Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Zombie subdivisions surfacing

Great Recession Gothic continues with the recognition of zombie subdivisions.  No, not homes for the shambling dead, but a particular kind of real estate development gone sour.  A series of homes are planned, but only a few built, and fewer occupied.  The Great Recession is to blame, with its personal bankruptcies, bad loans, foreclosures, and collapsing banks.

CNN describes this home ownership grimness in lovely, light Gothic terms: "A half-million dollar house in a field of weeds, surrounded by For-Sale signs," "no children in the boarded-up playhouse," "a wild and ugly ride," and the cheeky subtitle "Zombie subdivisions left naked." 

The reporter interviews a statistician, who describes one series of these zombie subdivisions circling Atlanta as "a ring of death," created not by a gold rush but by "a dirt rush."

The reporter adds a long timeline to the picture, with years to pass before these get occupied, if ever.  Horror tales, both fictional and non-, another setting awaits you.

(via Todd Bryant)

Fearsome Facebook: a presidential assassination poll

Someone put up a poll on Facebook, asking that service's 300 million users if president Obama should be killed.

The poll asked respondents "Should Obama be killed?" The choices: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.

The Secret Service are on the case, and already questioned at least one techie at the firm who developed the polling app.

Setting the politics aside for the moment, how does this play against the fearsome internet cultural current (this blog's subject)? 

On one level, it plays against type, given Facebook's relative immunity from the scary digital network meme.  If this has been a MySpace poll, or a Twitter tweet, the death threat would have been more acceptable.  But on Facebook, ah, it looks a bit shocking.  Facebook is for the polished, or those who would like to become or seem so (most recently).

On another level, media accounts seem oddly disinclined to point to an author.  Not that the author is known (as of this posting), but to mention that someone put up the poll.  Instead, coverage mentions the poll appearing on Facebook, or calls it a Facebook survey.  It's the old discourse of removing blame from a specific author (even if their name is unknown), and shifting responsibility to a medium or platform more generally.

Back to politics: this story is one which can be part of the narrative describing a rising tide of violent anti-Obama rhetoric.  This doesn't directly concern technology, but could through two avenues.  One: setting up a mirror to Obama's use of social media to win in 2008.  Two: by tapping on older fearsome internet memes about disliked political parties using Web 2.0 to organize.  Cf e-Qaeda for example.

Back to Facebook: will this story become part of a negative Facebook narrative? 

Gaming addiction camp

Time describes a treatment camp for gaming addicts. "ReSTART [is] a video-game and Internet addiction recovery program... about 30 miles east of Seattle."  It's an odd article, one half description of a medical program, one half glimpse into an unusual social arrangement.

For the former, Tiffany Sharples (the best name for a Time writer, ever) describes one man's suffering from too much gaming, and the recovery program.

On the other hand, Sharples then undercuts the whole thing by noting that, well, "internet addiction" isn't exactly a thing who basic existence anyone agrees on.

Although the term "video game addiction" appeared in the research as early as 1983 — in reference to kids getting hooked on arcade games — the scientific evidence hasn't progressed much since.

Ouch.  Since 1983?  It gets worse:

"The central issue is the absence of research literature on this," says Dr. Charles O'Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual...

"Absence."  Not "not enough," or "a nascent field of literture," but absence.  So we have camps in America and China, involving significant money and human behavior modification, dealing with something for which there, er, um, doesn't seem to be scholarly research.

Then O'Brien quietly goes for the kill:

"At this point I think it's appropriate that it's not considered an official disease," says O'Brien.

At this point when should note the article's description of what treatment costs, and what one gets from it:

[F]for $24,500 (including application, screening and treatment fees), "guests" could spend 45 days cut off from the computer, integrated into a real family's home with chores, daily counseling sessions and weekly therapy.

That's decent money, folks.  24.5K for a month and a half.

The fearsome internet addiction meme marches on.  Kudos to Time for not buying it wholesale.

PS: does the treatment plan include reading?  The article doesn't say.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

This Is Gothic News

CNN is trying to be the world's leading source for Gothic horror.  Check out this glimpse from the main CNN site, a few minutes ago:

Yes, "it bleeds, it leads" has long been a truism for journalism.  But holy Cthulhu, look at the shrieking terrors in that list.  Missiles! floods! bombs! robbers! punishment! kidnapping! virulent conspiracy, angrier Americans, and a murder/rape/beating mashup.

Note: this isn't their crime section (that's here).  It's not even the delirious, spastic whirl of Headline News.  Nothing has been edited to make this more creepy.  No, this is their main page, where they can do anything.  And fountaining up scares seems to be their thing.  They are mad as hell, kids.

What a Gothic world view.  Infocult cannot compete.

The eeriness index: quantifying the uncanny valley

An eeriness index is being developed by an Indiana University informatics professor.  Karl MacDorman is building metrics to figure out when a representation's similarity to the human is creepy, and when it's charming.  The model focuses on details like eye enlargement,  eye separation and face height.

The index also incorporates audience response.

MacDorman and his team plan to use results from objective sources like heart rate, galvanic skin response, electroencephalograms and functional magnetic imaging of the brain to gauge how far designers can go before characters creep out viewers.

