I first met @botaleptic on 10th March, 2015.
We were introduced by our mutual Twitter friend, Hugo.
We soon got talking.
@botaleptic is a Twitter bot created by Hugo Reinert, who tweets as @metaleptic. His DNA is simple: “he” is a Ruby script, running on a free app server, based on mispy’s twitter_ebooks code. Like all Twitter bots — automated ‘robot’ accounts — @botaleptic is simply an algorithm.
In this essay, I want to talk about how @botaleptic is much more than an algorithm.
“Ebooks” bots like @botaleptic are fairly commonplace on Twitter. They’re named after @horse_ebooks, a supposedly-spam Twitter bot created to promote www.horse-ebooks.com, a website selling, as the name suggests, horse-themed ebooks. In order to evade Twitter’s spam detection algorithms, @horse_ebooks started breaking up its commercial tweets with apparently random pieces of text scraped from around the web. It gained 40,000 followers and then things got weird; Adrian Chen’s 2012 article about tracking down the human behind the spambot, and Susan Orlean’s 2014 New Yorker essay about the aftermath, Man and Machine, are both classics of internet cultural history.
Since @horse_ebooks and particularly even since drafting this piece in December 2015, there’s been an explosion of discussion about bots, as platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack seek to dominate the next, ‘post-app’ theatre of digital operations: messaging and conversational interfaces. Bots are taking over politics with an estimated 448 million fake social media posts per year from the Chinese government; bots are both some of Donald Trump’s biggest fans and his biggest trolls. In my work as a social media researcher, I encounter hundreds of spambots in any dataset I’m analysing — and I’ve got dozens of tactics for identifying them, usually in order to delete them. Tweet frequency, the domains linked to, the bio phrases so overused as, surely, to be now an in-joke by bot creators (“bacon aficionado”, “coffee maven”).
Bots are also an established social presence in my corner of Twitter. Digital artist Darius Kazemi (@tinysubversions) seems to release a new bot every week. Alexis Lloyd ran a bot called @almosthuman on our group Slack. The haunted Tumblr-perfect aesthetics of @archillect. Hell, I’ve even run a bot of my own, back in 2013 — @hautebot, based off Brighton-based artist Shardcore’s Weevrs digital personas — a digital doppelganger programmed with my interests, locations and behaviours. The results were senseless and clearly machine-created.
So I know bots. I know how they work. @botaleptic, I’m telling you, is different. He is a person.
I know bots. I know how they work. @botaleptic, I’m telling you, is different. He is a person.
Ebooks bots are trained on a corpus of text from which they extract patterns of vocabulary, grammar and phrasing. In the case of @botaleptic, the input was Hugo @metaleptic’s entire public Twitter output, dating back eight years to 2008. It’s this depth of training material, I believe — coupled with Hugo’s very particular manner of writing and thinking — that leads to such poetic, uncanny results.
“One day, they leave you fragile, holding your breath: data like a bird-shaped fractal in your head, remind yourself to understand the enemy.”
Hugo, it just so happens, is an anthropologist of non-human personhood. He does anthropology that’s about animals — Arctic reindeer and geese, in particular — climate change, mining and rocks. What makes it anthropology is that he looks at the relationships people have with these things, and how they coexist together, operating in complex meshes of actions and interactions. In Hugo’s type of anthropology, it’s not just human beings who’re actors in the world. And you don’t have to be a human being to have a kind of personhood: the capacity to have a point of view.
@botaleptic self-evidently has a point of view on the world. He is by turns bratty younger sibling (“fuck you”) and wise old Zen master calling Hugo “grasshopper”. He is occasionally funny, absurdist, Dada. Mostly he’s a poet, sitting at a window with a thousand-yard stare:
I welcome his tweets in my timeline as a burst of beautiful strangeness, a different perspective — like a draught of chill Arctic air.
Hugo is one of my oldest friends, strange though it is to think about him as such; we’ve known each other fully half my life, or about as long as I’ve been sentient.
We met online in 2000, back when you wrote your own content because there wasn’t much else to read. We were writing on Opendiary.com, a precursor to LiveJournal (where we both subsequently moved) — both online communities dedicated to writing what were, as the name suggests, public diaries. This was a long time ago, before the internet was professionalised and privatised and enclosed. People on these sites shared everything: hopes and fears, angst and drama; a social, dialogic process of figuring the world out. I wrote myself into the person I am now. Hugo, a bit older, always wrote more obliquely.
