Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Abnormal death from gaming

A British man dies, so gaming must be responsible.  So says the BBC, who argues that long gaming sessions can cause deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) even in the young.  Sitting down too long is a classic DVT cause.

Long airplane flights are often associated with DVT, hence the importance of getting up when trapped in planes.

To his credit, the poor man's father offers a nuanced response, neither anti-gaming nor blaming.  "Don't stop your child from gaming - it's great fun! ... Enjoy it, just take a break."  In contrast the BBC report makes the fear more palpable.

Has anyone ever associated reading with DVT?  Or movie marathons?  Note that the reporter casts the blame broadly, to all multimedia, but ultimately focuses in on games.

(via Ed Webb's Diigobrain)

We need more insane leaders: new study

We need more deranged leaders: mad science turns its baleful stare upon political science.  Nassir Ghaemi's thesis is that certain types of mental illness make for better leaders.  Sanity is not only overrated, but saps a leader's abilities.

This is gleeful stuff from a distance, history written by Hunter Thompson:

JFK's success is put down to his use of steroids and amphetamines, which may have made him manic, Hitler was a failure because his abuse of methamphetamine made him too manic. Richard Nixon - generally considered successful, but also paranoid and depressive for much of his peacetime presidency - is re-diagnosed as mentally healthy and therefore ill-equipped to deal with a crisis such as Watergate.

Some fine mad science here:

There is little empirical data to support this position at present, and its many detractors point out, for instance, that depressed people tend to ruminate in an irrational way that is unlikely to lead to enlightening insights. This has not deterred Nassir Ghaemi, !

 

Mass murder? Surely the internet is to blame

It only took three days, but someone finally figured out how to blame the Oslo killings on cyberspace.  Thomas Eriksen makes the fearsome internet case.

He leads off with two main targets:

Anders Behring Breivik's world view seems to have been shaped by online fantasy games and the anti-Islamist blogosphere

Those are also the more lyrical "darker waters of the blogosphere ".  Alas, the gaming bit fades out as the article proceeds.

Eriksen sees these one or two technologies as yielding one interesting explanation for the attacks, as the villains have allegedly cooked up "a recipe for national fragmentation."  An interesting twist on the fearsome internet theme, this views technologies as politically troubling.  

The specifically antinationalist charge has precedents, of course, going back to Barlow's 1996 "weary giants".  The internet lets us go around nineteenth-century nationalisms bulked out in 20th-century powers, runs the thought.  Perhaps we've been dwelling in cyberspace long enough for nostalgia to peep forth.

Within that large-scale framework of shambling nationalisms, Eriksen can then avoid addressing the mental illness argument, or the random lone gunman case.  Breivik isn't a person so much as a Randian emlematic character.  Breivik's attacks are a symptom of something larger.  Something worse and more comfortably disliked:

This is exactly what happened with Breivik and many of his co-believers: they developed a parallel reality on the internet.

Now we're on different ground, the filter bubble/decoherence line of thought.  It's targeted at specific media.  Blogs, you see, are really the problem.  Why, 

had he instead been forced to receive his information through a broadsheet newspaper, where not all the stories dealt with Europe's loss of confidence and the rise of militant Islam, it is conceivable that his world would have looked slightly different

Yes, if only those meddlesome kids the internet hadn't smacked down broadcast journalism, there would be fewer mass killings.

Compare with this Reuters article, which focuses on the role of the internet in the lives of lone gunmen.  Here the author finds not national coherence in trouble, but simply very isolated and unusual individuals, who - rarely - become violent.

(images from Wikipedia)

The Devil went down to West Texas

Exorcisms are making a comeback in one west Texan town, according to local horror writer Matt Caidin.  San Angelo has hosted a number of conferences and other events, focused on identifying and combatting demonic presences.

For instance,

As he examined her case, he realized she exhibited the four top signs of demon possession.
She could speak other languages; although was raised Greek, she knew Arabic fluently.
She had unnatural human strength; at about 125 pounds, she could hurl furniture across the room.
She had knowledge of secret things; she could tell if a doctor was having an affair or dealing prescription drugs illegally.
She had a revulsion to sacred images.

And:

Pfeifer said he believes there is demonic influence in West Texas manifested through cults and Satan worship, but more so through secular things in the world that can be used for good, such as the Internet.

Ahem.

Caidin draws attention to the role of movies in shaping these events, too.

