Cryogenic tweets. The blog hereafter. Rest in Facebook. A vector of vales. How social media corrals us into the afterlife. Curated by
Dr Ricardo Battista, School of Specialization in Cryogenics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.
Out of nowhere, I began to notice Ken Hollings in my timeline, tweeting about so-called Twitter ‘non-people’. What he had to say was weird and intense, but shot through with the pealing bells of truth, and I was drawn to it instantly like a moth(man) to flame. I’ve long been intrigued by ‘dark Twitter’, a glitch-crack in the network, through which it’s possible to glimpse a slumbering intelligence. Think of numbers stations on shortwave radio, and the illicit thrill ham radio operators shared when they tuned into these eerie transmissions hiding in plain sight. Dark Twitter is like that, but with the weirdness amped up tenfold. And you have to know where to look.
Hollings tweeted a link to a blog post he’d written. The post drew a correlation between a certain species of Twitter spambot and EVP – ‘electronic voice phenomena’; ghost voices heard in white noise, made famous by Konstantins Raudive. Hollings’ theory was that these bots have somehow escaped from whatever corporate campaign they were shilling and are now doomed to haunt the Twitterverse, searching, like Raudive’s disembodied entities, for real humans to follow and interact with.
‘It may be,’ Hollings wrote, ‘that they have somehow replicated themselves and it is the digital echo of their non-presence that has now decided to follow you.’
Paul Virilio, urbanist and theorist of cyberculture, once told an interviewer about a science fiction story in which artificial snow was seeded with tiny cameras and dropped from planes. He explained, “when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.” The interviewer asked: “But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?” Virilio replied: “We’ll dream of being blind.” Desperate, I will dream that same dream, but even gouging out my eyes – all eighteen of them – will not be enough, for the imprint will remain, the augmented overlay, glowing like tracer bullets in the radioactive darkness of the mind’s eye. Remember, I can never unsee.
Then I will dream of death, but even death won’t save me, for I will have left enough data, enough tweets, enough cookies and enough honey traps from my online browsing patterns to allow unscrupulous marketers to harvest the information and construct a digital version of me. It will be a magnificent feat of malware, social engineering composed of my online leavings. This digital construct will traverse the Google Earth just as I do now. It will spam my friends and family, and it will tweet the same observations about Street View as I do. Actually, not “the same observations about Street View as I do”, but “the same observations because it is me”. No one will tell the difference. In the future, we are all sentient spambots.
My digital doppelganger will see me in Google Earth, reflected in the hubcap of the Street View car. It will see me reflected in the illusory facade of the PricewaterhouseCoopers building, watching myself watching the Barcode Project. It will see me in the machine, which has taught me how to remember a past I never had and a future I will never see.
The machine will teach my doppelganger how to live, at the same time as it teaches me how to die. No one will tell the difference.
From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Cryogenics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.
-START-
4 NOVEMBER 2013 - The School of Specialisation in Cryogenics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, led by Dr Ricardo Battista, has confirmed the existence of a virulent new spambot. It is potentially more resilient than previous variants, and likely sentient, with the potential to selectively infect targeted mobile devices.
The spambot was brought to the Centre’s attention by Andrew Macrae. Mr Macrae (@acidic) tweeted to Dr Battista: “Here is a fantastic social dead profile pic I came across the other day”, which linked to a previous tweet of his:
Figure 2: Glitchbot Zero (Macrae Bot).
Mr Macrae passed along a profile picture from a recent spambot interaction he’d had, referring to an apparent ‘glitch’ in the pixels that make up the image. This rendered the image half-finished and unformed. As Mr Macrae notes, it is indeed an effective visualisation of the milieu of spambots, many of which tweet incessantly strings of sentences that appear cut-up, recombined or half-finished.
Dr Battista retweeted Mr Macrae’s tweet, and then responded to Mr Macrae with the message: “Brilliant. It’s so inscrutably glitchy.” Within five seconds, Dr Battista received replies from two spambots, calling themselves ‘Devin Fredda’ and ‘Bennie Shandra’:
Figure 3 (above): original ‘Devin Fredda’ interaction.
Figure 4 (above): original ‘Bennie Shandra’ interaction.