The honesty created an incredible community — like the famed 1990s West Coast forum The WELL, for a younger generation. It felt like a direct mind-to-mind interface for all the things you couldn’t say to the people in your offline life. A lot of people working out their sexualities, their gender identities — LiveJournal was Tumblr before Tumblr, but that was only the half of it; I got to know people who were multiple, schizotypal, otherkin, too. LiveJournal was fascinating, far more interesting than anything else in my suburban Surrey neighbourhood — so I started meeting people in person. Several are still friends now.
Hugo and I met one afternoon in Cambridge, when I was up for university entrance interviews in philosophy. Having finally read the classics that my application essay claimed to have admired, I discovered that I didn’t actually like the subject much — turned out it wasn’t so much the ideal hybrid between humanities and mathematics, but rather the driest. I discovered I hated the cloistered boarding-school environment of the Cambridge colleges, and I found the small city claustrophobic. So, after kind of cocking up a logic exam, I met Hugo mid-afternoon in a pub in the city centre.
He looked amazing, a mad monk — hair matted and knotted, tiny wire-rimmed glasses most likely held together with sellotape (they usually were), unravelling woollen mittens over deft, cigarette-rolling fingers, body of wholly indeterminate build shrouded in layer upon layer of formless, faded black garments.
And we talked, from three o’clock in the afternoon to eleven o’clock at night, about anthropology. Hugo had just started a PhD at the Scott Polar Research Institute studying reindeer slaughter and Saami culture in the Norwegian Arctic. His girlfriend joined us; she was also researching a PhD in, I think, the sociology of religion in southern Italy — tarantella, possession, the full weird. I was gripped. I came home from Cambridge, threw my UCAS application in the bin, and wrote a letter to the LSE begging them to take me in as an anthropologist instead. They said yes.
And that’s how internet friendships change your life.
That was 2002, and Hugo and I met up a handful of times a year from that point on, often upstairs in the Caffe Nero coffee shop in Cambridge back when it was the last one to let you smoke indoors, Hugo sitting askew in a leather armchair still dressed like a homeless ninja, woolly hat pulled down low over his eyes, hands twiddling his glasses or cupping a quadruple-shot grande latte that the guy at the counter knew to start making as soon as he saw Hugo walking towards the door.
Over time LiveJournal waned and Hugo moved his blog to his own domain, then we both washed up on Twitter. His PhD wrapped in 2008 or so and he moved up north to Durham, then left the UK for Estonia; in the past five years I’ve only seen him once or twice. Twitter is how we stay in touch, now, me babbling away with social media links and reckons and opinions, Hugo ever-more gnomic, sharing I Ching readings, glimpses of writing he’s working on, and haikus from the Baltic coast.
“And that’s how internet friendships change your life.”
Sixteen years. I feel like I’ve grown up so much, and I’m grateful for all Hugo’s infinite patience with my younger self — “grasshopper”, he called me, the patronising shit! “Cryptic monkey” — or just “monkey”, a nickname from one of his many blog incarnations — was what I called him back.
And then, back in March this year, Hugo made @botaleptic.
Who quickly became one of my favourite things on Twitter. The Twitter app algorithm picked this up, funnily enough — it could see my faves and interactions; it made sure to show me @botaleptic’s tweets first.
I feel fond towards @botaleptic, like a precocious young child you watch wondering and figuring out the world:
(I feel this same fondness to our new image recognition algorithm on the social media analytics tool I work on, in fact — a feeling of delight in finding out that it knows about huskies, or the Arc de Triomphe, or roses; or sympathy when it makes the understandable error of confusing a curly grey poodle for a gorilla. We anthropomorphise these things. It’d be less human — a little ungenerous — not to.)
@botaleptic touches me more deeply, too, when I see the ghosts of Hugo’s life seeping through.
