Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Haunted augmented reality

How will we fear augmented reality? This conference description offers one uncanny suggestion:

There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.

This AR ghost sense depends on being already connected to someone else, or at least being aware of them.  It's the flip side of stalking, being shaken by your target's misbehavior.

Perhaps AR ghosts will become associated with glitches, such as rendering delays or databases slow to update.  Like uncanny Second Life rezzing/

We've already seen a version of AR hauntings with Ghostwire.  Ghostwire is safer, more mannered, in that the ghosts aren't socially connected to the user (presumably).

We've covered other likely forms of AR fear previously, like porting the classic fear of violent computer games onto homes.  

(thanks to Sean Connin; ghost photo by mattwi1s0n)

FBI Gothic, Evil Minds

It's interesting to see the FBI delve into the Gothic for an ad campaign.  It's for an archive, the Evil Minds Research Museum, and not for general admission:

 
 

Skulls! disembodied brain! women kidnapped!  Wow - serious B movie/Monk Lewis stuff.

The contents:

a research museum where we are collecting serial killer and other offender artifacts.

(thanks to Pablo via Facebook)

Fired for Farmvilling: social gaming addiction

A Bulgarian got fired for too much Farmville.  A politician, actually,

was removed from a city council committee because of sinking excessive amounts of time into FarmVille during meetings....

[Dimitar] Kerin was reportedly warned about his behavior several times before his ouster. 

Let's see if Facebook apps, rather than the platform itself, start holding an evil reputation.  Or if FB apps are rethought in more general terms:

And while he might be the first FarmVille firing (on record), it points to the broader trend of social media misdeeds leading to problems at work. Last year, a study found that 8 percent of companies had dismissed employees as a result of their actions on social media sites.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Cyberbullying or just bullying?

Another cyberbullying story came from New York this year.  Again a teenager took her life after social attacks.

 But in terms of fearsome media, notice the way this New York Daily News update is written.  After a cyber-fear-mongering title ("South Hadley High School's 'new girl,' driven to suicide by teenage cyber bullies"), the article describes events in some detail... all without specifying the technologies involved.

Nine Massachusetts teens were indicted Monday for driving a pretty 15-year-old "new girl" from Ireland to suicide in a case that has become a symbol of high school bullying...

Her books were routinely knocked out of her hands, items were flung at her, her face was scribbled out of photographs on the school walls, and threatening text messages were sent to her cell phone.

Physical or digital, the venue isn't foregrounded.  The bullying, not the mechanism, is what mattered.  Or matters.

So the tech is included: 

Students said Phoebe was called "Irish slut" and "whore" on Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook and Formspring. 

...along with other avenues of abuse:

On Jan. 14, Phoebe was harassed and threatened in the school library and in a hallway, Scheibel said. As she walked home, one of the "Mean Girls" drove by and threw a can of Red Bull at her.

In fact, poor Phoebe's Irish nationality appears more significant than which tools were used to torment her, in Kennedy's account.

Perhaps this is a glimpse of what could come next, if cyberbullying loses its unique cachet for mainstream journalism.  The Daily Free Press story linked earlier offers a similar vision.  This Atlanta Journal-Constitution note doesn't even mention the tech at all.  

Maybe the series of rape charges filed this week draw reporters' attention away from the internet.  Or outrage against school staff doesn't connect with cyber-anything.

The alternative is to highlight the cyber- aspect, as this article does.

(via Slashdot)

Social disease: Facebook blamed for more syphilis

Facebook increases sexually-transmitted diseases, claims the Telegraph.  Says one Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside: 

"There has been a fourfold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected with more young women being affected.

I don't get the names of people affected, just figures, and I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites.

"Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex."

There are several wonderful things going on in this report.  One is the classic association of a feared technology with deviant/disliked sexuality.  Another is the effort to add Facebook to the internet's dark side, an effort which seems to be doomed so far.

A third is the favorite media tactic of highlighting the digital aspect of a story not primarily about digital technology.  Here the important fact could be the rise on syphilis, rather than the purported role of Facebook in that disease's spread.  

