Description
Emails from friends should be safe. From a trusted friend especially. Hey, Aleks, check out this cool attachment. The message is a bit brief, sure, but you check that it isn’t a phishing account masquerading as a friend, it doesn’t seem like a hack. And the image, Smile.JPG, sounds like it might be something silly but cute. So ok, you open it up.
And you see… dog… smiling. A smiling dog, with human teeth.
Now the dog haunts your dreams, with it’s terrible human but inhuman smile, promising to leave you be if only you’d ‘spread the word’.
For this Halloween Aleks traces the origin of curses in the online world, discovering what Smile Dog reveals about our subconscious fears, our own culpability in sharing anything and everything online, and how the evolution, and disintegration, of this iconic curse sheds light onto something deeper - the rot of the internet itself, and the possibility that we may all now exist within a cursed internet.
The Digital Human is pausing to focus on what everyone's talking about - AI. Join Aleks and her co-host Kevin Fong for The Artifical Human from BBC Radio 4, listen on BBC Sounds.
Published 02/19/24
‘I asked myself this very question after a family member was affected by dementia. In her later years, the only person my grandmother still remembered was her husband – but he had passed away several years earlier. She asked about him every morning and finding out that he had died always upset...
Published 11/13/23