Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Forget tweet mobs; now it's tweet gangs

The fearsome Twitter meme advanced a step further this week, as the New York Daily News reports on Twitter-using streetgangs.  Henceforth they are "tweet gangs":

attacks [are] being plotted - and thwarted - 140 characters at a time.

One investigator recently warned parents and teens that the bastion of OMG and LOL has been infiltrated by violent crews waging turf wars.

Is Twitter just another ground for a fight, or does it worsen things?  The article first compares Twitter to phone records, then offers another view:

One 15-year-old in the 28 Gunnaz gang said it's just like any other "form of communication," except that the world can listen in on the conversation.

That feature can actually fuel disputes. A heated exchange between rivals on the service can turn into a full-fledged beef when others get wind, he said.

Contrast: how would it look different via Facebook? And if it was happening in MySpace, who would report on it?

(via Ed Webb, a one-man smartmob)

One video game away from war crimes

Can video games turn you into a war criminal? This is the question asked, quite seriously, by two Swiss human rights groups.  And, unsurprisingly, they find the answer to be "yes, kinda":

According to a new study by two Swiss human rights groups, TRIAL and Pro Juventute, many combat-heavy games actively encourage players to kill injured soldiers, attack civilians and destroy churches and mosques. As satisfying as these actions might be for players, they flagrantly violate real-life criminal and humanitarian law.

It's pretty obvious content-analysis stuff.  What's interesting is the angle the NGOs take on this.  Instead of following up on the usual path of assuming media content shapes individual perception, they are more concerns about public opinion:

the report's backers worry these games could damage public perceptions of what is and isn't acceptable in combat, leading people to think that nothing is off limits in modern warfare.

So the problem isn't that one soldier might, say, flip out and destroy a car full of civilians, or a civilian do the same, but that a nation might decide that it's a good thing to violate Geneva Convention articles. ...say, is there an argument being made about the US under Bush?

Note that the article never explains how such a public opinion changing mechanism works, or any evidence that it ever has.  Note, too, the tension between gamers as geeks (opening para) and gamers as somehow hugely influential.

Curiously, the article doesn't target children or teenagers, typical battlefields for this kind of argument.  Pro Juventute is all about children, so perhaps they have pursued this argument elsewhere.  Maybe it's because those populations don't play much of a role in shaping public opinion.  Or, optimistically, perhaps the article recognizes that adults are gamers.  (Call it holiday optimism)

On a clearly positive note, the Sphere article actually gives voice to criticism of this report, unlike most fearsome media coverage.  For instance,

"The fact that we have a healthy turtle population, that plumbers aren't going around jumping on people's heads and kids aren't murdering each other with flamethrowers, all tells me that video games don't influence the way we behave."

Heh.

Unfortunately, this other counterargument is a bit disingenuous:

"Nobody would dare suggest that a classic war novel or movie should be organized around a moral principle," says Tanya Krzywinska, professor in screen studies at Britain's Brunel University and president of the Digital Games Research Association. "Can you imagine what would have happened if Francis Ford Coppola had been asked to make 'Apocalypse Now' according to the Geneva Convention?"

Actually, the history of war literature consistently includes this kind of debate. 

(via Zenpundit)

Gothic horror or horrible hoax?

It must have been like being buried alive, for decades: a car accident left a Belgian man in a coma, diagnosed as being in a vegetative state...but he was actually conscious, while totally paralyzed, for 23 years.

"I screamed, but there was no one to hear," he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben's cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning.

The awful tale reads like a nineteenth-century horror narrative, perhaps a Blackwood's story of extreme experience (cf Poe's hilarious parody and analysis):

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say "no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away—it was all I could do.

But is this true, or is the recovery a fiction adding another layer of horror to reality?

Perhaps the story is based on a different kind of horror.  James Randi and others have noted that "facilitated communication" [FC], whereby another person helps a disabled one use a keyboard, the means by which Houber expresses himself, has often been criticized for adding content that isn't there.

This FC claim is simply untrue, a farce, a lie – and the “facilitator” knows it! And no, this man is not going to write a book, but the "facilitator" is, and if this humbug is not stopped, she'll make a fortune doing so. Put a stop to this, someone!"

