, including us.  Especially not us. According to a rather arch press release, "Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI."

The Fox News piece then offers this tidbit for science fiction and horror writers:

...the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Yes, Bolos are becoming real.  Or, put another way, we're on the way to WALL-E.  In the meantime we can just meditate on the power of that phrase: "extremely flexible in fuel sources."  Mmmmmm.

We first blogged about EATR (yes, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot) earlier this year.  Infocult: we're all about the uncanny valley where cannibalism and posthumanism come together for meals.

"Curing" internet "addiction" with electroshock: count the ways this is wrong

One Chinese clinic has been using electroshock therapy to treat alleged internet addiction, according to a local newspaper.  The Ministry of Health put a stop to it:

The China Daily reported last month that more than 3,000 young people were tricked or forced into in to the four-month long course. To enroll their children, parents or guardians had to sign a contract acknowledging that they would be given electric shocks of up to 200 milliamperes.

There are several disturbing elements to the story, beyond the horror of electroshock applied for pseudoscientific reasons.  For instance, the aura around cures:

Patients were considered “cured” or “reborn” once they admitted to their addiction.

And the overall regime of control and discipline:

According to the Guangdong-based Information Times, shocks were given if patients broke any of the center’s 86 rules, which included prohibitions on eating chocolate, locking the bathroom door, taking pills before a meal, and sitting in Dr. Yang's chair without permission.

...In addition to the electric shocks, [patients] claimed that they were not allowed to talk about anything other than overcoming their Internet addiction, ordered to kneel in front of their parents to show obedience, and forced to confess to “wrongdoing.”

(via BoingBoing)

The internet gone bad, a vision

A British columnist spins dystopically, seeing degradation everywhere:

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, "Cuh, Typical."

(via Bruce Sterling; we'll get to his industrial Gothic idea soon)

Mystery goo oozing from the frozen North

Viscous mystery drifting out of the Arctic:

It's thick and dark and "gooey" and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department.

Alien matter?  Shuggoth larvae?  Some mad science caught in the act?

(via Steve B)

Fearing for one's social media in Iran

This story about Iranian customs adds another layer to digital fears.

On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

It's a spin on classic fears of state power over one's digital life.  Now that digital life includes one's social media presence.

Notice that this is a case of fearing for Facebook, not fear of Facebook.  Facebook is again protected from being seen as uncanny or disturbing.  Every month its non-creepy reputation deepens.  Compare: would this story work as well if the traveler was asked about her MySpace or LiveJournal account?

Bruce Schneier offers one way to reduce risk of trouble from such customs searches.

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)

Creepy doll on eBay

Here's an excellent Gothic toy and story via eBay.

Note the disturbing way the doll is given a child's name and age, a la RealDolls: "HAUNTED DOLL~JENNA~9 YRS OLD".

Note the haunted media aspect:

Since I have been selling my grandmother's dolls, I have learned alot about hauntings and spirits, so I have started doing EVP's (voice recordings that you cannot hear with the naked ear) on my Grandmother's dolls. I have also recorded them with my night vision video camera. The shots and recordings I have gotten were amazing! I never knew that these dolls were as active as they were. On many of the recordings I have heard them talking among each other, laughing, crying, yelling, some where easy to make out, some were very hard, and some I couldnt make out at all.

Note the Gothic storyline.  The description starts in normal capitalization, then moves to all caps, which feels a lot like the speaker begins shrieking:

LITTLE JENNA HAD A ROUGH SHORT LIFE. HER FATHER RAPED, AND BEAT HER ON A DAILY BASIS. AS A VICTIM OF HER FATHERS TORTURE SHE HAD NO ONE TO TALK TO ABOUT IT. SHE WAS ALL ALONE, HER MOTHER PASSED AWAY DURING HER BIRTH, AND LEFT JENNA WITH HER FATHER A MONSTER.  IF JENNA DIDNT DO SOMETHING TO HER FATHERS LIKING LIKE CLEAN HER BEDROOM, SHE KNEW WHAT AWAITED, SHE WOULD BE THRASHED SEVERLY THEN HANDCUFFED IN HER BEDROOM CLOSET WITH NO RESTROOM PRIVALAGES, NO FOOD, NOTHING. THE ABUSE BEGAN  WHILE JENNA WAS ONLY 2 AND CONTINUED UNTIL THE DAY SHE PASSED.

And interactivity with a potential buyer:

Q:     I have been contemplating puchasing one of your dolls for a while know. I was wondering what kind of activity I would experience...
A:     hello, No, you would not have to tell him anything that is up to you. Welcome Jenna into your home with open arms, activity from jenna can be talking...

(thanks to Thomas Becket!)

Taibbi takes the Gothic economy up a notch

Our Gothic economy: Matt Taibbi goes after Goldman Sachs with monstrous rhetoric.

To begin:

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Taibbi offers some classic villain images, too:

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach.