{"id":17071,"date":"2013-09-25T14:05:24","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T18:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17071"},"modified":"2013-09-25T17:19:01","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T21:19:01","slug":"of-bots-and-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/09\/25\/of-bots-and-humans\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Bots And Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"he1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

what\u2019s a bot and what\u2019s human and where do we draw the line and should we draw that line<\/p>\n

Yesterday, we learned that the most infamous Weird Twitter account, @Horse_ebooks<\/a>, wasn\u2019t a algorithmically-programmed \u201cbot\u201d but instead the product of a person tweeting as if. The revelation was accompanied by a live performance of the account in a Manhattan art gallery. While much is being written about the account, I\u2019d like to share one thought about the live performance and what this all says about what is real and virtual, \u201cbot\u201d and human. In one day, @Horse_ebooks went from bot to human, and as I\u2019ll argue, embodied in an art gallery, right back towards bot.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll defer to the many other pieces about the history of @Horse_ebooks and the deeply emotional reactions people are having after learning things aren’t as bot as they seem. In fact, my favorite explanation for this came from Sarah just this morning on this blog<\/a>, arguing that when horse was a bot, we<\/i> got to supply the meaning, that made us feel good, and when the noise turned out to be signal, we lost our the credit for creating the signal. But let\u2019s also bring the live-performance into this discussion, and I think it complicates things a bit in an interesting way.<\/p>\n

The first step was revealing that the bot was human. Of course, a bot is always partially human, programmed by a person with a body and feelings and politics and standpoint and interests which is dumped into a world where it is (mis)understood by other humans. But a bot is very differently human because what it produces can diverge greatly from the human intentionality behind it. This massive difference in degree becomes, for practical reasons, a difference in type; bots aren\u2019t devoid of humanity, but they are still very different, and that\u2019s why the revelation that @Horse_ebooks wasn\u2019t <\/i>that different matters so much to people. So, yes, the technical is always deeply human<\/a>, but the live-reading yesterday made the reverse point, that which is normally described as human is also deeply technical, virtual. Things like social norms, language, identities are technologies. Standing in the gallery watching the reading yesterday was to me an effort to make @Horse_ebooks algorithmic again.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the fun of the Twitter account performance piece was that it queered the machine\/human line by passing a sort-of reverse Turing Test<\/a>, the live-reading of @Horse_ebooks played with that line in a different way. It was an intentional failing at the traditional Turing Test by purposefully taking that which is human and perform it as bot.<\/p>\n

My critique of digital dualism<\/a> is not just that what we call \u201cvirtual\u201d is very real but also what we call \u201creal\u201d is also always highly virtual. The art gallery is a good example: The idea of a gallery is to create a tool premised on delineating what is and isn\u2019t art, an architecture that deeply structures our actions, the intense performativity of us-actors in that space all create a highly simulated environment.<\/p>\n