bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Track 7 - Recap/1-recap.md

Title: Recap of the different tracks
Slug: 06-s7-step-1
Date: 2020-11-01 12:03
Summary: Here we look at an overview of what we have been discussing in this module.

These different tracks have intersected, overlapped and sometimes diverted from one another, taking us along multiple roads that were looking at:

* the potential of infrapunctures to address harms caused by digital infrastructures,
* the differences between digital infrastructures, computational infrastructures and platforms and what kind of friction that brings forward,
* how we can start understanding harms around, within and through computational infrastructures,
* bots as infrastructural embodiment,
* examples of bots as possible infrapunctures,
* the proposed term *bot logic* in relation to platform logic,
* bot behaviours,

and two ways to engage with bot logic by writing a fictional scripted dialogue and diving deeper into their materiality by running a simple bot code template which toots on botsin.space.

While this short module is not a programming lesson, a tutorial, or a set of methodologies to understand the possibilities of bots as infrapunctures, we hope that it can point towards a few ways in which bots either support or challenge the relations and interaction that a digital infrastructure makes possible.

Throughout this module we have tried to trace multiple forms of bot making and thinking with as kinds of intervention within a digital infrastructure.

As they do not require to function within server-side conditions and can be run using personal resources, bots create potential for users to express agency within the infrastructure's affordances and possibly even relations between the human and nonhuman actors present.

Bots are of course not a solution to computationally generated harm, nor are they able to repair infrastructures. Let's take for example the dependency of bots on APIs. While there is possibility to run a bot without using the API of an infrastructure, in order to have access to different functionalities than users, most bots will engage with it. It follows that with a change in an infrastructure's internal policy, the bots can easily be rejected. One example of this is the Twitter bot purge from 2018.

Nonetheless, bots enable certain possibilities to get to know and engage with an infrastructure's material, political and social aspects. Bots are prototypes as arguments, pointing towards ways in which infrastructures could be different. And perhaps this rhetorical quality may lead to a bigger impact.