What “What Would I Say?” Says About You
On The Pleasure of Turning Yourself into a Bot
“Whether you follow them or not, Twitter bots persevere, infusing one of our era’s great time-wasters with absurdity, serendipity, and chilling reminders of omnipresent surveillance. Twitter bots represent an open-access laboratory for creative programming, where good techniques can be adapted and bad ones can form the compost for newer, better ideas. At a time when even our most glancing online activities are processed into marketing by for-profit bots in the shadows, Twitter bots foreground the influence of automation on modern life, and they demystify it somewhat in the process. Sometimes I wonder how much longer Twitter will tolerate bots’ generative graffiti, especially as the company rushes to justify its I.P.O. with generative revenue dollars.” — from Rob Dubbin’s “The Rise of Twitter Bots”
Users of Twitter are of course very familiar with bots, and the humorousness of seeing your favorite writers, philosophers, or musicians turned into a stream of non sequiturs sprinkled delightfully through your timeline of real people’s snarky jokes, humble brags, and first-world problems. To take, say, a random line from the work of Deleuze and Guattari—e.g., “Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of smooth spaces?”—and either post it as is, or even add to it a comical follow-up—e.g., ”Kick it up a notch!”—is to both engage in a bit of surrealism not unlike that of William Burroughs’ “cut-up method,” and to use a tool of mockery not unlike that of Alan Sokal.
On the one hand these bots allow us to see worlds that we would not otherwise engage in, like an opera singer suddenly bursting into song while shopping for groceries, affording us a taste of a possible source of pleasure we had not (or perhaps even could not have) known before. A bot can thus function like an all-you-can-eat buffet of insights, absurdities, and lyricisms to ponder, enjoy, or glance at without the pain of having to actually read a whole book or sit through an entire opera. On the other hand these bots allow us to not only see such worlds that exist beyond our everyday lives, but allow us to feel comforted by, rather than ashamed of, their alienness since they are so obviously ripe for derisive laughter when removed from their natural habitats. A bot can thus also function like a stand-up comic who went to grad school and then goes from town to town letting the audience hear some of the stupid BS that passes for “knowledge” and “wisdom” among those condescending Ivy League guys who think they’re better than everyone so you can laugh, yell “I knew it!,” then share this hiliarity at work the next day.
Now, with the arrival of the “What Would I Say?” Facebook App, you can turn yourself into a bot. After allowing it access to your Facebook account, you can generate status update after status update of non sequiturs produced from your own past status updates. You can then use these generated updates as actual Facebook status updates by clicking on the handy “Post to Facebook” button.
But why would we want to turn ourselves into bots? And why do we find this auto-botting so funny?
If, as I suggested earlier, the bot functions as a bit of surrealist poetry, then isn’t laughing at these statuses and sharing them with our friends actually engaging in a bit of humble-braggery? Presumably users of this app do not share every status generated, but instead generate and generate until one appears that is worthy of sharing, one that is, most likely, also worthy of the “OMG who knew I could be so funny?” that makes for a great humble brag. Furthermore, the inclusion of the #WWIS at the top of the page is an enticement to share your self-bottery with not only your friends and family, but with the Twitterverse. You contain multitudes (of nonsense about cats, Game of Thrones, and Obamacare), and the world needs to know. In other words, you are proud to be worthy of being botted.
Yet if, as I also suggested, the bot functions as a bit of inferiority-driven derision, as what Nietzsche would call “ressentiment,” then is the sharing of these statuses actually a form of self-criticism? Before you engaged with social media you were likely someone who, upon hearing of Facebook or Twitter—or, if you are of my generation, of MySpace or Friendster—made fun of whoever suggested you join and pointed out that you didn’t care what celebrities ate for breakfast or in telling others what you were eating either. Nonetheless here you are, posting about what you think is funny, stupid, important, tasty, worth seeing, skipping, hearing. But, and here’s the key, that initial hatred and loathing of the idea of doing such things has not gone away. If anything, like Macbeth, having “in blood, stepped in so far” you now realize that “should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” WWIS is thus the latest vehicle of self-hatred, the newest way to yell at yourself in the mirror for being a fat pig while you eat an entire slice of chocolate cake by yourself. In other words, you are disgusted that you believe that you are worthy of being botted.
So what does “What Would I Say?” say about you? It says that to err is human, but to mash up your errors and share them with the world is divine.