What is remarkable here is that the two spambots have ‘glitchy’ profile pictures that are almost identical to the bot discovered by Mr Macrae (a bot we shall term ‘Glitchbot Zero’). It’s almost as if they were able to somehow ‘listen in’ on Twitter conversations that were relevant to them, and then insert themselves into that interaction. As Mr Macrae surmised when Dr Battista wondered how they found him: ‘They’re attracted to glitch.’
Clicking through to ‘Devin Fredda’s profile page, Dr Battista found the following (‘Bennie Shandra’s bio and image were similar, although the geographical location was given as Germany, not the Philippines):
Figure 5: ‘Devin Fredda’ profile page.
The bot’s bio conforms to many recent examples of the type of bot classified by @bat020 as ‘hipster spambots’ (essentially a machinic joke at the expense of the subculture of real-world social media analysts that call themselves ‘social media ninjas’). The bot’s tweets also conform to type, being nonsense forms that appear to scrape and recombine existing sentences from elsewhere on the social web, a common form of communication identified by researcher Ken Hollings (for a class of bot he terms ‘Twitter non-people’, related to Hipster Spambots).
However, what is truly outstanding about the nature of these two bots is not just their ‘glitchy’ profile pictures, an amazing coincidence (if indeed that’s what it is) given the conversation between Dr Battista and Mr Mcrae, but the immediacy of the response from both bots to Dr Battista’s tweet. In itself, the ‘glitch’ picture phenomenon appears to be new and therefore worthy of study, as it breaks with the tradition of bots using fully formed human faces. Use of the glitch variant suggests that the bot itself is aware of its nature, and is unashamed about it, no longer looking to pass itself off as human.
Figure 6: close up-views (L-R): ‘Devin Fredda’ and ‘Bennie Shandra’.
There is a startling extension to the theory of sentience. We ask again: how did ‘Devin Fredda’ and “Bennie Shandra’ know that Dr Battista was tweeting (obliquely) about ‘glitchy’ spambot profile pictures? To restate, Dr Battista’s reply to Mr Macrae, which the spambots in turn replied to: 'brilliant. they’re so inscrutably glitchy.’ As no mention was made of the unusual nature of the profile pictures in that tweet, how did the spambots recognise discussion of their own type taking place between Dr Battista and Mr Macrae? One theory put forward is that the original image tweeted by Mr Macrae, and retweeted by Dr Battista, was embedded with some kind of tracking or tracing code, allowing glitchy spambots to stalk and attach themselves to humans making use of the image (Dr Battista’s reply was in response to a tweet containing that image). Conversely, as mentioned, one might rule the connection as coincidence (albeit one of low probability, given the relative scarcity of glitchy profiles at this point in time). This theory suggests that the bots attached themselves to Dr Battista by following their usual spammy algorithms, and that they would have replied to him whether he was tweeting about ‘glitchbots’ or not. Put very simply, it is a coincidence that they also happen to have glitched profile imagery.
Figure 7: ‘Bennie Shandra’ profile page.
While we recognise that the first theory, regarding tracking codes, does not suggest compete autonomy in and of itself (it could still be an automated process, albeit a very sophisticated one), a series of strange occurrences since the original interaction shifts the balance of probability towards sentience. Dr Battista followed the two bots on Twitter when he realised the connection between them and the original Macrae discovery. Yet within an hour of doing so, they were suspended by Twitter, effectively vanishing from existence. Twitter routinely suspends accounts that have been identified as spammers, yet on this occasion it happened so quickly, and apparently so responsively, it was as if they disappeared into thin air on being ‘touched’ by Dr Battista, somehow ‘forcing’ Twitter into suspending them. The only way the Doctor was able to get screenshots of the ‘conversation’ was because, on the Doctor’s iPad, the bots continue to have a presence, despite being suspended. That is, Dr Battista is still able to read their replies and click on their profiles, even though they no longer exist when he tries accessing them on any other device. To restate, they do not exist for anyone other than Dr Battista on that one device.
Dr Battista has logged out of Twitter on his iPad and logged back in, repeatedly, yet still achieves the same result every time: the spambots exist only within that very localised environment. Lending weight to the theory that this was a coordinated glitchbot response to the conversation between Dr Battista and Mr Mcrae is the fact that when the profile pictures are lined up in a row, a startling pattern emerges: the grey glitch area steadily increases with each variant (and in iterative, identifiable increments) so that it almost covers the entire profile area by the third image.
