The Point of Collection

The conceptual, practical, and ethical issues surrounding “big data” and data in general begin at the very moment of data collection. Particularly when the data concern people, not enough attention is paid to the realities entangled within that significant moment and spreading out from…

What is the Value of a Bot?

Bots are tools, designed by people and organizations to automate processes and enable them to do something technically, socially, politically, or economically.

Most of the bots that I have built have been in the pursuit of laziness. I have built bots to…

The Case for Precise Outrage

Mechanisms matter in technology criticism.

Hostile Architecture — Electronic Monitoring

Enforcement of public safety and order is sometimes less…

Bots: A definition and some historical threads

I am a poet and artist, and I make Twitter bots. The term “bot” encompasses many different kinds of software agents, from conversation simulators like Eliza, to programs that write stories about sports events without human intervention, to…

Our friends, the bots?

In the past, the bots I’ve made have primarily been a tool for exploring systems and culture. I feed the bot data or…

Rise of the Peñabots

Shortly after the start of his campaign during the 2012 Mexican presidential election, then-candidate Enrique Peña Nieto…