Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

SMS death threats in Oz

Death over SMS: someone is sending Australians scary text messages. They contain a lethal threat combined with extortion:

[M]essages...typically read "Someone paid me to kill you. If you want me to spare you, I'll give you two days to pay $5000. If you inform the police or anybody, you will die, I am monitoring you"

As with most spam strategies, this only requires a few responses to start paying off.

Now there's got to be an autocomplete joke in here...

(via Slashdot)

A man shoots up a crowd, so we should expect some fearsome media blaming.  Examples emerged pretty quickly.

For instance, one tv news show, trying to generate a backstory for the shootings, suggests video games could have played a role (around 2:00: "spending time in his apartment playing one video game after another, shooting shooting shooting"). 

Apparently the shooter did like one computer game.  Unfortunately it's not one which fits the fearsome digital media narrative:

Another medium can always take the blame: movies, especially those featuring violent content.  Listen to Fox:

If indeed he identified himself as The Joker, could the suspected gunman, James Holmes, have been influenced by the Batman movie or cartoon series? “There have been a tremendous number of studies showing that violent movies can indeed increase the likelihood that somebody in the audience will act aggressively,” Leonard Berkowitz, PhD, Professor of Psychology Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison, explained to FOXNews.com

Here's a call for censorship.

Or we could hit up a tv show's fan base.  Beware the "dark, Trekkie-like person."

(via several fine Reason posts)

Faking a family online: a social media tale

The internet-enabled hoax genre continues, as a young American woman admitted to creating a fictional family.  Emily Dirr created a family including a Mountie father, pregnant then killed mother, and cancer-stricken child ("Warrior Eli").  She also built up a supporting cast of characters numbering perhaps 80.

The hoax sprawled over the internet across a series of platforms: multiple Facebook accounts and groups, email, Yahoo Answers, Xanga, CaringBridge, instant message, a now-dead Friendster clone, and text messages.  Dirr also snarfed photos from Flickr.  Physical artifacts were involved: fake bracelets supposedly made by the ailing boy (image left) and drawings.  A Web-based charity received donations spurred by events in the hoax.  Hundreds of people followed over more than a decade.

Followers broke open the hoax through a blog, appropriately.  That's where the author confessed.

Gawker has a fine account.

(thanks to Peter Naegele)

The internet made me do it

Ulugbek Kodirov plotted to assassinate the American president, because the internet.  At least that's how his defense attorney sees it.

Mr. Kodirov’s lawyer, Lance Bell, blamed the Internet for radicalizing the young man... “I’m not calling him a victim,” Mr. Bell said, “but he’s a victim to a degree of social media.”

It's an update to the insanity defense.  

How does it work, this internet-driving-person-to-violence thing?

According to the signed confession in his plea agreement, which was posted online by The Birmingham News in February, the young man hatched his plot to shoot the president after being radicalized while watching jihadist videos online. He then communicated via YouTube with someone he believed to a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

It's a very practical defense.  It sidesteps questions of mental health, individual responsibility, and religious violence.  It could connect with an older/cyberphobic jury.

(via Ed Webb's Diigo)

Trading in the dead

Several companies are doing very well indeed by marketing products created from dead human flesh.

This real-world Gothic has several classic horror aspects.  Body horror, of course:

Human skin takes on the color of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about six square feet...

“At the basic level what we are doing to the body, it’s a very physical — and I imagine some would say a very grotesque — thing,” said Chris Truitt, a former RTI employee in Wisconsin. “We are pulling out arm bones. We are pulling out leg bones. We are cutting the chest open to pull the heart out to get at the valves. We are pulling veins out from the inside of skin.”

Consider, too, the mystery surrounding the trade:

[T]he tissue-donation system can deepen the pain of grieving families, keeping them in the dark or misleading them about what will happen to the bodies of their loved ones...

[S]ome patients don’t even know that they are the final destination. Doctors don’t always tell them that the products used in their breast reconstructions, penis implants and other procedures were reclaimed from the recently departed.

Then there's this good old Gothic trope, the corpse stealer:

Ground-level body wranglers [great phrase] in the U.S. can get as much as $10,000 for each corpse they secure through their contacts at hospitals, mortuaries and morgues. Funeral homes can act as middlemen to identify potential donors. Public hospitals can get paid for the use of tissue-recovery rooms.

d

(thanks to Jesse Walker and Steven Kaye)

Bane Capital

Bain Capital, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney's former business, meets Bane, Batman's villain.

Sample tweets:

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Newsweek jumps on the cyberfear train, rides like a mad thing

...few people will survive unscathed...

The internet is driving us crazy, hollers Newsweek.  Mental illness is what cover article author Tony Dokoupil focuses on.  And what a piece of work is this thing.

It all starts with mental problems, dear blog reader and fellow sufferer:

The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic.[emphasis added]

Worse than that,

At Stanford, Dr. Aboujaoude is studying whether some digital selves should be counted as a legitimate, pathological “alter of sorts,” like the alter egos documented in cases of multiple personality disorder... 

These psychological charges lead Dokoupil to drug addiction.  Not only does the internet make us psychotic, but

Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways...

Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, argues that “the computer is like electronic cocaine..."

The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.[emphases added]

Where to begin...

First, the writer flings these controversial (at best) or bogus arguments with utter assurance, blithely ignoring any discussion.  (Say, doesn't the internet make that kind of rhetorical style happen?) Better yet, he quotes Susan (Baron) Greenfield as an unimpeached source, similarly sidestepping any hint of dissenting views.  Dokoupil brings up the DSM's new approach to internet addiction, forgetting to mention the huge problems with it.  In fact, the article barely supports its huge claims at all.

When critics do appear, they don't get to make a case.  Instead, they are, somehow, quietly, "puckish" (a term Dokoupil likes so much he uses it twice).

Second, Dokoupil ascribes vast, Svengali powers to internet-enabled devices.  At no point does he raise any other reason to use the technology beyond addiction and madness.  He mentions "corporate employees" tethered to smartphones, neglecting to consider that, just maybe, corporate culture and the bad jobs market might have something to do with it.  Going on line to learn, connect with friends and family, express oneself... none of those non-Satanic reasons are allowed in this vision of internet as gargantuan crack pipe.

Similarly mood disorders are "linked" to online activities, neatly avoiding the possibility that casuality could run another way.  Until the author weirdly tosses his argument aside at the end:

in a way, it doesn’t matter [!] whether our digital intensity is causing mental illness, or simply encouraging it along, as long as people are suffering. 

So... "Everything I just wrote might well be wrong.  But bad stuff is happening, dude.  Could be the machines."

Third, the article commits the all too common error of assuming nobody has ever thought about this before. 

[A]ll of us, since the relationship with the Internet began, have tended to accept it as is, without much conscious thought about how we want it to be or what we want to avoid. 

"all of us", eh? Like the Association of Internet Researchers (founded 1999)? Or those studying the philosophy of technology?  Brilliant, accessible thinkers like Howard Rheingold have been on the case.  Librarians have been helping us from the start.  Teachers have been teaching the heck out of the net.  Why is such ignorance acceptable for Newsweek?

"without much conscious thought": how many articles, books, presentations, speeches, videos, and works of fiction have appeared over the past two generations doing that very conscious thinking?  You'd have to be blind - or perhaps distracted - to have missed that.

"accept it" - apparently no human was involved in making the internet.  We just received it passivel.  The internet simply appeared in full completion, like a 2001 monolith, and we sat there, gawping, addiction circuits gaping wide.

Fourth, it's unclear which technology is in the author's cross-hairs.  The titles claims "Web", but also mobile devices (hence the sickeningly trendy "iCrazy"), and also internet, not to mention the dreaded videogame world.  The piece doesn't distinguish between any of these. Legacy tech appears, but mysteriously.  Notice how the article folds tv into cyberspace via the typical weasling language of "screen time":

Americans have merged with their machines, staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day, more time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping. Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count time spent multitasking on several devices.

Does this include tv watching, either hardware or content?  Does the internet reframe decades of television experience in some way?  The author is silent on this too-realistic point.  

Entertainingly, note the magazine cover's celebrity gossip headline, and the Octomom and Tom Cruise links within the article. Presumably some media is a-ok.

I want to point to the "Dorito-encrusted" line, but prefer to leave that bit for the reader to discover.  Picking this apart is ultimately saddening.

(via MetaFilter and Yago Colas; cover shot, unavailable at Newsweek, helpfully archived by simplify your life)

The storm of Titan

The south pole of Titan features an awesome, vast, and disturbing storm:

Like the fervent boiling of an ancient monster, or the first signs of alien incursions into the solar system.

Here's an animation, showing the basic motion:

The skull grins because it is delighted

Good morning, Infocult minions.  Time for some coffee:

For more of AZRainman's tasty work, check out his site.

(thanks to Amanda Lee)

Fearing gamification, the next level

Digital analyst Evgeny Morozov offers the darkest picture of gamification's negative possibilities so far:

Prediction: The social web ends once gamification meets genocide

(thanks to Jesse Walker)