Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gothic Power and Light

One British town has come up with a splendidly Gothic way to generate electricity.  From the burning of dead bodies:

Durham Crematorium wants to install turbines in two of its burners, which would use the heat generated during the cremation process to provide the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 televisions...

The turbines would be powered by steam produced from cooling the extremely hot gases – at temperatures of at least 1,500F – that are used to cremate bodies....

Why not just use the electricity to keep the building's lights on?

Alan José, the crematorium's superintendent and registrar, said: "We calculate that we will have far more electricity than we can possibly need so we would be feeding a reasonable amount into the grid."  

It's not quite The Matrix, but could clearly disturb folks.  It triggers our anxiety over dead bodies.   José is "anxious not to upset people over the plans."

"the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 televisions": there's something beautifully techno-gothic about that comparison.  Imagine the blue light of tvs shining at night, flickering in shadows.  Televisions powered by the dead.

(thanks to Peter Naegele; photo by Mark Fischer)

The werewolf executive

Political Gothic, 1980s style:

Criminalizing the constitutional crimes that are the inevitable result of the theory of the "unitary executive" might have encouraged the nation to ignore the ravings of an authoritarian lycanthrope like Richard Cheney.

Classic monster and tyrannical villain, all in one!

Let's have a brief Gothic Dick Cheney retrospective, shall we?

The Onion in 2009 had Cheney lured into steel box by trainers.  "Cheney only eats what he kills."

Or one legislator's reflection:

For another Iran-Contra-Gothic take, recall the last scene in American Psycho (2000), where evil yuppies and/or serial killers mock Reagan's lying ability.

(thanks to Ted Major)

Dawn of the squishybot

A new robot paradigm is upon us, or life imitates David Cronenberg?

Behold the gooeybot. No skeleton, just soft plastic and... undulation:

It's either very cute or nightmarish.  Listen to the eerie language describing its construction:

 they fabricated a "tetrapod," with four limbs spreading out from a central body in a tall X shape. Each of the limbs could curve down when pressure was applied, and the "body" at the center of the X could either be held rigid or allowed to flex.

There's a quiet beauty to this.  Or Lovecraftian terror.  Or sex fetish.  Probably all three.

Ars Technica ramps up the terror, helpfully:

Before you get images of a giant, rubbery X shambling down the street...

AAAAAAH!  Sleep well, twitching friends of Infocult.  We will expect a report in the morning.

The monstrous origin of all life

A tiny organism alone on a vast world, its multifarious shape and very nature incomprehensible to human eyes: such is the ancestor of all Earthly life.  LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is hard to discern from our time, nearly 3 billion years later given the lack of a good fossil record.  But scientists keep trying to limn the ur-thing.

For instance, the monster was possibly some kind of meta-domain entity:

LUCA [eventually] split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants 

Maybe that "one primordial form" (Darwin) also used RNA instead of DNA.

Poole has studied the history of enzymes called ribonucleotide reductases, which create the building blocks of DNA, and found no evidence that LUCA had them...

Instead, it may have used RNA: many biologists think RNA came first because it can store information and control chemical reactions.

The form could have been tiny, or vast.  Researchers use "mega-organism" to describe it.  Plus there's this Solaris-ish language: "this living primordial ocean essentially functioned as a single mega-organism."

A living ocean, a sprawling incompehensible monster - surely life didn't have a Lovecraftian horror origin, did it?

(thanks to Ed Webb's mad Twitter organelles; photo from Machete Red)

Best 2012 Gothic election slogan so far

The classic political Gothic meme is back:

(via John Kellden's G+)

"If love tears you open"

Here's a bouncy, nostalgic, very dire little video+song, "Me and Mr. Wolf".

As a companion piece to Glen Duncan's novel The Last Werewolf, animators George Fort and Monica Smith (Superjail!, Venture Bros.) teamed up with cabaret band The Real Tuesday Weld — who you may know from the video game L.A. Noire — for "Me and Mr. Wolf," a gleefully violent music video that harkens back to the animation of the 1940s. Witness a werewolf and a little red femme fatale wander through a hellish (albeit bouncy) cartoon world.

