Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Disturbing tales of augmented reality

How will people fear augmented reality? Possibly by experiencing, or thinking about, experiences like this one.

You stroll along a street, look up at a shiny display, and see yourself already participating in a story.  In the case of this Dutch ad, you find yourself watching thugs beat up paramedics, knocking a stretcher and patient to the pavement.

It's a PSA, and the point is clear (about how to respond to public violence not aimed at you).  But the fears here are several, and will probably return and grow as AR seeps into the world:

1. Loss of control over one's representation.  It's that moment of horror you feel when hearing your voice recorded and played back for the first time, or seeing an especially bad photo.  Here the AR ramps things up by embedding you in a story.
2. Enforced passivity.  You're not hypnotized or restrained, but the already-in-process story places you in a static, disengaged yet present stance automatically.
3. Loss of control over navigation.  Instead of walking along one sidewalk, you see yourself stopped on another one.  It's a Twilight Zone/Phil Dick sort of feeling, finding yourself in another world.

  (thanks to Todd Bryant!)

Economic crisis is like a blood-spurting, agonizing, murderous hemorrhagic fever: OECD

Best Gothic economic description of the week award goes to the OECD's secretary general:

"Contagion has already happened," Angel Gurria, the secretary general of the OECD, told Bloomberg News today. "This is like Ebola: When you realize you have it, you have to cut your leg off to survive."

Gives a new level of meaning to "belt-tightening", which Gurria mentions later on.

The Great Recession has been described in Gothic terms since 2008.  Has anyone archived and/or studied this?

(via Planet Money)

Already the iPad desires sacrifices

Today's perfect Gothic short-short story:

Today I wrote to Cameron, “I owe you bigtime,” which my iPod autocorrected as, “I owe you victims.”

(is that iPod or iPad?)

A dark hole into the Earth

A British reservoir drain becomes an eerie Gothic structure in this BLDGBLOG post.

"What we have here... is a geometrical oddity: an edge over which it is impossible to look. Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the sun into which we cannot see." 

(image of dry drain from Google Earth)

Ancient human past revealed by melting icecap

Prehistorical human traces are appearing in some northern Canada mountains, thanks to global warming.  We can develop Gothic storytelling implications out of that right away, but it's hard to beat the article's elegantly spooky title,

Ancient artifacts revealed as northern ice patches melt

 Think of an X-Files episode, or the other pole's great stories, when you read

Andrews and his team have found 2400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years. Biologists involved in the project are examining dung for plant remains, insect parts, pollen and caribou parasites. 

(link via Warren Ellis); gorgeous photo from subarcticmike)

Underground myths: some Soviet urban legands

Urban legends from the Soviet Union.  There's plenty of horror on display, as one would expect from the genre: poisons, killings, gross stuff.

There are some fine Cold War/Soviet culture riffs in the lot:

Foreigners sold black marketeers jeans infected by syphilis. The last ones sold them to unwitting fellow citizens. Usually on the back seam there was a package with flea (lice) scaring poor people at first jeans wash.

Radar vehicles driving about the streets and checking videocassette recorders concerning prohibited cassettes [Radar! -ed.]

Some grand Gothic, too:

Allegedly there existed huge underground plants where some cool and highly secret equipment was produced. There related the legends about tanks moving along the ocean bottom and underwater warehouses of atomic bombs in  the Atlantic.

Russian humor:

Metro. Doors are about to close. A civilized person - in a tie, indispensable detail - wants to get in, the doors are closing and his head is already in the subway car and stuck in the doors and the rest of the body is still on the platform. He looks sadly at those who are in and says in the fallen silence - “That’s great! F*** underground!”

And that classic Russian fatalism:

A boy was playing with scissors and put out his own eyes. While terrified mom was running about the flat a girl sank in a bath. When mom saw it she jumped out of the window from the 10th floor. Dad was in no minute at home, saw a dead mom’s body on the asphalt, a blind boy and a dead girl, shot the boy from a gun and shot himself too. Everybody died.

All quotations from the original, weirdly translated into English.

(photo from happygirltc)

Another Craigslist story

Craigslist is a place for sordid revenge, or so runs the conclusion one might extract from this story.  The Smoking Gun reports on a man arrested for placing a Craigslist ad, inviting men to a (former) coworker's house for sex.  She didn't know anything about this until orgy-minded males began arriving.

 

How is this part of the fearsome internet idea?  It could easily be used to build a sordid reputation for Craigslist, linking that service to an appealing stew of sex, work, and vengeance.  Such a smear could also pick up on previous stories, like "the Craigslist killer".  It could also connect with stranger tales, such as the Craigslist listing for a haunted house.  More prosaically, a cultural theme of Craigslist-as-nasty could link to the role that service played (and plays) in the decline of newspapers (for example).

Sex, revenge, declining businesses, haunted houses - a fine matrix out of which many stories could emerge.

(thanks to Ed Webb)

Be careful with those alien invaders: Hawking

We should take care in communicating with aliens, recommends Stephen Hawking.  They might communicate back via pillaging and destruction: "contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity."

Hawking picks up this classic sf theme to help us think through possibilities of ET interaction, with some grounding in recent exosolar exploration.  He offers a classic space opera vision:

I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.

Hawking then helps explain this grim view through two ironic/cynical/realistic views, based on ourselves.  For one, considering the present:

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

Then a glance at history:

If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

Some security-minded brooding from Drezner and Cavanaugh.

(thanks to Randy McCall via Facebook, and everyone else! "Alien artifacts" photo from fotographix.ca)

Fearing 3d tv

Samsung has issued a health warning about 3d tv sets.  No surprises here, just a focus on seizure threats.

Keep an eye on this for fearsome media possibilities.  This theme could persist, like the mobile phone brain disease myth.

There's also this fine set of aesthetic, er, health problems:

If you experience any of the following symptoms, immediately stop watching 3D pictures and consult a medical specialist: (1) altered vision; (2) lightheadedness; (3) dizziness; (4) involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching; (5) confusion; (6) nausea; (7) loss of awareness; (8) convulsions; (9) cramps; and/or (10) disorientation.

Targets to aim for, for the right video creastor!

Fearing Android: Jobs triggers the sex meme

Fearing the mobile phone: a new meme associated one cell platform with sex.  To be precise, Steve Jobs apparently argued that his iPhone platform should be pornography-free.  But 

“Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.“

 Several notes here.

1. This is a marketing move, aimed from one competitor at another in a very intense marketplace.
2. Steve Jobs' enormous cultural impact, magnified by the famous reality distortion field, could well drive this meme into popular use.
3. Associating one technology with sexuality or sexual representation is a classic move in the history of fearsome media.
4. The connection between sex and children reappears here, with Jobs' earlier comment "there’s a porn store for Android... You can download porn, your kids can download porn."
5. Obviously Apple users, including children, can access a vast world of porn through the open Web.  This porn meme is based not on the Web, but in targeting the apps world.  
6. Swimsuit apps, soft-core body images are sometimes still ok on the iPhone apps store, aren't they?