Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Ukraine jetliner crisis turns Gothic

The crisis over a downed Malaysian airliner in Ukraine took on a strikingly Gothic hue as one rebel leader offered a fascinatingly gory conspiracy theory.  Igor Strelkov thinks the corpses are not what they seem.

According to the information received from the people who collected the corpses, a large number of the corpses are “not fresh” – these are people who died a few days ago.

Oh yes.  Strelkov develops this in detail.

First of all, not all the people in the plane were dead prior to the fall.

Second, a large quantity of medication, including blood serum and so forth, was found in the airplane, which is not characteristic of a regular airliner. It looks like there was some kind of special medical cargo on board.

It's a combination of classic Gothic horror (suspicious dead bodies) with Gothic-themed mad science.

Strelkov adds some forensic, sensual detail:

[two individuals who personally gathered the corpses after the crash] emphasized that a large number of the corpses were “completely bloodless” – it’s as if their blood clotted long before the catastrophe. They also remarked that there was an overwhelming putrid corpse stench, which was also noted by many locals...

Infocult readers might ask, how could a plane full of dead people fly?  Strelkov anticipates your objections:

The pilots were, of course, perfectly alive – the entire cabin (and the front part is well preserved) was literally bathed in their blood.

This raises a different kind of story beyond the Gothic and sf.  It's really an espionage tale now, some kind of Grand Guignol false flag operation, perhaps.  

Bruce Sterling is skeptical, but sees the zombie possibilities.  Pravda doesn't mention zombies, but is also not buying it.

Infocult readers may also think of prior art alone these lines.  Several of chairman Bruce's commentators, for example, mention the first season of Fringe (2009), where a plane of the dead landed.  Others might recall John Varley's short story "Air Raid" (1977), later the novel Millenium (1983), which also features a complement of dead air travelers.  TV scanners might be reminded of The Strain, originally a 2009 novel.

Infocult offers this hypothesis: all intense politics ultimately tend to the Gothic.

(link via Colin Howells; airliner photo from Wikipedia)

The Gothic history of Ouija

Smithsonian has a fine article on the Ouija board's history.  The whole thing is delightful, so we'll only excerpt a few key pieces here.

ITEM: ironic death by Ouija.

Kennard CEO "William Fuld... died in 1927 after a freak fall from the roof of his new factory—a factory he said the Ouija board told him to build."

ITEM: early 20th-century crime connections.

In 1921, The New York Times reported that a Chicago woman being sent to a psychiatric hospital tried to explain to doctors that she wasn’t suffering from mania, but that Ouija spirits had told her to leave her mother’s dead body in the living room for 15 days before burying her in the backyard. In 1930, newspaper readers thrilled to accounts of two women in Buffalo, New York, who’d murdered another woman, supposedly on the encouragement of Ouija board messages.  

ITEM: the pivotal role of The Exorcist (1973), within which was

the implication that 12-year-old Regan was possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board by herself changed how people saw the board. “It’s kind of like Psycho—no one was afraid of showers until that scene… It’s a clear line,” says Murch, explaining that before The Exorcist, film and TV depictions of the Ouija board were usually jokey, hokey, and silly—“I Love Lucy,” for example, featured a 1951 episode in which Lucy and Ethel host a séance using the Ouija board. “But for at least 10 years afterwards, it’s no joke…"

ITEM: Ouija meets the Turing test.

Their initial experiments involved a Ouija-playing robot: Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In actuality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control.

Does the board still have this post-Exorcist resonance, generations later?  It does appear in the first Paranormal Activity movie (2007).

(thanks to Steven "Human Planchette" Kaye; spooky board photo by Gabriel Molina)

Fearing the driverless car

The FBI has generated some useful ways that Google's self-driving car could be scary.

First, you might have a car bomb*, if "autonomous cars may be used as 'lethal weapons.'" The Googlemobile would thereby become "be more of a potential lethal weapon that it is today.”  As one source observes, "There could soon be self-driving car bombs." Or:

a driverless car could become a fantastic weapon. A terrorist could load one up with a bomb and send the model on its way with on one inside.

Second, more impressive car chases would result:

“bad actors will be able to conduct tasks that require use of both hands or taking one’s eyes off the road which would be impossible today.”

One nightmare scenario could be suspects shooting at pursuers from getaway cars that are driving themselves.

Here's a list of previous Infocult posts on the many ways we fear the GOOG.

(photo from Wikipedia)

    *tip of the hat to Mark Leyner.

A 19th-century ancestor for Infocult

A Smithsonian article on scrapbooking turns up, among other things, a shadowy ancestor to this very blog!

[N]ewshounds cataloged their obsessions, one of which was death. A Midwesterner morbidly collected a scrapbook of obituaries, including articles with delightfully gothic titles like “Hid Their Victims in a Ditch” and “Two Weeks With a Corpse: A Senile Mother Alone in a Farm House With Her Daughter’s Remains.”

Sister or brother!

(thanks to Steven "Ancestor.com" Kaye)

 

A Slenderman history

One part of the Slenderman collective mythos has been establishing a historical background.  Backfilling Slendy's present video and digital photo presence with mock-archival images is the work of many hands, neatly assembled here.

For example, 

Noppera-bō

Country of Origin: Japan

Similarities to Slender Man: faceless, tall, thin, deceptive, can appear differently

Freaky Backstory: Noppera-bō like to scare humans for fun. They can be male or female (like the one pictured) and take the form of a person known to their victim - before dissolving their features to leave a smooth, blank face.

But if we're going to use the "tall man" meme, let us please note this very great Tall Man.

It's fascinating to watch Slenderman, a native-born cyber Gothic meme, develop and expand.

(thanks to Geekymom!)

Dark pit appears in Siberia

The Earth's war against humanity took to the eastern Russian front, as a dark pit mysteriously appeared in eastern Siberia.