(via Jesse Walker, a-walkin' in the night woods)

Death by Craigslist, creepiness via Facebook

Anothers Craigslist-linked crime story adds more fear to that social tool's reputation.  Murderers apparently used Craigslist to lure victims to their Ohio killing ground, according to CNN.  

Another social media service also looks dark in the story, as reporters solemnly repeat one of the victims' last Facebook update.

Craigslist looks like Svengali here:

In contrast with the negative Craigslist is the story's moving note about a blog post written by one of the victims' children.  Blogging isn't criminal, but affective; moving, not horrific.

Unrelated: one of the suspects has a terrific mug shot.

Infocult: all over Craigslist.

(thanks to Ladi)

Black Friday or Black Sunday?

Black Friday continues to offer real-life Gothic. This time there's a story about one shopper dropping dead in a store:

A man collapsed while doing some Black Friday shopping in a crowded store, and people nearby continued to shop.
Witnesses tell WSAZ.com some shoppers walked around and even over the man's body.

That was West Virginia.  After our earlier story about an LA woman pepper-spraying for competitive shopping advantage, it looks like consumer horror is a coast-to-coast thing.

Fear and dread

The fearsome internet in a phrase:

In my experience, every new tech breakthrough, every new Google or Facebook, is met with fear and dread

The speaker's full quote is actually based on regional comparison.  The fear is European, and is contrasted by:

In my experience, every new tech breakthrough, every new Google or Facebook, is met with fear and dread, rather than the enthusiasm we see in Asia, and here in the States. 

Black Friday, a celebration of internet fear

One Black Friday celebrant attacked other consumers with pepper spray last night.  Police called it - seriously - "competitive shopping."

Infocult wonders why anyone would voluntarily head to a store on this day.  Is it greed? Bad scheduling? The allure of sales?  Some weird festival feeling? No, the best explanationis: it's about fearing the internet.

How?  Because it's a deliberate act of shunning the online world.

Consider: if the purpose of Black Friday is to buy up presents for Christmas etc holidays, that purpose is far more easily served by shopping online.  Amazon, for instance, has fired up a series of sales for this dread weekend.  A casual trawl across online shops presents many more price cuts and special deals.  Over the next few weeks we'll see more of these.  So shoppers can save money buying online.

Scheduling problems are also solved by purchasing online.  If the mails are clogged horribly, it'll take a week to ship something to its destination... which means we still have several weeks remaining.  Shoppers have plenty of time to strategize.

Some Black Friday defenders cite the face-to-face reminder of Thanksgiving dinner with folks othewise unseen.  This misses the fact that the majority of Americans are online, and that the leading reason for using social media is to communicate with friends and family.  So the reminders are there, online.

What remains to drive screaming hordes to hell-malls?  Perhaps it's ignorance of online shopping.  Some folks are still effectively offline.  Others feel nervous about sharing credit information.   That explaination might have worked in 2001, when Americans were still migrating into cyberspace in stages.  But in 2011, internet usage is simply too widespread.

No, Black Friday is an act of deliberate resistance to the internet.  It's a holiday from online life, a raucous celebration of face-to-face interaction.  Black Friday is a return-to-the-mall-womb, a nostalgic riot for bygone pleasures.  Black Friday claws back to an imagined social world before the Web's triumph.  It's grounded in the ancient, 20th-century delights of shopping, of getting physical stuff right there, on the spot.  It rejects the Web page in favor of the unopened food court.  And millions do it!  Nothing else but fear can motivate this movement at such a scale. 

It's a doomed thing, of course.  Some of the Black Friday celebrants put down their pepper spray and take photos, which they share on Facebook.  Others text fellows in other malls, comparing prices.  It's all documented in Web video.  And all of it depends on networked digital media, from global credit systems to extended supply chains hauling tvs into Wal-mart.  

Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, Black Friday is a historical reenactment, gleefully mixing fiction and reality, dependent on what it shuns in order to function.  Its votives flock to crowded aisles in flight, shrieking in a delight just barely removed from terror.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - Lovecraft

(photo via jbhthescots)