If the FC is bogus, what kind of consciousness is housed in that coma-sapped brain?

(via Arnaud Leene)

Historical storytelling by Facebook

Web 2.0 storytelling by Facebook: a Polish cultural experiment narrates history.

A young boy in shorts and a white T-shirt, with black hair, dark eyes, and a mischievous grin - that is how Henio looks to his friends on his Facebook page.

"My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin," he writes on his profile. His birthday is March 25, 1933. He is no more than seven or eight years old. As a young Jewish boy, he was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp.

Henio has been signed up to Facebook since August 18, 2009. "On that day, I wrote my first entry," said Piotr Buzek. The 22-year-old works in the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, and he is responsible for bringing Henio back to life in the virtual world. He imagines how Henio felt during his life and writes as though he were him.

"Here at the center we have collected a lot of information about Henio's life, and then I tried to imagine how this young boy experienced the world around him," said Buzek.

Note the social involvement, but lack of authorial response so far:

...By now, Henio has more than 1,700 friends on Facebook, and more are being added every day. Henio doesn't chat with them - he only writes short sentences about his life. His friends comment on what he writes - empathetically and honestly. They tell him what war means. And sometimes they can only explain to him that for many things in life there is simply no explanation.

(via the excellent Evgeny Morozov)

NPR reporter blames internet for mass shooting

A US Army major shoots up Fort Hood, and NPR's Daniel Schorr blames... the internet.  It's a fascinating piece, a fine example of the fearsome internet theme.

It's hard to make out just how this explanation works, since Schorr only identifies a single factor: Hasan's email communications with one cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. 

the army psychiatrist had frequented a mosque in Northern Virginia where Awlaki preached. More recently, a year ago, he sought to renew that contact by e-mail. The cleric has said that he did not reply to the first two or three messages, but then opened a relationship in which several more e-mails were exchanged over a year.

So it's unclear why the internet as a whole is to blame, rather than just email (Twitter is off the hook this time!) or that mosque.  It's also difficult to understand why Schorr blames the medium rather than the messenger, since the explanation is based entirely on the cleric somehow firming up Hasan's killing desires.

Worse yet, Schorr admits that he has no idea what was actually in the emails:

Texts of the messages have not been released, so it is difficult to know who said what to whom.

Content, in short, is bracketed out.  Only the form, or format, matter.  It's a form of the technology is not neutral school of thought, where our tools shape our use of them.  If you have a hammer, the world looks like a mass of nails.  How using email leads to serial homicide, Schorr doesn't exactly explain, but that's the conceptual underpinning.

Note, too, the way Schorr opposes the internet to the human - as if, through the internet, humans somehow cease to exist:

In the case of Hasan, judging from what has been disclosed, Internet contact with the like-minded seemed to replace human contact.

"human" here usually means "face to face" - as if humans don't use the internet.  (I always want to ask people who use this line if they consider letter-writing inhuman, or phones, or painting) 

There's also a hint of the echo chamber argument ("contact with the like-minded"), although that's nor pursued.

Besides weird argument and classic theory, Schorr also some finely tuned scary rhetoric:

[Maj. Nidal Hasan] had no accomplice — unless you count the Internet in which he communed, exchanging sinister thoughts with an extremist cleric...

does the Internet merit some of the responsibility for helping the violence prone to fester there in communion with the machine?

"sinister", "communed" and "communion," "fester" - tasty, almost purple prose. 

That last line, about violence festering, draws on the classic meme of the violent internet.  Or rather, the internet as hosting representations of violence, which somehow seep out into our precious bodily fluids offline lives.

One commentator adds that Schorr tries to mix in Obama's trip to China, vaguely linking Chinese internet censorship with the mysterious Hasan-Awlaki emails.  The connection is hard to make sense of, at best.  At worse, perhaps it's "an ironic counterpoint suggesting that censorship is, in fact, in the public’s best interest"?

(thanks to Jesse Walker, who closes with this fine line: "If email makes you shoot people, do microphones make you stupid?")

