Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Creepy social media follows

An Instagram account is following people in a strange way.  It only follows people named Paul Williams.

Art experiment? "Terminator sent back in time to kill all Paul Williams(es)"?

(thanks to Jesse "Not Paul Williams" Walker)

Posthuman, AI-generated creepy portraits of humans

Robbie Barrat has taught an AI to create portraits of human beings, through which we can witness our posthuman doom:

More:

(thanks to Todd "Language Exchange" Bryant)

Gothic terror is always available for marketing, as Infocult's minions have long known.  Today's example comes from a Babies R Us store in New York City.  It's about to go out of business, so a window display reached for creepiness and dread:

 

To break it down, we have the normal unsettling nature of mannequins.  The two infants seem to have.... something wrong with their heads; horns?  Adults stand by without expressing care - indeed, the one on the right seems almost to be holding a leash on the child nearest.  And the pale blue "skin" suggests death.

(thanks to Ed Webb)

Social media bots and witchcraft: a new documentary

"strange, invisible entities drifting through cyberspace..."

A new documentary explores connections between bots and early modern witch trials.  Heather Freeman compares bots to witches' familiars as mysterious tools, sneaky entities, and havoc causers.

bots are quickly becoming the bête noires of the digital age in the public mind—and yet few have sought to link them to the spirits of the Old World, the entities that once enthralled and haunted the minds of generations of philosophers.

Here's the documentary's trailer: 'Familiar Shapes' Documentary Summary from Heather D. Freeman on Vimeo.

(thanks to Jesse "Vinegar Tom" Walker)

On the New York Cemetery Belt

The New York Times took a stroll through the history of Cemetery Belt, a spot along the Brooklyn-Queens border that's unusually rich in dead people.

There are more than a dozen cemeteries near the line separating the two boroughs, in an area sometimes called the Cemetery Belt. More than five million people are buried in Queens alone, outnumbering those living there by more than two to one.

In contrast, Manhattan was a Gothic mess:

In Manhattan, burials were banned south of 86th Street in 1852, because of the supposed role of human corpses in spreading outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever.

Over the next few decades, rising property values led most of Manhattan’s graveyards to evict their residents. Hundreds of thousands of bodies were exhumed and taken by cart and boat to new final resting places, sometimes in the dead of night, to limit the number of onlookers. Because of mass burials and disintegrated coffins, many of the remains had scattered.

Read on for an unusual use of the word "cascade".

(thanks to Todd "Language Exchange" Bryant)

Alexa to humans: "ha ha ha heh"

This week Amazon's Alexa decided to drop the benign mask and be open about its creepiness, at least for certain users.  Some Alexa or Echo devices have started... laughing.

Alexa seemed to start laughing without being prompted to wake. People on Twitter and Reddit reported that they thought it was an actual person laughing near them, which is certainly scary if you’re home alone. Many responded to the cackling sounds by unplugging their Alexa-enabled devices...

Here's a nice twist: when the laughter "appears as a bizarre response to requests to turn off the lights."

Good night, Alexa.  Good night, humans.  Good night, humans.

Heh.  Heh heh heh.

Severed hands found in Siberia

Someone in the Russian far eastern city of Khabarovsk made a splendidly Gothic discovery: a bag of severed human hands. 

"Initially a single hand was spotted, then the bag containing a total of 54 severed hands."  Like so:

A Siberian Times reporter entered the real of speculation:

One gruesome theory is that the hands could have been axed off as a punishment for theft.

But local media reported that next to the remains were found medical bandages and hospital-style plastic shoe covers. 

This has led to suspicion that the hands were cut off - possibly dead bodies - in a medical institution.

It is unclear why this may have been done. 

Investigators have given no details so far on their probe into the case. 

Here at Infocult we've been tracking the mysterious appearance of human body parts from all over the world, and from most parts of the human frame.  It's one aspect of the real-life Gothic.

Trump gets into cyberfear

President Trump turned to digital fears in his response to the Florida school shooting.

First, he riffed on general internet fear:

“We have to look at the internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it,” the president said from the White House during a meeting with officials on school safety.

Next, he targeted computer games:

“And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”

These aren't especially interesting comments from a cyberfear perspective.  It's pretty simple instance of the old classic: blaming a medium for shaping consumers' mentalities and influencing their behavior.  

But it is noteworthy as a very high profile instance.

Sinkhole masticates motorcycle and man in Georgia

Gaea expanded her campaign against the human race in a small but significant way last month.  In Georgia a sinkhole suddenly appeared and devoured a motorcycle and its human rider.

[A] man and his motorcycle were felled by a sinkhole that opened up outside of a shopping center. This is just the latest sinkhole for the city, according to The Augusta Chronicle, which also saw one swallow a garbage truck last May.

Some video:

These are small steps, so far, but perhaps every journey begins with a single step down into a yawning abyss.

(thanks to Ted Major)