Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Maybe it's not cyberwar after all

Cyberwar hysteria took a hit in the form of rational criticism last week.  Presenters at the RSA conference argued that this form of cyberfear is overblown:

"We are in the midst of a cyber war of words," Schmidt said. "Let's quit pointing fingers and start cleaning up the infrastructure."

Bruce Schneier sees category confusion:

"We are not necessarily seeing cyber war, but increasing use of warlike tactics in more general cyber conflicts," Schneier said. "I think that is what's confusing us."
He cited a Stuxnet computer virus evidently crafted to find and disrupt an Iranian nuclear facility as an Internet Age attack that smacks of warfare but arguably falls short.
"It is not war," Schneier said. "It is in the middle somewhere."

Instead of "war", maybe what's going on is "crime" or "spying":

The most prevalent cyber threat has been theft of information from networks, US Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn said...

Lynn also turned the old disdainful charge of bloggers as guys in pajamas to defuse the cyberwar meme:

"As you know better than I, a couple dozen talented programmers wearing flip-flops and drinking Red Bull can do a lot of damage," Lynn told the gathering of software savants.

(via Peter Rothman at The Facebook)

Turn yourself into Little Talking Tina

It's time to combine two classic Infocult themes, evil dolls and the fearsome digital world. How to do it? Naturally, we turn to Japan, who gives us the first turn yourself into a doll fabricator.

The Clone Factory (what else?) images your fine self from multiple angles, pastes the info into a 3d imager, then prints out the result as an action figure.

...which is when you wake up, shrinkwrapped, and trying to scream with your little plastic jaws.

(thanks to Ed Webb, trawler of nightmares)

Beware the posthuman zombification business card

[T]he criminal underworld has unwittingly stumbled upon one of the greatest discoveries of 21st-century neuroscience.

Need a new drug to fear? Wired is here to help, offering a scary write-up about burundanga.  Lots of Infocultish material there.

First, burundanga has a fine reputation in urban legend.  The best is the burundanga-soaked business card, which turns recipients into zombies.  Not as good as this greatest business card story of all, but still nice.

Second, the zombie bit: burundanga removes the victim's will, says Wired, thanks to the classic effects of scopolamine.  You become a controllable fleshbot, while effects last.  So we can link the stuff to all kinds of antecedents: zombie powder, hypnosis, etc.

Third, burundanga reveals not a bug, but a feature of humanity itself/ourselves:

Although not fully understood by neuroscience, free will is seen as a highly complex neurological ability and one of the most cherished of human characteristics. Clearly, if a drug can eliminate this, it highlights a stark vulnerability at the core of our species.

Hence the great supervillain-cackling quote at the start of this post.

(thanks to jason kielbasa; image from Hoax-Slayer)

Terrorists love those Facebook status updates

Beware! Loose Facebook updates kill VIPs:

Interesting how unmarked the terrorist is.  Not clearly a jihadist, so the old e-Qaeda meme isn't really present.

(thanks to Charles "Defender of Airstrip One" Cameron)

A bit on mummies

Mummies are neglected monsters in these Gothic days. Some people are trying to bring them back, at least in the public museum world.  

As well they should.  Not only is there a long tradition of mummy horror, but anything requiring the verb "deflesh" is just mandatory for Gothic purposes.  And just think of the story possibilities of "accidental as well as deliberate mummification".

Monstrosity is in the method, sometimes:

[F]inding the exact mummy-making recipe wasn't easy.
"They only had the ancient texts from Herodotus and they were missing some sections," she said. "The notes said to get the brains out of the body you had to stick a rod in the brain and stir it. But there was nothing explaining they'd have to break bone to get into the skull cavity."
"Then they had to add water to liquify the brain and turn it face down to drain it," she said.

There's a nicely cinematic moment in this video when a battalion of men in black defend a mummy shipment:

(via Damon Root at Reason; photo by Natalie Maynor)

Victoriana, Infocult style

If the brain of Edward H. Rulloff, a.k.a. Professor Leurio, were able to come alive, glowing and pulsating as it issued angry, murderous commands to you from inside your head, it would.

Murder, mad science, missing bodies, relentless justice, and philology: some interesting nineteenth century true crime from upstate New York.

...I could summarize Rulloff's bizarre career, but you're better off reading that link.

There's some fine, grim crime gone wrong storytelling there, too:

Mirick drew a pistol from under his pillow and fired it directly at Rulloff’s chest. It failed to discharge, so he threw it to the ground and lunged at Rulloff. He clutched at his face, tearing off his mask. As Rulloff fled down the stairs, Mirick hurled a stool after him. Meanwhile, Dexter had been knocked down by Burrows.

As Rulloff and Jarvis regrouped, the clerks held down Dexter and clubbed him on the head and face with a metal stool. When Rulloff fired his pistol in the air, Burrows backed down, but Mirick lunged at Jarvis, catching him by the privates and pinning him over a counter. Rulloff fired one more warning shot as Jarvis cried out in anguish before he finally held his gun to Mirick’s head, and fired.

The three fled from the store, Rulloff’ supporting the injured Dexter and exhausted Jarvis on his shoulders. In their excitement, they forgot the boat by which they had arrived and attempted to ford the Chenango River. The Chenango River is not especially deep, but it is wide and sweeping, and the three burglars were in no condition to swim. Dexter and Jarvis both drowned making the attempt. Rulloff himself escaped, only to be halted and arrested at the railroad depot the next day.

(via the brain of Warren Ellis)

Social media panic, the opera

The scary side of social media now has an opera.  Two Boys has the tagline: "lifts the lid on the risks of life online".

 

(via Ed Webb)

Not fearing social media

How do we learn not to fear social media? By using it to fight crime.  A missing person's family has summoned up Web 2.0 to find her.

Downside: it's another Missing White Girl (TM) story.  Maybe that's what it takes, though, to build a counter-narrative to fearsome media.

(thanks to Ladi)

Zombinomics

It's about three years since the 2008 crash, and people still like using Gothic descriptions of the economy.  Today's example:

The so-called American economic recovery won't die, because it's undead. It was a zombie to begin with....Call it Zombinomics.

There's even a bloody-looking chart:

More from the same shambling yet cheerful blogger:

It's not about getting a recovery going. That's not going to happen, not if Martians land in flying saucers with a billion tons of gold to invest in bank capital. It's about preventing something worse than we have now, namely screaming, bug-eyed, blood-in-the-streets, rape-the-crops-and-burn-the-women panic. Zombie not bad. Zombie good. Zombie better than alternative, which is you dead. Really dead. No breath, never get live again. Zombie is as good as it gets. You zombie, you still alive, sort of. You not zombie, you dead. Opposite of zombie not happy, lively, active. Opposite of zombie is you push daisies up. The best we can get out of this is a zombie banking system, one that still pays its debts because it earns enough interest from the toxic assets left over from the last boom.

Infocult: it's a Gothic economy.  We just live in it.

Gaddafi's pulp fiction hideout

Life imitates pulp thriller: Libyan ruler Mommar Gaddafi is reported to be ensconced within a vast underground lair. These are "13 feet wide desert water tunnels, some of which are 600 feet deep".

More:

The tunnels are part of the 20 billion pounds ‘Great Man-Made River Project’ that Gaddafi had built in the 1980s. The tunnels, which link the desert with Tripoli, Benghazi and Sirte, are reportedly big enough to take a double-decker bus and are made of 75-ton sections of reinforced concrete pipe.

Gaddafi himself has long been working up the pulp villain reputation.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)