Figure 8 (above): the three profile pictures as one continuous image. L-R: Glitchbot Zero (Macrae Bot). Glitchbot 2: ‘Devin Fredda’. Glitchbot 3: ‘Bennie Shandra’.
Figure 9 (above): the ‘Devin Fredda’ account today.
Furthermore, ever since the interaction, Dr Battista has been receiving a series of odd alerts on his Twitter app. Dr Battista has set the iPad to push notifications to him when someone replies to or follows him on Twitter. In the past week, he has received several notifications that certain accounts have followed him or replied to him, but when he checks those accounts they either don’t exist or there is no such reply.
A recent example was a notification for a tweet from an account called @restonic. The tweet said: ‘Wait. Don’t stop. I’ve now followed two of them.’ When Dr Battista clicked on the tweet inside the notification banner, it took him to @restonic on Twitter, where he discovered a profile picture almost identical to ‘Devin Fredda’ (glitched out, mostly grey, with large black pixels at the top of the picture) accompanied by the usual nonsense tweets. There was no bio information. Then, when Dr Battista tried to click on a @restonic tweet, his Twitter app crashed.
Figure 10: the @restonic page as it now appears.
Logging back in, Dr Battista visited @restonic again. This time it did not feature a glitchbot profile picture, but a rather normal avatar for a mattress company in Dubai. The tweets were no longer cut-up and unformed nonsense. Indeed, there were no glitches of any kind to be found and no mention at all of a tweet such as the one described, about ‘following two of them’. It would appear that the glitchbots had somehow hacked the @restonic account, replacing its tweets and profile picture with their own, and then tweeted their cryptic message to Dr Battista. Yet it remains puzzling how they managed to do this only via Dr Battista’s iPad notifications, for there is simply no trace at all of this behaviour on the Twitter interface itself, or anywhere else for that matter.
Dr Battista has received other ‘ghost’ Twitter notifications on his iPad, but they now disappear from view too rapidly for him to even click on them. Nonetheless, he was able to ascertain that a recent example included the name of comedian ‘Hugh Laurie’. Of course, due to its fleeting appearance, no screenshots were obtained. This behaviour, co-opting real-world identities, is also consistent with recent spambots; Hollings has identified several bots that have taken their names from deceased people, for example, by scraping online birth and death databases. Of course, ‘Devin Fredda’ and ‘Bennie Shandra’ remain on Dr Battista’s iPad Twitter app, like ghostly afterimages. They can be clicked on and their tweets replied to, although they no longer respond or reply, as if they are dormant. Any attempt to replicate this outside Dr Battista’s iPad app simply returns Twitter’s standard ‘Account Suspended’ message.
To date, Dr Battista has informed the School of Specialisation in Cryogenics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of a total of six iPad ‘ghost’ notifications since the original interaction on Twitter with ‘Devin Fredda’ and ‘Bennie Shandra’. The Centre will continue its surveillance of the social web for further symptoms and will review unusual patterns carefully. The Centre is also working with international partners and experts to classify similar occurrences around the world. If members of the public encounter similar behaviour, it would be appreciated if they could email Dr Battista directly: dr.ricardobattista at gmail dot com.
Further reports will follow to assess the situation and review recommendations for continued surveillance, monitoring and review.
For a week, Scott Simon, the popular radio host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” stayed by his mother’s side in a Chicago hospital as she died… I, like more than a million others, followed Simon on Twitter when news that he was sharing his hospital experience went viral…
Death has now been able to make its way back into the conversation, he believes, thanks to “the narcissism of the self-esteem movement”—our culture’s growing enthusiasm for sharing personal information, which opens “a very rare window into a forbidden dimension of life, which makes death part of everyday experience,” he says.
A “new extension of time” is a phrase conjuring the blackest existential horror. What if you could never die, were not allowed to die? Death may lack accountability, but in this new technological landscape it may not exactly be a barrel of laughs for the deceased either (never mind those they are supposed to “torment and stalk”). After all, the dead might reasonably be expected to have found, by accident or design, the ultimate release from whatever madness the living currently find themselves enmeshed in. Not any more.