The thing yawns wide into a splendidly black circle:

Here's what it looks like from the air:

Russia Today soberly observes that:

An urgent expedition was sent to the far-northern peninsula to try and solve the mystery. The team arrives on Wednesday to survey the seemingly bottomless pit...

The seriousness of the find is evidenced by Russia’s Emergencies Ministry being present among the expedition. The Russian Academy of Sciences is also on board, planning to take samples of the soil, air and water from the area, which is big enough to fit several MI-8 helicopters.

This is a fine start for all kinds of terrifying stories.  Think "Who Goes There?" or mole people.

A different kind of scary tale comes from scientists looking to understand how the abyss opened up.  This one is about climate change:

Another explanation has been posited by Anna Kurchatova from Russia's Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center. She believes the crater was formed by a water, salt, and gas mixture that ignited an underground explosion, also the result of global warming.

(thanks to Peter Rothman and Derek Bruff)

Economics of the living dead, the anthology

For the Infocult book shelf: Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science, a new academic anthology focused on the intersection of economics with classic monsters.

The essays collected in this book are as humorous as they are thoughtful, as culturally relevant as they are economically sound, and provide an accessible link between a popular culture phenomenon and the key concepts necessary to building one’s understanding of economic systems large and small. It is the first book to combine economics with our society’s fascination with the undead,

Here's the table of contents:

Introduction: Living Dead in the Modern Economy, by Glen Whitman and James Dow

Part I: Soulless Mates

1. Human Girls and Vampire Boys, Part 1: Looking for Mr. Goodbite, by Glen Whitman
2. Human Girls and Vampire Boys, Part 2: ’Til Death Do Us Part, by Glen Whitman

Part II: Apocalyptonomics

3. Packing for the Zombie Apocalypse, by James Dow
4. Eating Brains and Breaking Windows, by Steven Horwitz and Sarah Skwire
5. To Truck, Barter… And Eat Your Brains!!! Pursuing Prosperity in a Post-Productive World, by Brian Hollar
6. What Happens Next? Endgames of a Zombie Apocalypse, by Kyle William Bishop, David Tufte, and Mary Jo Tufte
7. Order, Coordination, and Collective Action among the Undead, by Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Alain Marciano

Part III: Blood Money

8. Investing Secrets of the Undead, by James Dow
9. Zombification Insurance, by Eleanor Brown and Robert Prag
10. Monsters of Capital: Vampires, Zombies, and Consumerism, by Lorna Piatti-Farnell
11. Trading with the Undead: A Study in Specialization and Comparative Advantage, by Darwyyn Deyo and David T. Mitchell
12. Buy or Bite?, by Enrique Guerra-Pujol
13. To Shoot or to Stake, That Is the Question: The Market for Anti-Vampire Weapons, by Charlotte Weil and Sébastien Lecou
14. Taxation of the Undead: Non-Sentient Entities, by Joseph Mandarino

Part IV: The Dead Body Politic

15. Tragedy of the Blood Commons: The Case for Privatizing the Humans, by Glen Whitman
16. Zombies as an Invasive Species, by Michael E. O’Hara
17. What Would the Reasonable Man Do in a World Gone Mad?, by Brian Hollar
18. Brain-Dead vs. Undead: Public Ignorance and the Political Economy of Responses to Vampires and Zombies, by Ilya Somin
19. Sinking Our Teeth into Public Policy Economics: A Taste of Immortality, by Fabien Medvecky
20. Where Oh Where Have the Vampires Gone? An Extension of the Tiebout Hypothesis to the Undead, by A.L. Phillips, M.C. Phillips, and G.M. Phillips

Part V: Brain Food

21. The Economics of Bloodlust, by Ian Chadd
22. Between Gods and Monsters: Reason, Instinct, and the Artificial Vampire, by Daniel Farhat
23. Killing Time: Dracula and Social Discoordination, by Hollis Robbins

The metal claws of ancient Peru

Archaelogists have uncovered - and isn't that how many horror stories begin?

Ahem.  Archaeologists in Peru have dug up a terrifying artifact from a pre-Incan civilization.  It's a pair of metal claws,

ornamental metal pieces fashioned to look like feline paws with claws. The paws may have been part of a ritual costume used in ceremonial combat, El Comercio reported. The loser would be sacrificed, while the winner would get the costume.

They look very impressive, too:

(via Sandy Vincent)

Staging the nightmares of children

American photographer Arthur Tress created a fascinating set of photographs: a group of children's nightmares. 

Tress spoke with children about their dreams—often nightmares that involved falling, monsters, that buried alive scenario—and would then photograph them experiencing it in a safe, staged setting.

"I was looking for mythological, archetypical, kind of nightmarish images. That kind of became my trademark for the next 20 years, that kind of surreal disturbing photography."

Haunted on Facebook

I just heard a Facebook alert. I'm too afraid to swap windows and check it.

A nice bit of Facebook horror appeared on the Reddit NoSleep board. It has the appropriately long title of "My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook. I’ve got the screenshots. I don’t know what to do."

The story poses itself as a cry for help from a young man increasingly scared of Facebook content seemingly coming from his dead girlfriend.  Formally, it's a sequence of paragraphs arranged in chronological order, each linked to a screen capture of some creepy bit of Facebook activity.  The narrator sets up each graphic, then reacts to it.

For example, here is one of the early exchanges.  "Nathan" is the story's narrator, the boyfriend; "Emily" is the supposedly dead girlfriend:

Note the anonymizing features, which add a documentary feel to the story.  And note, too, the final open text box, which gives an extra sense of ongoing conversation.

Later the exchanges become more like a ghost story.  For example, this screenshot shows Emily complaining about temperatures - of the grace, most likely: