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There has been a successful little horror movie about a haunted Zoom call. But Zoom's live video gives a sense of authenticity.

In general, I think, texts and WhatsApp messages are too easily spoofable to give a gothic frisson. In a world where you can now livechat with AI recreations of dead loved ones (as I'm sure you read in the LRB), who needs ghosts?

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Nov 2Liked by Adam Roberts

I agree computers don't usually work in horror. An exception, there is a horror podcast called The Magnus Archives. Episode 65 called Binary is about a computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIJ1uqulmI

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There's a book on this theme, which I found useful when writing The Angels of L19, which also plays around with haunted media via the idea of an angel as a medium for transmitting messages. This book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/696360.Haunted_Media?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZXDQjaRIuh&rank=1

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I've no idea why Substack has decided to stick my comment in here, precisely. Maybe it has its own haunted agency.

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Hmmm. I don't find the technologies of automated language spooky, really; disturbing, in their ability to do voice without agency, but that's not the same thing, is it. In fact, the 'eerie' in Mark Fisher's terms requires the absolute opposite - the perception of agency where you *don't* expect it. Banal and copious are not eerie/spooky qualities.

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Possible argument here: voice technologies are haunted by ghosts of the past until the point that reliable recording is invented for each of them. Only in the absence of prosaic, ordinary playback is it spooky to imagine a voice out of the past speaking on your exciting new telephone/coming through in Morse on your telegraph key. And perhaps there's an ambiguous zone when recording technologies *have* been invented but are still rare, expensive and remarkable. A haunted Edison cylinder is easier to imagine than a haunted WhatsApp text. But – corollary – ghosts of the future are invoked instead by the spooky time-defying quality of infinite reproducibility. After all, cyberspace was invented by Gibson to be haunted from the first moment he thought of it. The ghost of *sentience*, an anticipation of the spookiness now realised in LLMs, is there already in his AI loas, being tended by actual voodoo priests in Count Zero.

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Do you find LLMs, ChatGTP and all that, spooky? I don't know if I do. I can sort of see the Ghost-In-The-Machine logic of this new tech, but the text generated always strikes me as banal rather than eerie. Perhaps that's just me. HAL, in 2001, with his always-calm, soothing, reasonable voice which stays the same whether he is playing chess with you or murdering all your crewmates, does achieve something of this uncanny affect, so perhaps it does have to do with voice technologies as opposed to text technologies.

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It's an interesting question. Why not a haunted cell phone tower? AI seems like it would be ripe for the horror treatment, except that AI horror goes back at least to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Although Ben Aaronovich has worked eldritch horror into something that's more in line with contemporary AI technology in one of the Rivers of London novels.

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"I Have No Mouth ..." is a nightmarish story, certainly; but I don't know if it relies upon the notional computer technologies that trap its characters. The tech stuff isn't really spelled out; it's a premise for the story.

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Yeah, that's a fair point. Ellison's AI is essentially magical and has morning to do with non-sfnal AI. I feel like there's potential with modern "AI" technology -- you could train an LLM on the Necromicon or other forbidden tomes; a person could be haunted by a chatbot that's been fed the social media of a loved one (this is apparently already a thing, minus the haunting); the use of AI to insert a dead actor into a film goes horribly awry ("The Purple Rogue One of Cairo"?).

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Jeanette Winterson tried it, not totally successfully, in Night Side of the River.

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I haven't read that one: I'll seek it out.

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What Ring's about isn't even TV - a technology that was pretty mature by the 1980s - but the brand new technology of videotape. The film captures the eeriness of mechanical reproduction - in this case, being able to rewind and watch the same thing over and over again - just as effectively as MR James did in The Mezzotint; and it is, as you say, pretty bloody scary.

I guess there have been a few "new technology" horror and horror-adjacent films - Host, Unfriended, Countdown - but nothing to touch Ring, or indeed The Signalman. Odd.

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Yes, you're right: video tape + telly.

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