Shodan is the “terrifying search engine that finds Internet-connected cameras, baby monitors, traffic lights, medical devices and power plants"…
…after a Shodan search, you could monitor a corporate giant’s warehouse… or make a bunch of elementary school kids uncomfortably warm… If you wanted to use Shodan to haunt a mortuary, you could bring their crematorium to life from afar…
And of course, there are the cameras. There are thousands of IP cams around the world that are vulnerable to intruders. They have been hacked — one intruder got into a Texas family’s Foscam baby monitor to slut-shame a 2-year-old. A flaw in TRENDnet cameras — that recently drew the Federal Trade Commission’s ire — let onlookers see people with those cams changing, checking on their babies, and “going about their daily lives.” Feeds like this provide windows into people’s home lives…
“It’s like crack for voyeurs,” says Dan Tentler, a security researcher who specializes in finding exposed cams and says he’s catalogued over 900,000 of them, including one in a marijuana grow room.
“We’re going to keep putting things online but there’s a cost to that,” says security consultant Eirann Leveritt who specializes in finding industrial systems inadvertently made public. “It’s cheaper to move information online. But there’s a privacy and security cost.”
The efficiency of the [Boston] manhunt was reassuring, but the chase also illustrated how the data we generate in our daily lives can get sucked up by the security apparatus. The Social Dead Zone sees the same surveillance technologies at work in the ghastly attack on the soldier in London. The blogger quotes J.G. Ballard’s dark warning, “In a sense, we’re policing ourselves and that’s the ultimate police state”…
After the Woolwich attack something called the Opensource Intelligence Unit is conducting “strategic horizon scanning,” which is somebody anxiously watching Tweetdeck for signs of trouble. So, one of those primly dressed officers in London’s Metropolitan Police Service could be reading your next tweet. But you are looking, too…
Senior police have warned officers that criminals are using Facebook and other social media to befriend them and tap into secret information.
A senior officer has told officers that cavalier use of social media puts members in danger of being tracked by criminals using “geo-tagging” technology…
“Criminals have been known to use information gleaned from social media to engineer relationships with police for the purpose of securing access to law enforcement information or to compromise a member’s integrity,” he said…
Supt Gleeson said police needed to be aware that they were not the only ones capable of using social media to gather intelligence.
Below: J.G. Ballard. Photo by Simon Durrant, from i-D magazine, 1987.
Below: Excerpt from Ballard’s 1977 Vogue essay. Via Gideon Defoe.
A post at Buzzfeed has been doing the rounds this week, on how author J.G. Ballard “predicted social media in 1977”. According to Buzzfeed, “he made this uncanny observation in a Vogue essay”, reproduced above.
When I first read the Vogue excerpt, I was sceptical of the connection, believing that, if anything, it proved that Ballard predicted reality TV rather than social media. Nonetheless, I asked my associate, Dr Simon Sellars, formerly of Monash University and a published researcher of Ballard’s work, to give his opinion. Dr Sellars declined my request for an interview, stating that he was still in the depths of an ongoing research project on the topography of cereal boxes, which has been “consuming” all his time. However, he did grant me permission to reproduce an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Applied Ballardianism, about life through a Ballardian lens.
Dr Sellars’ conclusion? Ballard predicted both reality TV and social media…
J.G. Ballard wrote about nothing but virtual worlds, the shared hallucinations of the everyday: suburban streets, billboards, the benevolent dystopias of advertising, the dominance of television, the savage euphoria of motorway systems. The role of his fiction, as he repeatedly emphasised, was cautionary. He once told an interviewer: ‘I’m trying to say “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.”’ Yet much of his appeal to the cyberpunks lay in the seduction of his techno-visions. The fetishistic charge given off by the character of Gabrielle in Crash, her crippled body clad in leg irons, remade and remodelled, constantly depicted in geometric conjunctions with leather car seats and steering wheels, is transmutable to the femme fatale Molly in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Molly herself is an anti-heroine clad in leather and silver shades, toting sleek weaponry that appears moulded to the contours of her body.
