Cursed
After getting an unexpected email attachment, Aleks Krotoski traces the origin of an iconic internet curse - Smile Dog.
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鈥檛 a phishing account masquerading as a friend, it doesn鈥檛 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鈥� dog鈥� smiling. A smiling dog, with human teeth.
Now the dog haunts your dreams, with it鈥檚 terrible human but inhuman smile, promising to leave you be if only you鈥檇 鈥榮pread the word鈥�.
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.
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Erika Kvistad

Erika Kvistad is a literature and media scholar working on digital horror narratives. Her previous publications in this area include work on haunted spaces on the internet, Gothic interactive fiction games, and horror webcomics, and her most recent work is on the early-2000s horror hoax YouTube series In the Dark. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway
She reveals the origins of Cursed Content online, and how they are designed to stick with us by tapping into our deep set, subconscious fears.
Line Henriksen

Line Henriksen is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Malm枚 University, Sweden. She is the author of the monograph In the Company of Ghosts: Hauntology, Ethics, Digital Monsters (2016), and co-author of the forthcoming book Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters: Ethical Co-Existence in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge 2024) together with Nina Lykke and Katja Aglert. Her research interests include monster theory, hauntology and creative writing as method.聽
She tell us how Smile Dog exposes the dark underbelly of the internet, and challenges Aleks on the ethical nature of sharing content that could infect, and consume people.
Michael Lutz

Michael Lutz is an academic and writer whose research focuses on the dialog between contemporary media theory and the long history of humanism. He is also a podcaster on the Ranged Touch network, where he regularly discusses everything from academic game studies to the complete works of Stephen King
He tells us how he created Smile Dog and spread it to the unsuspecting people of the internet, and how in following it鈥檚 evolution, he got an unexpected insight into the disintegration of the internet as we know it, as a more malevolent curse swept in to take it鈥檚 place.
Broadcast
- Mon 30 Oct 2023 16:30成人快手 Radio 4
Podcast
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The Digital Human
Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world