Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Happy Halloween from Infocult!

It's the best holiday of the year, today, and Infocult wishes you all uncanny, disturbing, exhilarating best.

Some bits for your monsters to consume:

• A list of great horror movies from Martin Scorcese
• Wal-mart and Cosco now selling coffins
• Dacre Stoker's Dracula sequel has shambled forth
• The Canadian human foot plague continues
• more as the day proceeds.

Meanwhile, here at Blair Witch North, we're watching horror movies all day.  So far: Bubbahotep, some episodes of Supernatural, and Horror Express.

More bits as the day staggers onwards.

Hierakonpolis, or dawn of the dead

When was the first zombie attack, historically?  Some archaeologists claim Egypt.

[I]n 1892, a British dig at Hierakonpolis unearthed a nondescript tomb containing a partially decomposed body, whose brain had been infected with the virus (Solanum) that turns people into zombies. In addition, thousands of scratch marks adorned every surface of the tomb, as if the corpse had tried to claw its way out...

(thanks to John Lynch)

Another way to start fearing the iPhone

A classic fearsome digital media theme has arrived on the iPhone, as a new app lets you fire a weapon towards whatever you're looking at.  Firepower adds machine guns to what your camera picks up, like so:

The representation of violence has long been a problem for digital media critics.  It might not stick to the iPhone, given its JesusPhone cult and the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.  But the Apps Store's willingness to allow all kinds of disturbing content through, while blocking other content for being unsuitable, might eventually open up a space for complaints.

Alternatively, since this is an augmented reality application, outrage might go general.  Fearsome AR is inevitable, given the history of digital media anxieties.

Beware the digital love jihad!

Beware the internet, because it can lead you to inappropriate sex.  That's an old meme, but it received a new twist in South Asia this year, as Indian Hindus and Christians worry about losing believers to Islam.  One means for such conversions: computer-mediated romance, according to a group of clerics.

the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council has issued "love jihad" guidelines, calling on parents and schools to monitor children's activities and discourage them from using mobile phones or spend long hours on the Internet. "Bringing up children the spiritual way is the best means to fight the love jihad," said the Christian group. 

The use of the awesome term "love jihad" nearly summons up the e-Qaeda meme, creating quite a mix.

It gets even better when one source exhorts us to, ah, "probe the 'unseen forces" behind "Love Jihad'".

(thanks to Argus-eyed Charles Cameron)

Free Web speech can be murder

The fearsome internet meets religious violence in this call for Web censorship.  A Kuwaiti writer observes a culture war in progress:

several newspaper websites, as well as some electronic [journals] and blogs - especially in Kuwait - have become mouthpieces [for those who] spread hatred and accuse [others] of heresy, atheism, and abandoning religion. [Owners of these websites] do not realize that some of us still live according to the medieval mentality, inveigled by the prospect of earning [the favors of] black-eyed virgins [in Paradise] by [spilling] the blood of a writer or a philosopher.

Al-Saraf then recommends:

"[It is not my purpose], either here or anywhere else, to call for curtailing freedom of speech or banning opinions; however, publications [must] be subject to [certain] rules and principles. I call on website owners, whose ranks I will join in near future, to undertake minimal censorship of responses [submitted to their sites] and to eliminate [those that are potentially] dangerous…"

That's a classic pro-censorship dodge: I'm not for censoring, except a little, and for our own good.

Note the emphasis on the Web purveying bad content.  Here, the stuff is religiously negative (in context).  

(via Net Effect)

Greenhaunting the Cold War

Drawing a green line down the Cold War's European frontier is the aim of Green Belt Initiative.

Listen to one commentator brood on the old military haunting morphing through time:

the initiative aims to thicken and de-civilize that political line, so that the ghostly trace of a militarized landscape becomes a feral and wild preserve, land sacrificed willingly not to Ares but to biodiversity. The line would crawl through “old-growth boreal forests” at the Finno-Russian border, across the western margin of the east Eurasian taiga, and past “airfields, missile bases, and [military] training sites” ...

(via Warren Ellis)

The internet versus women: Joanne Lipman opines

The New York Times offers another internet-thwacking opinion piece.  While criticizing the current state of gender relations, Joanne Lipman determines that the internet is a major cause of gender inequality.

Lipman dates a decline in the status of women from 9-11.  The wars play a role, the precise nature of which is hard to make out in the article. But technology also drives the crisis

The Internet gave everyone a soapbox. The louder, the more offensive, the better.

Having thusly solved social media and SEO metrics, Lipman moves on:

The conversation online about women, as about so many other topics, degenerated from silly and snarky to just plain ugly — and it seeped into the mainstream.

Online discourse starts at silly and snarky, one notes, then goes downhill.  There's no room for good quality at all.

There's also no room for feminists online, or feminist content, apparently.

I’ve been puzzled by these screeds, which are so at odds with the real achievements documented in the Shriver Report and elsewhere.

Having dunned the entire internet, Lipman then... considers counterarguments? admits exceptions? pursues the point?  No, she simply races onwards, eventually advising women to respond by, among other things, having a sense of humor and not fearing to be girls. 

Again, the Times apparently is satisfied by this kind of internet-slamming writing to share its editorial space with it.  Cheap, shallow gestures of disdain are worth publishing.  Perhaps it's ok if they're silly and snarky, because they won't drop below that level.

Dick Cheney, vampire

Bush administration Gothic continues, even after Cheney and W. exit the main stage:

The undisclosed location is where the coffins are, eh?

(thanks to Charles Cameron!)

Romancing the uncanny valley

This interview describes a kind of love triangle between a wife, her husband, and a dating simulation's lead character.  There's some interesting uncanny valley erotics, interesting for general Infocultish purposes. 

But things turn dark as the discussion proceeds.  For example,

Q: So what is your Love Plus girlfriend doing now?

Koh [husband]: I'm too scared to find out. I'm probably going to get in big trouble if I open it after leaving her alone for several weeks. Maybe she's dead now. That would be scary.

The dating sim goes Gothic!  But before you can hum "Annabel Lee," consider the wife's view:

Koh: ...remember Tamagochi? They used to die if you didn't feed them.

Yurie [wife]: Oh yeah. That would be kind of bittersweet. 

Bittersweet? Oh yeah.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

ThisMan: uncanny viral meme

Have you seen www.thisman.org/?  It's a Web site offering an elegant premise: a certain man has appeared to people in dreams.  This Man (he has no name) with the same eerie, calm face, to different sleeping people, around the world.

The site offers stories about these encounters, theories about who This Man might be, and fliers for you to download and print up.

Yes, it's apparently a viral art project, or marketing campaign, by This Guy.  Andrea Natella has been working on guerrilla marketing for a while.

Here's a bigger image, just for your sleepytime delight: