Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

More health care Gothic, as the Senate hits deadline

The United States Senate tried its hand at health care Gothic this week.  According to the Washington Post, two Senators offered grim speeches.

From Rhode Island,

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) had just delivered an overwrought jeremiad comparing the Republicans to Nazis on Kristallnacht, lynch mobs of the South, and bloodthirsty crowds of the French Revolution.

"Too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear," he said. "History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead. Tumbrils have rolled through taunting crowds. Broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets. Strange fruit has hung from southern trees." Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, Whitehouse promised a "day of judgment" and a "day of reckoning" for Republicans.

I can't find a transcript, but would love to see more.

From the other side of the aisle, Oklahoma offers dark prayer.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."

The Post's Milbank sees this as targeting one colleague in particular:

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads -- but without his vote, Democrats wouldn't have the 60 they needed.

The health care Gothic language (blogged here) has persisted through the debate.  Will it return in 2010?

Superb winter Gothic art from a Romantic

John Coulthart reminds us of Caspar David Friedrich's fine winter Gothic paintings.  Continuing our seasonal theme:

Haunting, eerie, contemplative genius (loci):

Reindeers for transportation: a Gothic update

Reindeer transport Santa in the folklore, but that technology nearly received a Gothic update in Sweden this month.  After a terrible accident led to the deaths of hundreds of Sami-herded animals, a Scandinavian energy company offered to translate the reindeer into the need for speed.

The carcasses could be milled, dried and sterilized, the Norwegian Protein Corp. suggested, and the Christmas icons could be turned into biofuel, as the company does with the carcasses of farm animals that die in accidents or because of old age.

"It will be bone flour and fat. The flour will be burned, and the fat used as heating oil. Both products we extract would be clean energy products," said Bjarne Hagen, director of Norwegian Protein Corp.

The Sami hated the idea, and are instead going to bury the creatures at Jokkmokk.

(via Carmen Tschofen via Twitter; image from Billyboy)

Forward to Christmas in Gothic style

As the winter solstice draws nigh, we think of Christmas and, naturally, its horrors.  So to start things rolling, here are some dark decorations.

From Kansas City, a provocative display:

 

A well-done diorama of someone getting stuck while hanging Christmas lights.  And one taken pretty seriously by drivers:

The first thing they would notice is that the lights had apparently fallen down. As they got closer, they would do a double take when they noticed the guy hanging. I would hear screech after screech in front of my house from people slamming on the brakes or quickly turning into my driveway and, many times, into my yard.

And from American redneck culture, a different creature suspended:

We have more holiday horrors in store for you, here at Infocult: the best Christmas tv special never made, the story of one family's horrible holiday tradition, a mysterious image which one commentator sees in a Christmas decoration, and the Great Recession's ghostly fleet of Christmas absent.  There's also a pile of accumulated holiday spirit in last December's winter holiday Gothic round-up.

(thanks to Ladi for the suggestions)

Health care Gothic shambles onward

From the National Review comes a Gothic/satirical take on health care reform, continuing the Gothic theme that discussion has enjoyed:

That image is a parody of this one, which is also a bit disturbing on several levels:

   

Previous Infocultism on health care Gothic: Olbermann on corpses and monsters, the death panel attack, blood brothers unite, chewing off a protestor's finger.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Ohio Gothic holiday art

An Ohio artist continues his project of holiday cheer.

Keith McGuckin of Wellington, who gained fame for his "Gingerbread Nazis" a few years ago, has three new displays.

"Pyro On My Pillow" is about a snowman named Norman who lives a normal life by day but at night goes around setting foreclosed homes on fire.

There's also the "Amazing Iron Lung Santa with Polio" and "Gingerbread Men Recreating the Lee Harvey Oswald Assasination." 

A video sample:

McGuckin says he's surprised that people are offended by the polio piece this year. He says even though it's bizarre, it's supposed to be a positive message.

We've been stalking the wild Ohio Gothic for some time.

(thanks to Barbara Sawhill, fighting the good fight)

Friedman clicks on jihad.com, hilarity ensues

Tom Friedman resurrects the e-Qaeda meme with gusto, warning us about jihad.com.  Or Virtual Afghanistan (TM).

It's a weird article, with strange lunges and phrases, odd even for Friedman.  For example,

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things...

That's a fun explanation of the Civil War, as a kind of kindergarten lesson.  But note the exhortation to the Muslim world to, um, have a giant, bloody, sustained civil war: "Islam needs the same civil war."  How appealing!  "Thanks, Tom," murmur grateful Muslims around the world. 

Or,

A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.

(Or we ask them to have a civil war.)  Does that include the Taliban and al-Qaeda?  Or the various Muslim-majority allies (Turkey, Egypt, etc) who seem to have their own ideas?  Or Muslims in the US.  Who is this "we", actually, doing all of this?  And did objectifying Muslims and Arabs perhaps - maybe - just maybe - predate 2001?  That's quite a broad brush, Tom.  And what happened to the internet by that point in your article?