Ballard began as a writer of science fiction. As a schoolboy, I devoured SF yet his name was only obliquely familiar, mainly from blurbs on other books, a cult figure inhabiting an elliptical orbit far distant from planets Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. What exactly was a young lad, keen on space opera and Doc Smith’s Lensmen series in particular, to make of stories described by bored copywriters as ‘chill splinters of unreality’ and ‘the source of a bleak new evil’? But after Bruce Sterling anointed him as the patron saint of the cyberpunk movement in Mirrorshades, I noticed him everywhere. Everyone began to namedrop him – musicians, filmmakers, artists, architects – in books, interviews, song lyrics. I recall my surprise at discovering a 1987 interview with him in i-D magazine, that tireless documenter of the extravagant and ultra-expressive style cults of the 80s. What was this peripheral figure from my sci-fi apprenticeship doing there, mixing it with i-D’s self-described lunatic crew of ‘Greboes, Waifs, Wannabees, Heavy Metal Christians, Sloane Rebels and Nocturnal Vampettes’?
Yet he was more ‘punk’ than any of them. Closing the interview, a remarkable sidebar collected some of his more striking thoughts, and I marvelled at his ability to discourse on apparently anything. Here was Ballard on Live Aid: ‘You couldn’t mount another. The TV tube is like a flagging piece of nervous tissue – you need a bigger and bigger charge to get a kick out of it.’ On TV news: ‘It’s not news … it’s entertainment news. A documentary on brain surgery is about entertainment brain surgery. But then again, maybe the vital discoveries are going to be made in the area of entertainment brain surgery.’ On yuppies: ‘[They] aren’t interested in having kids, they are their own kids.’
He crafted his observations in a way that was both delimiting and exhilarating. The attraction to TV, for example, a medium always uppermost in his thought, was couched in a way that bordered on abject disgust – ‘flagging nervous tissue’ – but also elided completely the boundaries between the body and technology, forging the reader’s cyborgian afterbirth with pleasurable, sentient energy. So primed, I eventually began to understand the ironic underbelly of his ‘dangerous bends’ equation. ‘But of course,’ he told a different interviewer, playing games with our perception of him, ‘there’s a small part of me which has always said, “Dangerous bends ahead. Speed up.” Because I’m curious to know…’
Accompanying the i-D interview, Simon Durrant’s grainy, monochrome portraiture compounded this abnormal charisma. Wearing a black shirt, Ballard stares off camera, his expression one of detached certitude. He pinches his thumb and forefinger together under his left eye, pulling the skin of the cheekbone down to reveal his wide, opaque pupils. It is an overtly theatrical gesture, pregnant with symbolism, a coded missive. As a young man, I spent a good deal of time trying to divine the true meaning of that gesture, in tandem with the future-shockwaves contained within the interview. What exactly was he staring at?
Ballard could expose the vacuity and never-attainable levels of satisfaction that power the logic of the consumerist engine, yet he was not above the thrill of it all, for he understood the liberating charge that comes from total abandonment. He saw the capturing, framing and enhancement of perversity by modern technology as beneficial, an unprecedented ‘back door pass into the realm of psychopathology’. The focus on televised irreality was deliberate, pronounced. Ballard copped to being a TV junkie. His research for his novel Hello America didn’t involve flying to the US, he said, it came from watching The Rockford Files. He was fascinated by the ‘kind of inward collapse’ brought about by new technology. ‘Deregulation of the airwaves,’ he told i-D, ‘will lead to a deregulation of the imagination.’ In the future, ‘ultimately every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.’
Remarkably, a decade before the i-D interview, in 1977, Ballard had already tested this idea in his short story 'The Intensive Care Unit’, with its near-future setting where ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens. To talk to someone, even intimates, it becomes necessary to log onto one’s personal TV channel. [This story can be seen as the fictional partner to the Vogue essay referenced by Buzzfeed].
Eventually the narrator decides to enact the unthinkable: he brings his family together to meet in the flesh. But they are all overwhelmed by this unmediated interaction and experience reality overload. Overcome with bloodlust, they hack each other to pieces using household scissors. Like Deleuze, Ballard saw television’s functions as surveillance and control. In a 1988 interview, he explicitly states this while recycling a passage (about 'pre-empting original response’) from the introduction to his novel Crash:
The danger with TV is that it predigests and pre-empts any kind of original response by the viewer. It just feeds the viewer a kind of reality. (It has in fact become the new reality, just like processed food has become the staple diet of many people in the West.) This force feeding makes us rather like a lot of bullocks in pens.