One criminal business model: killing for sellable fat

One Peruvian criminal enterprise sounds like something from horror or pulp fiction: criminals kill victims, extract the corpses' fat, and sell in on the black market.

The gang allegedly targeted people on remote roads, luring them with fake job offers before killing them and extracting their fat.

The results were sold to cosmetics companies.  Like Fight Club, people end up using people products on their flesh.

This isn't a new thing, or a fad, but a longstanding business:

Police said the gang could be behind the disappearances of up to 60 people in Peru's Huanuco and Pasco regions.
One of those arrested told police the ringleader had been killing people for their fat for more than three decades.

Longstanding enough to attain some historical resonance:

The gang has been referred to as the Pishtacos, after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat.

There's surely a missing new media angle here.  Isn't it really... crowdsourcing taken to the ultimate?

(thanks to my truly scary wife)

Hadron collider as Lovecraftian horror, continued

I know it's easy to pick on The Register, but still, this is fine stuff:

'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC
Attack of the Hyperdimensional Juggernaut-Men

It's all riffs on some remarks from scientists at LHC.  Er, based on brainy boffins' bright ideas.

The article has tons of fun with this theme, but finally stoops back to science at the end.

Dr Bertolucci later got in touch to confirm that yes indeed, there would be an "open door", but that even with the power of the LHC at his disposal he would only be able to hold it open "a very tiny lapse of time, 10-26 seconds, [but] during that infinitesimal amount of time we would be able to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.

"Of course," adds Bertolucci, "after this tiny moment the door would again shut, bringing us back to our 'normal' four dimensional world ... It would be a major leap in our vision of Nature, although of no practcal use (for the time being, at least)...."

(thanks to Randy McCall; any new Canadian feet, Windsor man?)

Feeding blood to your machines

Best science headline of the day:

Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood

One presumes the blood is contributed voluntarily. 

A team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has created tiny microbial fuel cells by encapsulating yeast cells in a flexible capsule. They went on to show the fuel cells can generate power from a drop of human blood plasma.

This idea has some ancestry in sf.  Our first thoughts might turn to The Matrix (1999) (best use of "coppertop!" as a swear word).  But the concept goes further back to Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991).  There's probably earlier stuff, too.

All kinds of horror stories could be built upon this. Think about the hard-working hacker, or office temp, whose vitality is slowly, slowly drained away from overwork.  Or the victim is parasited to death without ever learning the cause, a la Quiroga's brilliant "The Feather Pillow" (pdf).  Or, as with The Matrix, an evil force forces people to power these batteries with their lives.

Gizmodo offers an even more disgusting idea, since these tiny machines have a

major problem with waste products. That waste is created as those particular batteries involve microbial yeast-based fuel cells that steal "some of the electrons produced when the yeast metabolizes glucose" in order to create a small current. While the entire process works just fine, the yeast cells are at risk unless the waste products are removed. We can't exactly let the waste be dumped into the blood stream, so until there's a some kind of cleaning process, the batteries are trouble as they either they die off or poison your bloodstream while trying to survive.

On the fearsome digital media side, how long before someone uses this story as a rhetorical figure for overdependence on technology?

Rise of the bone-eating worms

A monster is awaiting its stories: the bone-eating worm.  Just say that out loud, to yourself, or to a stranger, preferably in the dark.  Then read on:

eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones.

Osedax worms chew into carcass bones, growing watery blossoms from the ossuary. 

There's a Gothic beauty to this horror:

Robert Vrijenhoek... would also like to know how[Osedax worms] manage to find and colonize the bones of dead whales in the vast, pitch-black expanse of the deep seafloor...

(via Paul McCauley, who helpfully suggests we "imagine them growing bigger, and crawling out of the sea...")

Recession Gothic in Portland

From Oregon comes another vista of Great Recession Gothic, a video showing a subdivision never developed.

the streets, streetlights, utilities are all in place, but not a single house was ever built, due to the collapse of the real estate boom market. It has sat empty for about two years.

Previous Infocult on Great Recession Gothic: foreclosure leads to torture, the unclaimed dead pile up, more unclaimed corpses, the recession's ghost armada, Congress as haunted house.