The Mound - #17 - Robots Win the Internet
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In perhaps the most 80s turn of events ever recorded, John Farnham is under attack! From robots!
It was to be expected, no doubt, that in gifting his 1986 smash-hit You’re the Voice to the Yes campaign, John would receive some online abuse from Australia’s Nay-sayers. That a great many of these digital Nuh-Uhs are coming from a network of inauthentic X accounts, though, is slightly more interesting.
From whence the network came we cannot say; it was only thanks to another bot - a good bot - that the inauthenticity of the swarm was made known to us. This good bot, built by a group called Internet 2.0, works by assessing an account’s activity and then giving it a score between 0 and 100, with a zero indicating very human and a one-hundred indicating your mother-in-law!
Sorry.
This Good Bot (they call it 5th Column, I call him Astro Boy) is at this moment our last line of defence against these nefarious producers of (dis)content - the likes of whom we first met during the 2016 Presidential election, when Russian “hackers” were shown to be publishing inflammatory content across the Meta-verse and beyond - crudely produced but nevertheless effective online assets, all designed with the express purpose of starting fights: cartoons of Bernie Sanders in a bikini, fake and racist pronouncements from Trump, photos of your mother-in-law!
Sticks and stones will break my bones but your words will never hurt me.
Whoever coined this phrase clearly never envisaged such a terrifying future for us all - a world in which words could hurt us, had hurt us, and robots now set the tone for our political discourse. A world in which I, at any moment, might be gut-punched by Astro Boy for ending an email with Regards.
Well, before we say that’s enough internet for one civilisation, we’d best do our best to save the world of online debate - and to show these bots who’s boss.
Here’s how we fix it:
The issue with these bots is not that they exist - or even that they’re mean. They are in truth no different to their human counterparts, to the unending sea of political commentators seeking views and ad dollars at the cost of any actual, honest-to-god debate. And even they are nothing new. Not since before 1968, when Vidal and Buckley practically birthed the modern “debate”, have we really seen two normal, well-adjusted and yet politically-opposed people publicly question each others’ views without it all devolving into a circus of sorts.
And that’s why these bots are really such wonderful news. For the longest time we’ve had to watch real, genuine human beings with real, genuine feelings battle each other in debate, And, like late Romans, we’ve been too focused on the gladiators in the ring below us to notice the crumbling of the empire around us. But now we’ve the chance, finally, to remove our fellow man from the varied rings of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the YouTube comments section - we can leave it all to the bots. We could even set up a new platform made exclusively for enraging bots to battle each other for internet supremacy and, of course, our entertainment. WWE-style, we’d design these bots to develop stranger and stranger views, quirky affects, their own calling cards and finishing moves.
For the first time in history any human could look to their left, to their right and see no difference, for we’d have finally taken our rightful place in this universe - as the aggressively and devoutly drunk followers of a game too dumb to explain, too fun to quit.
You’re welcome, Australia.