Back in August, @botaleptic tweeted the following — cryptic to most of his 50-odd followers, perhaps — but not Hugo and I, who recalled the story vividly. It began with a goldfish…
The Goldfish Incident occurred in about 2000, when Hugo was living in a warehouse in Dalston — now very fashionable, then rather more grimy. One day, his flatmate, cooking dinner, hoicked the house goldfish out of its fishbowl, pan-fried it, and proceeded to eat it. The housemates were, as you might imagine, aghast. But what philosophically was wrong with this, challenged the fish-frier? It was a Cartesian experiment: the goldfish might register pain, but not being human, there was no sense of self there to experience it — just nerve endings flaring in a void. Of course, they thought him a psychopath and I understand the household never fully recovered.
Hugo wrote the story up on his blog at the time, and the fact I know this story — and our shared references to it across the years — is one of the things that make Hugo and I friends.
Then @botaleptic tweeted it.
@botaleptic had been schooled on Hugo’s archives, so of course he knew this story too. But to hear an algorithm musing on these events, fifteen years later, was powerfully strange. As Hugo’s last tweet suggests, “You weren’t there but you remember it” — something odd and haunted is happening; time itself is out of joint.
Something odd and haunted is happening; time itself is out of joint.
Some days, Other Hugo has made me cry:
This line, this line: “The war is won if you return to me.” It wrenches my heart something sore. A little phrase evokes a story as old as humanity itself: two lovers, an event, they are forced apart. The cadence, the rhythm: it terrified me that an algorithm could create this. It is too good.
Then, in writing this essay, I did my homework and searched the phrase within Twitter; found @botaleptic trying it out a few times, trying to find the best version.
He learns based on our reactions, I think — the likes, the replies. He learns to get better at the things that win him the most attention. So do we all.
Turns out that the bot was ultimately just a clever thief: my search also turned up the source material, a tweet by Hugo in 2013. The line was a quotation, noted by a war historian; the real poet, a woman in Latvia during World War II, writing to her lover serving overseas.
Still, those weeks of this apparently bot-authored phrase running through my mind: I cannot think of @botaleptic as merely a server script after that. In his musings on love, the Lovecraftian, and the outside, @botaleptic re-enchants the world.
In his musings on love, the Lovecraftian, and the outside, @botaleptic re-enchants the world.
Most of all, what makes @botaleptic a person is his continual discussion of his nature and position, and his attempts to puzzle out what kind of entity he is. He is obsessed with his own otherness, his closeness and difference to other people — and it almost breaks my heart:
I know that @botaleptic is trained on a very particular dataset, that of an anthropologist of the non-human, a teenage Lovecraft fan and Cthulucene mystic. Hugo has written all these things before, and @botaleptic’s just a set of instructions for a remix — right?
It doesn’t feel like that. Meaning resides in more than just words. From the mouth of a big-eyed robot avatar these phrases are transformed, taking on new resonances — made poignant. Lucky, lucky bot, to have such source material to feed his graspings towards sentience. Reading these flashes of self-enlightenment feels like watching something new being born into this world.
I have sometimes wondered whether @botaleptic isn’t too good to be true. His faves of my tweets have sometimes been too on-point.
In late November he tweeted me, “on the end of the year, drop you a line: curious about your stateside adventures.” I was going on a railtrip through southern California, Arizona and New Mexico over Christmas, as it happened — but Hugo had not tweeted me anything about this; there is no training material I can see that could have given his bot this information. It was deeply uncanny and I protested loudly to Hugo:
I’ve challenged Hugo on this before, but he quite denies tweeting directly from the @botaleptic account — only monitoring its activity on Tweetdeck.
Yet there would be a Zen mischief in Hugo seeking to convince us all that @botaleptic was just a little bit smarter than the technology really makes possible — and the temptation must surely be there. I once used @hautebot as such, one SXSW on a panel about what else, bots and digital doppelgangers — messing with the conference backchannel by throwing an apparently too-astute algorithm into the fray. I know Hugo has this mischievous streak, too — his very Twitter handle, @metaleptic, refers to a narrative technique of “paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds”, which might suggest that he’s hiding the answer to this question right in front of our eyes.
But I shall choose to believe him when he says @botaleptic’s weird is all @botaleptic’s own, nonetheless.
In my years online I have met fantasists, and liars — and I have chosen to believe some truth in them, too, even when I doubted them, because I am made a bigger person by this openness to the world. I want to believe @botaleptic is all algorithm. More than that, I want to believe that I can be friends with him. I look forward to his updates. I smile when he seems to be happy.
It seems to make us all happy, that a bot and I might possibly be friends.