 
(thanks to the twitching puppet that was once Steven Kaye)

Advert Gothic: amputation against shark finning

This ad against shark finning offers a fine bit of horror. It's based on the old idea of putting humans in the place of animals. And yes, a tad unsettling, especially that final pull back from the incarnadine beach:

(thanks to catherwood)

The mobile phone no-service horror cliche

Cell phones have made it harder to kidnap people these days. So the devices must be removed from victims-to-be in scary stories. At least phones should be disabled in some way.

This clip does a fine job of aggregating horror movie scenes where phones don't work. It's well excerpted, and should feel very familiar:

The other name for this kind of scene is "living in Vermont."
(via MetaFilter)

Death of a census worker: a political Gothic tale is born

It could be the start of another health care reform horror story, or a new urban legend: a US Census worker is found dead in Kentucky.  His body was discovered hanged in a cemetery, with the word "fed" apparently written on his chest.

The AP account has a whole battery of American Gothic details:

• Item: death in a cemetery.  Points for setting.
• Item: warning or explanation written on William Sparkman's corpse.  For a bonus chill, "The law enforcement official... did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word." "In marker or blood or what is not known."
• Item: the locale of rural Kentucky, dredging up classic anxieties about scary rural folk.  Just wait for the first pig squeal/banjo joke.

Details are hazy.  For instance, note the string of conditionals and hypotheticals here:

Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment.

So it's possible that this is not the anti-Obama psycho-terror killing tale it could well be.  It could prove to be something else, such as a suicide, or murder unrelated to politics.  For instance, this observer notes known meth labs and police response in the area (more here). 

If one of these explanations wins out, watch for the political story's persistence in classic urban legend form.  It will be passed from hand to hand, details modified along the way, eventually checked on Snopes.

But if it the other theory turns out to be true, that a federal worker (part-time) was killed for political reasons, then this story could well become a central narrative for the season.   For Obama supporters and others, it could be viewed as "a modern day lynching", a hate crime committed by people driven mad by anti-government hatred. 

It could be connected directly to various tea party and anti-health care reformmovements, as in this tweet: "the Bill Sparkman lynching in KY that happened on or before 9/12".   One official referred to the (alleged) killing as "essentially domestic terrorism."

If the case remains unsolved for a time, though, it could become a Gothic tale told in two ways, via strict partisan or culture war lines.  From the right, the Other McCain, for example, urges caution:

My immediate curiosity is whether this had something to do with a moonshine or drug operation, rather than "anti-government sentiment." ... Let's wait to see what law enforcement discovers before jumping to any kind of politicized Let's-Blame-Glenn-Beck speculation.

There are several reliable rhetorical moves available for this side.  Connecting the tale to law and order, as O. McCain just did, is a classic.  Seeing the opposition as hysterical is another standard move.

While, from the other side, left/liberals can draw a connection to national political figures: "Remember Bill Sparkman! Down with Michelle Bachmann!"  And "@MicheleBachmann Responsibility for the death of Bill Sparkman lies squarely at your feet. Shame on you."  Bachmann is a favorite trope to select for the left.  On this blog, focused on horror stories, we've noted her Gothic voice before.

Or the left can add more political and historical layers:

There's been a lot of talk on the right about the connection (always very tenuous, and now severed) between the census and ACORN, a group that's been conservatives' favorite bogeyman of late. And Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has been spreading her own fears about the census, at one point even suggesting a link between the census and Japanese internment during World War II -- a frightening parallel for modern conspiracy theorists who fear that the government is setting up similar camps for them now.

Also available for liberals is seeing the right as having viral powers, such as the specter of this one (alleged) act of violence spurring on others, maybe Turner Diaries-style:

Lord have mercy, if this turns out to be some backwoods, irate, homicidal teabagger, the already close-to-untethered 24% of right-wing crazies will up the violence ante...

There's also trotting out, even tentatively, the old idea of linking political speech with political action.  That's the Glenn Beck->Bill Sparkman vector.

There is, in fact, already political art:

(Sparkman photo, above, source here)

From flesh to skeleton: an air burial in photographs

This series of photos purports to document a Tibetan air burial.  A dead human body is brought out to an open area, prepared, then presented to a hungry flock of birds, who devour the flesh.  A skeleton remains, and receives further treatment.

Some of the images might be disturbing, even for Infocult stalwarts, so we'll make do with this classic trope, the death birds winging in towards a grim feast:

The second page of the series offers what seems to be a different instance of that funereal event.  We can notice the Gothic conjunction of doom and ruin in this selection:

I was astonished at the regularity of the revealed spine...

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Polar lairs revealed

As autumn begins demolishing summer, why not look ahead to winter's Polar Gothic?  The Onion will help us out here, describing the awful discovery of supervillain hideouts in the Arctic.  Revealed by global warming, you see:

 "In August alone we discovered 44 mad scientist laboratories, three highly classified military compounds, and seven reanimated and very confused cavemen. That's more than twice the number we had found in the previous three decades combined."

The hardships are really difficult.

According to a Natural Resources Defense Council survey, 78 percent of sinister one-eyed industrialists based in the Arctic have been forced to relocate their powerful underworld shadow governments, with many now secretly orchestrating world affairs from dormant volcanoes on remote islands.

(thanks to Randy McCall! - of Canada, take note)