In medical terms, the way an intensive care unit protects at the same time as it strips away privacy echoes Ballard’s view that we welcome the colonisation of our own bodies. In the story 'The Intensive Care Unit’, every human action is monitored and recorded, yet the narrator notes the 'admirable conventions’ and 'liberating affectlessness’ of this world, which afford him the chance to 'explore the fullest range of sexual possibility’ through clandestine pornographic channels catering to all tastes. The narrator feels safe and protected. 'The Intensive Care Unit’ was written well before CCTV was introduced in the UK in the late 1980s, yet it imparts the uncanny feeling that there is a form of surveillance guiding the story’s networked reality, even though this is never directly stated. The characters’ televised broadcasts are ostensibly for private and personal use, but there is an uneasy sense that what they are recording is also being transmitted elsewhere, the cameras part of a linked grid. This is emphasised when the narrator refers to the key events of his life as lived under the 'benevolent gaze of the television camera’, as if the camera has the power to confer, or withdraw, life and death itself.
Above: man trapped in elevator for 41 hours, live on CCTV.
Here, Ballard also seems to anticipate the coming world of reality TV, where the boundaries between private and public spheres have dissolved. Even in Crash, from 1973, there are sequences that prefigure the way people behave in a world of instant celebrity, where there are cameras everywhere and we might be plunged through one side of the screen to the other in an instant:
Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.
The camera as a self-aware entity is a crucial motif in Ballard, but it breaks free in his later work to become fully autonomous, increasingly unfathomable. In 'The Intensive Care Unit’, the characters play up to the omniscient cameras. Despite the narrator’s affection for his mediated society, he harbours a desire to push the boundaries, to break the frame, hence his plan to bring the family together. This seems a classic SF device: in a sterile dystopia, where everyone is controlled and kept in their place by invisible forces, the rebel makes a stand by puncturing the mediated boundaries of his life. It can be seen in films such as Logan’s Run, THX 1138 and The Truman Show. Yet in Ballard, the narrator has no desire to escape the camera’s gaze. On one level, he appears trapped within the intensities of a completely mediated world, the boundaries of the body dissolving in an all-seeing, all-encompassing electronic gaze.
Death, the final release, is willingly performed for the camera, so thoroughly assimilated as to become naturalised and normal. The narrator retains his admiration for the benevolent camera, intending to make a 'complete record … of this unique event’. He affectionately thinks of the controlled slaughter of his family as 'the ultimate home movie’, and is more than happy 'within the generous rectangle of the TV screen’. There is no question of escaping or of trying to find a world beyond the gaze. For the narrator this is undesirable or even impossible, about as improbable as an astronaut leaving the boundaries of the universe to see what is on the other side. Any transcendence through death will still be enacted within the logic of the electronic gaze.
As we have seen, in later interviews, post 'Intensive Care’, Ballard would continue to refine his views on affirmative social isolation, enthusing about the possibilities of private media and suggesting that the average home would soon acquire the processing power of a small TV studio, enabling us to broadcast our intimate fantasies to one another. In 1982 he enthusiastically told V. Vale that ‘Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days … We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be very strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything.’
Needless to say, for Ballard there was always a dark side. Today, online persona factories frame a fluid performativity enabled by the irresistible connective tissue of social media. What is YouTube – now inevitably banal, smoothly integrated into the fabric of everyday life – if not the medium for each of us to design and star in ‘our own sit-coms’? Anyone familiar with ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ will surely recognise the dark shadow of those ‘very strange’ productions (indeed, of what we now recognise as social media), with its disturbing warning about the dangers that await when we have the capacity to broadcast ‘the inside of our heads’. Ballard’s futurism, always potent, extremely well reasoned and argued – frequently alarming – was, above all, uncannily accurate.
He did not flinch, and he expected us not to. What’s more, he was right.
Some users presented a convincing picture that the electric shocks under power lines are primarily from the electric fields, not the magnetic one, because the frequency is just too low, and the body must be considered as a capacitor to estimate the currents etc.
Google Maps just included pretty much all of the Czech Republic to the Street View. That’s why I could look at the place where I had felt the electric shocks. First, the mast over there clearly corresponds to 400 kV according to a list of masts (model 8a-3), a pretty high voltage. But it’s even more interesting to see what the Google car was seeing in front of itself at the same point where I experienced the shocks.