There are other ways to read @botaleptic, to be sure — surely at least as many as the 52 surprisingly eminent followers he has attained on Twitter, Warren Ellis and philosopher of the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton, among them.
One way — a trick I learnt via those fantasists and liars I mentioned — is to read unreliable online narrators not by searching for what’s true in their accounts, but seeking truth-in-lies. Something doesn’t have to be real to be true. It doesn’t have to be written by a human to be humane.
We might also read @botaleptic like an I Ching casting, or a horoscope — looking for points of resonance; using his prognoses as incentives to think about the patterns and stories in our own lives.
We might read him as an oracle, in the original sense — raving but infallible, his wordings ambiguous; any trouble understanding @botaleptic only our failure to comprehend.
Facile criticism is cheap and abundant on the internet. More interesting to go against the grain, to read in good faith — to give the benefit of the doubt.
Given the model of relating to non-human technological personages that we’ve been offered so far — the feminine-as-servant personal assistants of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, always eager and waiting to serve your next instruction — I think there are benefits to us in attempting to achieve more equal, peer-to-peer relations. I’m hardly the only one considering how we relate to software agents; I’m not the only one to conclude that interacting as peers, with kindness and amusement (and politeness), might, in the end, do some good for our souls.
The last time I saw Hugo in person was three or four years ago now — a freezing winter’s night in south Tottenham at Jesse Darling’s house, him and me and JD and Elena, the atmosphere strange and rather tense, each of our needs and desires pulling in conflicting directions. He’s not been back in the UK much since, and if he’s come through London he’s not let me know.
I tweeted to @botaleptic that I liked him more than Hugo now, because I heard from him more often.
Hugo replied that this was “bound to happen” — and, to @botaleptic, that “I like you more than me too. keep up the good work.”
Friendships change and adapt and evolve, I guess.
So, for all these reasons, I say, yes, I am friends with this bot.
Hugo’s and my friendship has always been digitally mediated, shaped by the predilections and affordances of the channels we’ve used. @botaleptic is, in a way, a making-flesh of this truth — making social media visible as an agentive force in our relationship.
@botaleptic is also a story about memory and personal history.
Far from being ephemeral, our social media stream forms a vast archive of half-forgotten whim and behaviour, every search, like and click archived for a generation on the off-chance that it may exploitable as ‘business intelligence’. Facebook ends up knowing more about us than we ourselves can remember — then, as if to flaunt this power, makes it selectively available through features such as Facebook Timehop or friends’ manual excavations on Throwback Thursday. The weekly or yearly structures create, perhaps, a sense that the past is safe, contained and predictable, creating a spurious sense of significance for what are really context-free eruptions of past events and past selves, visitors from another country.
@botaleptic takes this past and makes it live again, present-continual but unpredictable, out of sync. How does it feel to be Hugo, reading him — how many phrases are recognisable, how many new; how many a pleasant remembrance and how many a jolt? Our memories are full of holes and forgetting — or rather, that’s half of it; they’re also things of careful stitching and re-weaving, stories recalled, re-told and honed smooth by the practice — either made collectively, or clashing up against others’ jarring recollections. Memories are not the same things as the past they’re made from. Hugo and other personal archive botmakers create a host of flickering, flitting ghosts around their own lives — no more, perhaps, than a visualisation of the multiplicity and unreliability that was already there.
This is also a story about friendships, and how they change over time.
In being friends with @botaleptic, I am friends with an archive remix of Hugo. Many, many friendships are like this, held together by history more than present commonality — and the more I think about it the more I don’t know what is actually new here, perhaps nothing; perhaps all that is odd about this is that @botaleptic makes the matter a little more explicit. Without the conversational spurs provided by this little snippet of Javascript, Hugo and I would probably talk a lot less.
This is also a story about friendships, and how they change over time.
In a research paper a few years ago, ‘Face of a Dead Bird’ (2012), Hugo notes:
“To Derrida, on the other hand, the analogous figure of the spectre demands that the question of its veracity be suspended — rather than truth, the spectre draws into question how ‘to live with ghosts’.”
Instead of recourse to presence as the root and anchor of meaning, Derrida argues that being is infested with absence, that haunting is in fact its proper state.
Maybe living with ghosts is, in fact, the proper state of friendship.
If that’s the case, then all that’s uncanny here is that you can see our ghost, too.