(image via tacit requiem)

Sometimes it's just the devil

Gothic advertising: this commercial starts with a scary house, then moves into a modern classic horror story, then... Well, we won't spoil it:

Dirt Devil-The Exorcist from MrPrice2U on Vimeo.

 

(thanks, Elena)

Ghosts and demons, or how to describe the American economy

One liberal site splashes Gothic all over the American federal budget battle.

First, it's ghosts.

[John Maynard] Keynes died in 1946. But his ghost hovered over America's economic debate until pretty much Monday night. 

Next, demons. 

At that time, in their ostensibly dueling speeches, both President Obama and House Speaker Boehner embraced the language of "austerity" and performed an unwitting exorcism.

(I think the author intended the target to be the ghost, not a demon, but didn't have a good word other than "exorcism", and "laying to rest" is perhaps too clumsy)

Then some gloomy weather to complete the scene:

When President Obama used to meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron, for all their apparent bonhomie, a dark cloud hung over their relationship. It was the cloud of economic policy...

It's a solid use of Gothic rhetoric, since the post is describing a dark, dismal situation.  There's some referential irony as well, since exorcisms are supposed to be positive events, when successful.  And maybe the insinuation that Keynes was (until now) a ghost/demon afflicting Republicans.

 

Brit boffins brood upon monstrosities

A new report from a British university urges new rules to prevent new monsters.  Specifically, human-animal hybrids are the subject of the Academy of Medical Sciences' concern.  

Inserting human... material (what a phrase to conjure with!) into animals requires new regulatory bodies and policies, argue the authors.

Animals containing human tissues, cells or genetic information are used to refine research methods, creating animal models that better represent human disease, and to develop and produce new therapeutics.

The LA Times, always on the Gothic lookout, is quick to pounce on the "nightmares" possibility of chimeras:

 If you can picture a frog with a human head, a monkey with human vocal chords or a dog with opposable thumbs, you can see why some people want to put the brakes on any sort of scientific experiment that mixes cells from different species.

Reuters falls back on the simple, potent classic term, describing rules for monsters.

Hybrids, monsters, crossbreeds, chimeras: what is the source of their fearsomeness?  To begin with, they blur boundaries which we'd rather maintain.  Moreover, they are linked to the messy nexus of reproduction, warped by science, which is always a fine stew for Gothic imaginings. 

(thanks to James Foster; photo by A Little Lam)

 

The face in the sewers

Down below a Belfast suburb, under the streets, deep in the sewer systems, a face is glimpsed, looming out of the dark.  Behold... Sewerface !

(Yes, it's an artifact in CCTV.  Like the Face on Mars, just much smaller.  Enjoy it anyway)

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

American Gothic, with WiFi

A "bizarre and calculated campaign of terror" conducted by a "depraved criminal”, or a tale of WiFi and a bad neighbor?  A Minnestora man hacked into his neighbors' home network in order to frame them for child pornography and political terror.  

It's a scary story, real cyberGothic, with a villain, deviant materials, and innocents besmirched. Wired puts it thusly:

Barry Ardolf, 46, repeatedly hacked into his next-door neighbors’ Wi-Fi network in 2009, and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden...

[A]n investigation revealed that he’d also hijacked the Wi-Fi of other neighbors, and terrorized them as well.

[Ardolf ran] a calculated campaign to terrorize his neighbors, doing whatever he could to destroy the careers and professional reputations of Matt and Bethany Kostolnik, to damage the Kostolniks’ marriage, and to generally wreak havoc on their lives...

The perp ran through a series of scary topics along the way, including illicit sex, child porn, and the basic threat to privacy.

(photo from phylevn)

Beware Wet Linda

What if some accidental deaths aren't actually accidents?  It's a classic horror and crime trope, finding malice and agency behind what appears to be random or natural violence.

"Unauthorized Drowning" (part 1, part 2) posits an evil force behind a series of drownings.  It's a short work, around 18 minutes.

The style is fictional documentary, a straight-faced hoax.  So much is evident from the videos themselves:

The YouTube description field goes further.  In Web 2.0 storytelling style, it adds supplementary material in the form of text-based background story:

Part One of the Directors Proof Dub of the pulled Canadian documentary on Drowning. I was able to get this off a file-sharing site. This is the one that the CBC pulled off the air because of the Morris family and UC Davis

And yet I can't find anything else on the Web about "Unauthorized".  Is this a would-be viral project, a la Blair Witch, but which never took off?

(thanks to my dear wife)