A pretty nice colorful distortion. It is strongly correlated with the masts so I guess it has something to do with the electric fields, too. Am I right? If I am right, what are the electric fields that may cause similarly strong effects in the digital cameras used by Google or others? There are lots of capacitors in those digital cameras, aren’t there?
Why is the ordering of the anomalous colors yellow, cyan, violet (from the top towards the bottom where the treetops and roofs are located)? Is it linked to different capacities or voltages or other electric parameters of the three color-sensitive segments of the digital camera?
Even the humble realtor is a ghost, a software routine. This is common in the small business sector. Some time ago, while in the process of goading another spammer – for research, you understand – I caught the delightful spectacle of two spambots being polite to each other…
The pressure exerted on social subjects by a labour market in which casualisation is the norm has made the category of ‘internet entrepreneur’ psychologically universal…
Take Ana Hofman, of the Traffic Generation Cafè. Her advice on how to build your small Twitter empire is unsentimental as they come. It involves using keyword searches to locate your potential targets and automated software to establish a rigid routine of followings and unfollowing so as to maintain a balance that won’t give you away to Twitter’s spam-detecting routines…
This is the new you: organised, ruthless, inflexible, willing to speak in short pre-packaged bursts in order to achieve maximum social efficiency. You’re dead now, but it doesn’t matter. There is another you somewhere else on the networks, a truer you, alive, who speaks with honesty and integrity – like the real Ana Hofman – to her vast, primed audience.
But there’s a problem, isn’t there? It’s reciprocity. Like with Bieber. How do you know that those people you carefully selected via algorithms and keywords aren’t playing the same game as you? How do you know that that you are not a number to them? That they didn’t follow you back in the morning lest you unfollowed them in the afternoon? How can you be sure? How could you even hope?
Wouldn’t it be simpler and more realistic to assume that everyone is dead?
Very soon iPhones will also be sex vibrators, they’ll be useful for masturbation. In the same way, modern artists need to be like modern objects that are polymorphous.
Yes. Artistic. Because I don’t speak about me. The expression is limited, and they’ve become the haikus of our century. I use it to share ideas—poetical, philosophical ideas. I seem to help, I answer questions. I give consultations, things like that.
When I started, people laughed at me because they said it’s just for idiots, who write what they eat, what they do. It’s a tool for the politicians, celebrities, athletes, to make poems, or to make philosophy. They called me crazy. I said no, no! It is an art. I will make it an art, and I did.
You said once in an interview that movies are the highest art.
I think that. But it’s like Twitter. It’s the way you use it…
AJ: The only literature that is important to me is poetry. It is about the maximum expression of a concept in the minimum amount of words. Now it’s Twitter. This is literature for me…
KB: Twitter? [laughs]
AJ: Yes, to put an enormous quantity of thoughts into 140 characters. It’s about compression.
In the 21st century, Twitter is the haiku of the Middle Ages.
Your films have a cult status. Are you meeting more of your younger fans in the last 20 years?
Yes, more and more.
What surprised you most in their reactions to your films?
I feel understood. They follow the heroes. Their heroes are rock stars. Marilyn Manson loves Holy Mountain. He called me and he put on the internet that he loves Holy Mountain and a lot of 13-year-old gothic persons discover Holy Mountain. I need to wait 40, 50 years to be understood by the young persons. I have a young public. And now I am making Twitter. I have 800,000 followers. Everyday I have 1,000 more. Because Twitter is the literature of now. And I do it. And my public is young persons. Incredible, no?
Above: David Lynch debates Alejandro Jodorowsky over the iPhone.
“A dedicated team of British police officers is monitoring social media around the clock in the wake of the fatal attack on a soldier in the south-east of London, in order to gauge sentiment and be ready to respond.
Umut Ertogral, who runs the Opensource Intelligence Unit for London’s Metropolitan Police Service, today told the AusCERT information security conference a team of 17 staff were working seven days a week to track social media feedback and monitor community tension.
The unit is conducting what Ertogral called ‘strategic horizon scanning’. He said: 'There’s a lot of work we’re doing to analyse the language and how people are talking on Twitter’… the unit was also exploring association to establish influencers, particularly for protest movements.
'We’re looking at tribes as well as people surrounding themselves with likeminded people so we’ll see a lot more clusters within the social media world’.”
