Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Off with your head, next week!

Today's best Halloween costume is a headless Marie Antoinette:

Celebrate the most Gothic decade ever in style.

(thanks to crafty Ladi)

Editing children into the uncanny valley

This page about retouching photographs of children is making the rounds, but it's fine Infocult material.

This is about professional services which retouch and/or Photoshop photos in order to make the depicted children look better.  Or "better", if you find the changes disturbing.

On one level such recrafting of images triggers serious uncanny valley reactions in many people.  It's a bit like Little Talking Tina cosplay, or forcing one's child into that play.  It's not when inanimate objects display human attributes, but the reverse, humans being dehumanized in representation.  Some of you may recall a scene in Švankmajer's Faust, where the main character gets subsumed into a puppet.

On another level this phenomenon - both the practice and the horrified reactions - offers a different aspect of the fearsome internet memeplex.  It's an example of anxieties about digital media manipulation, where a tool (Photoshop, here, and most commonly) alters a presumably reliable depiction of reality in a malign way.

There's an additional theme in play, too, which is class.  Check the comments stream from the article, where some accuse participants of being white trash.  What kind of class anxieties does this elicit?  Perhaps it can be compared to dana boyd's analysis of Facebook vs MySpace.

(thanks to saramin)

Another twist on internet addiction: information is dope

In yet another twist on the internet addiction meme, some researchers claim to have found biological reward systems for information-seeking. 

A team from the National Eye Institute saw the mid-brain dopamine levels rising for monkeys who received their longed-for information. Said dopamine worked with higher and lower level decision making, cerebral cortex and  basal ganglia.

So what does this mean for the fearsome internet memeplex?  First, it adds another layer to the internet addiction story, offering a bit of biology to that angle of attack.

Second, it's a way of demonizing information overload.  Not only is there too much to wrangle, see, but we're wired to want it.  How horrendous!

(image from misscleopatra)

Fearing Twitter's "twitch mob"

Here's a frantically over the top piece about the dangers of Twitter.  It's a fine case for the growing body of Twitter fear material.

One commentator on Stephen Gately's death (previously) struck a homophobic stance.  Many people criticized Jan Moir, and some used Twitter to complain.

For Brendan O'Neill, that's when all hell broke loose.

Britain's first-ever 'twitch hunt', has revealed the dark side of the Twitter phenomenon and how a social network can quite easily turn into a virtual lynch mob.

The rest of the article races madly down that road.  Was Moir killed or beaten?  Did threats warp her life?  Apparently not, but we know from the history of fearsome media that representations are good enough for outrage.

I thought it was only authoritarian, Orwellian regimes that treated thoughts and speech as crimes?

Police state - Twitter meme - you connect the dots.

Further on in this manic piece is a nice gesture towards other media, casting them as victims in the case:

[the] twitch-hunt could well be an even bossier PCC, more police interest in particularly opinionated op-eds, and a more cautious, punches-pulling media.

Never mind that mainstream media helped carry this story along.  The point is to romanticize older media when demonizing the new; a very old tactic.

The thing goes on, characterizing Twitter users as a kind of chimera, combining animals and Maoists, herds and dictatorships:

The whole debacle was driven by a herd mentality. Twitterers slavishly followed instructions from on high - from Fry and other Dear Leaders of the People's Republic of Twitter - and even circulated readymade, pre-written complaints to the PCC. The desire to complain, to join the in-club of fashionable Moir-maligners, came before any careful thought about the content or the consequences of such a twitch-hunt.

As Twitter use continues to grow, we should probably see more of these stories.  If Twitter hits Gartner's hype cycle, the fearsome tweet model could then give way.  Until then, await more tales of the twitch of the tweet-nerve.

(thanks to Janice MacDonald!)

Cybercrime as service: Gartner on the dark cloud

The dark side of the internet cloud was focused on during a Gartner presentation this week.  It doesn't sound like rising FUD, so much as reasonable responses to changes in the user environment, from a security view:

"Our nightmare scenario is here now," said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. Botnet-driven cybercrime is clearly accelerating as online predators involved in "cybercrime as a service" plunder corporate and consumer data for financial gain....

Now comes cloud computing as service offerings and "obviously attacks will come after this," Pescatore said.

The story includes an interesting note indicating the term "cloud computing" could be even more easily associated with fearsome overtones:

Mark Hurd, chairman and CEO at HP, who gave the keynote at Gartner yesterday, evoked a knowing chuckle from the audience when he said he has visited with many CEOs and frankly, they didn't like the term "cloud" because they would prefer to think they're operating in "clear skies."

Cruise the North Atlantic in Gothic splendor

Looking for a Goth-themed vacation?  Consider redoing the Titanic's voyage.

On April 8th, 2012, the Titanic Memorial Cruise will set sail from Southampton, England, Titanic’s initial port. From there it will visit Cobh, Ireland, Titanic’s last port of call, and will continue on towards Halifax, N.S., Canada. Its final destination (hopefully) will be New York City.

Oh yes:

At this time, there will be a memorial service at the exact GPS coordinates where the ship sank commemorating the 100th anniversary of this tragedy. Guests aboard the boat will pay tribute to all while simultaneously freezing their butts off for the full experience. 

A free coffee to the first Infocultist who recalls which movie had one of the Cheech and Chong duo spotting a ghostly Titanic arriving in New York harbor.

(thanks to John Lynch)

Best Halloween prop of 2009

There's no Halloween prop like a dead body.  So it seems in LA.

Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead since Monday with a single gunshot wound to one eye. He was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment on Bora Bora Way...

Neighbors on the 13900 block of Bora Bora Way told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday “but didn’t bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy," he said.

"The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex [and] they all didn’t do anything,” Raishbrook said. “It’s very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest.”

Shouldn't Ohio be doing this?  Or aren't some Canadians cooking up there own... distinctive version?

(thanks to catherwood)

Vampires are all about forbidden love: Esquire shocker

Here's a theory about the appeal of vampire fiction: it's all about straight women's desire to have sex with gay men.  Let Esquire explain:

Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That's what everybody wants, isn't it? Sex that's dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving.

But what about the conservative nature of some vampire stories, like Twilight?  Ah, Marche has already thought of that one:

In the bedroom, we want to have one foot in the twenty-first century and another in the nineteenth

The culture wars argument that follows doesn't really make sense, but bonus points for humor:

The first question that comes to mind when you see a family-values orator today is, "I wonder if he's into meth-fueled orgies with male hookers?"

(via Feministe)

Waiting for the economy to get even more Gothic

Jim Kunstler is wondering what the next phase of the economic crisis will look like, and sees Gothic.  He starts with the new movie, Zombieland:

If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein!  Woody is on his way....

Then its on to a riff on terrorism:

The kind of heinous acts that we have feared emanating from foreign "evildoers" since the awful stunt of 9/11/01 are now most likely to come from among our own "people" - a few pounds of Semtex in the lobby of Goldman Sachs's New York headquarters... a few men with market-grade small arms converted to full-automatic outside on the Wall Street sidewalk one evening at holiday time when the suits are leaving work for the day.... It won't take much.

I haven't seen Zombieland myself.  Any recommendations, Infocult hordes?

World-destroying machine traveled through time to save us all: one theory

Imagine you're a supervillain, and have built a world-destroying machine.  Excellent work.  But what if the machine travels back through time to undo its operation?  This is the mad science theory, or at least one put forth by two physicists. 

To wit:

the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

To be fair, Nielsen and Ninomiya don't posit a mad scientist.  No, nothing so mundane:

“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”