In fact, the internet vanishes from the editorial's second half entirely, sneaking back in only in the putative conclusion.  The call for Muslims to have a civil war seems to be an offline one, although it's hard to tell.

Earlier, Friedman calls for "a parallel surge — by Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders — against those who promote violent jihadism... online in the Virtual Afghanistan. "  What does this look like, besides imitating the 1860s?  Is Friedman calling for increased censorship, or creating Arab state cybersecurity forces, or taking down servers hosting jihadi content, or what?  It's impossible to tell, but fun to guess at.

The whole thing begins with the stern-faced exhortation "Let’s not fool ourselves."  Oh, c'mon, let's!

Behold the doppelbot

Doppelgangers: fearsome characters from horror stories, or the next luxury consumer electronics item?  The Kokoro Company (Japanese, of course*) is rolling out a pricey gift: your own robot double

The company will create the sitting robot out of silicone with the same face, body shape, hair and eyes of the recipient. Their speech will be based on recordings of the owner's voice.
The android's facial expressions and upper body will be modeled on the movements of the buyer.

What do you give the man who has everything, eh?  Another him!  Or someone else.  

Story possibilities just unspool out of this account, with plenty of sf history to draw on.  Some rich fellow buys a copy of himself, but finds it never ages, unlike himself (Dorian Gray-ish).  A lonely person buys another self, but the firmware upgrade leads to... changes.  Spouse murders her doppelbot, "by accident."  The doppelbot disappears, but its voice can still be heard, and issues orders over the phone.  And so on.

So far, it's not a mobile device (except in your nightmares):

Unfortunately it won't be able to walk so you couldn't take your double with you to the shops, nor will it be sophisticated enough to sit in for you at the office.

How pricey? 20.1million yen, according to the Daily Mail, or about $221,000.  Perhaps American rich folk should be encouraged to buy these, in order to help the economic recovery.

This is an adult toy, in every sense.  Compare with the children's doubles, like the doppelBarbie, or MyTwinn.

Kokoro already makes Actdroids, which "create the human-like natural yet charming expressions with high functionalities retained."  They also do some kind of Hello Kitty robot... thing, but I can't look.

We've been covering doppelgangers for a while.  It's an Infocult world; you and your shadowy double just live in it.

*I wonder how many people hear the company's name and think of the novel.

(via Instapundit)

Legislating a corpse: health care Gothic

The Gothic mode is always available for political argument.  For example, Keith Olbermann on the US Senate's consideration of health care reform.

The Frankenstein's monster trope:

through circumstances beyond their control, they are now seeking to reanimate a corpse killed by the Republicans...

Death by torture:

This bill, slowly bled to death by the political equivalent of the leeches that were once thought state-of-the-art-medicine, is now little more than a series of microscopically minor tweaks of a system...

And a giant social monster-thing:

The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it.

It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into it, as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness...

This shows some of the Gothic's power.  Far from being a marginal field, it's a genre which appeals broadly, readily usable in democratic discourse.

Previous Infocultism on health care Gothic: the death panel attack, blood brothers unite, chewing off a protestor's finger.

Mobile devices delete the world: Washington Post has a bad dream

Mobile devices are rapidly deleting the world around us, broods the Washington Post. "We have become digital zombies."

The article is a curious bit of hyperbole.  Its focus is attention, recycling older worries about handheld devices sucking our perceptions out of the immediate world.  But rather than addressing a qualitative shift, Adrian Higgins sees a qualitative transformation:

we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world

It's an easy stretch, simple to poke holes in.  Perhaps the audacity of the stretch lets Higgins skip the many ways digital services bring our attention to our surrounds (augmented reality, Outside.in, etc).  Or the simplicity of the binary opposition helps him forget that there's a physical world at the other end of a lot of virtual venues.

The claim then bleeds over to a different opposition:

This retreat from the natural world is most evident in the young

Based on the rest of the article, this isn't "nature" as in "the given world," but as in "pretty green living things," gardens, lovely campuses.   Does the same duality apply to reading a Kindle on the subway, say, or listening to an mp3 player while walking through bureaucratic corridors?  Couldn't this digital world be an improvement over, or at least an escape from, some bad spaces? As ever with technology criticism, focusing on a troubling new device lets the critic romanticize older stuff, glossing over problems with a rosy varnish.

More bad binaries get let in:

The difficulty, Harrison argues, is that we are losing something profoundly human, the capacity to connect deeply to our environments.

As if the virtual isn't human (and that's an old, old fear).  But note that "virtual" here could easily be any number of pre-digital practices or devices.  Isn't it quite human to be so immersed in a conversation, or in reflection, as to lose track of one's surroundings? 

In fact, books play this role, as Kurt Vonnegut and others have pointed out.  Before the Web took, off, they were criticized for this (Infocult readers can all recall being told, as children, to take their heads out of books no doubt).  But the newer technologies make the older ones look better and more natural.

(via Reason; image of Owain here)