(thanks to catherwood, Todd Bryant, and the rest of the Infocult legions)

Zombies on the left: Mark Dery's brilliant take

Why zombies, why now?  Mark Dery offers a typically fantastic take.  Ultimately he sees the zombie hordes as an economic thing, an expression of Great Recession fears.

Now that the econopocalypse has thrown millions out of work, triggered an upspike in homelessness, and eaten the braaains of consumer confidence, the zombie has undergone a role-reversal, incarnating American fears that the republic is a shambling shadow of its former glory, Left 4 Dead by the near-meltdown of the financial system. 

It's good to see Dery channeling themes we blogged last April and since: Marx's Gothic, White Zombie, unemployment, news media picking up Gothic language, etc.  

Maybe we're seeing the emergence of a left Gothic take on politics and the economy in the post-Bush era.  The HuffPo sometimes does this.  Krugman's been singing the Gothic economic song for a while.  And some real-life horrors certainly have a class rage flair.

 And it's just always a pleasure to read more Dery when he opens the throttle wide:

Zombies are the resident evil of an economy whose moribund state confronts us everywhere we look in a landscape littered with dead malls, “ghost boxes” (dark, shuttered big-box outlets), and “zombie stores”—retailers forced by dismal sales to reduce their inventory to its bare bones, with the ironic consequence that their emaciated stock and empty floorspace scare customers away, accelerating the death spiral.

David Skal is well quoted in the piece, too:

Having cannibalized all their home equity, and foreclosed our future, zombies have become everyman avatars that have traded in the forward-looking, if audacious, message ‘I must eat you to live,’ settling for ‘I must eat you just to stay dead.’

What does the right-wing response to the left-wing Gothic look like in 2010?  Maybe Anne Rice will take a shot.

Previous Infocult on Dery.

CNN grins at dental horror

CNN continues to be a purveyor of Gothic horror.  It's dental terror this week, with an odd tale of a felon's mouth modification.

Note the bit about some of the teeth coming off.

Amidst the pain, humiliation, and civil rights violations, we could consider this a case of horror being mainstreamed. It's also an example of mainstream journalism turning to Gothic horror for ratings (since the case wasn't otherwise newsworthy).

Facebook versus the mob

Facebook continued to avoid a bad rep this week, as Italian police apparently used the world's leading social networking platform to bust a mobster.

CNN's story offers a nifty snapshot of mainstream news engaging with Web 2.0.  First, note that this Web story is video only, lacking a transcript or audio-only version.  Second, CNN's video includes a lot of staring at a YouTube video, itself Webbed up by an Italian news station.

At the end, one of the reporters (an anchor?) offers a gratuitous swipe at the wrong social media platform:

He won't be sending many tweets now... not with somebody looking at 'im.

Facebook comes out of this story smelling like a fine G-man.  There isn't an odor of surveillance here, at least not surveillance we're not supposed to like.  Instead, Facebook is a protector, a good guy enabler and tricker of bad guys.  2010 looks like the year Facebook escapes the fearsome Web.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Alien parasites? Oh bother.

Today's Gothic mashup connects Winnie-ther-Pooh with Giger's Alien.

The first third is my favorite.  The last third is redeemed by Christopher Robert's return.

Previous Pooh on Infocult: This is the bear.

(via William Gibson's Twittery)

Texan would-be supervillain tests out cybercrime

A Texan auditioned for supervillain status last week, via automative cybercrime.  Omar Ramos-Lopez allegedly disabled 100 cars remotely, turning off their ignitions and activating their horns.  He used a social hack (former coworker's password) of an interesting networked system:

The Texas Auto Center dealership in Austin installs GPS devices that can prevent cars from starting. The system is used to repossess cars when buyers are overdue on payments, said Jeremy Norton, a controller at the dealership where Ramos-Lopez worked. Car horns can be activated when repo agents go to collect vehicles and believe the owners are hiding them.

We should expect to hear stories about Chinese military hackers planning to launch just such an attack upon American cars while being driven on highways.

(via Ed Webb via Diigo; photo from Lordcolus)