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@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ Summary: What type of bots are being made?
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Having just unfolded what infrastructural harms could be, we now move to exploring bots. When we say bots, we refer to software applications that automatise certain tasks and can run autonomously or semi-autonomously. Some of the most popular examples include voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri, but they can also be web crawlers indexing the web or even bots maintaining Wikipedia.
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Bots are an interface between digital infrastructures and human users. They are automated scripts that fulfil specific tasks which do not require expensive equipment to be able to be run.
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Bots are an interface between digital infrastructures and human users. They are automated scripts that fulfil specific tasks. They also do not require expensive equipment to be able to be run, which means that amateur as well as experienced programmers are able to build them and deploy them.
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Andreas Hepp terms *communicative robots*[^hepp] as "autonomously operating systems designed for the purpose of quasi-communication with human beings to enable further algorithmic-based functionalities – often but not always on the basis of artificial intelligence" (1410).
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@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ In this track, we will introduce Andreas Hepp, professor of media and communicat
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<br>
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# Footnotes
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# Footnoteswhich
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[^platin]: Plantin, Jean-Cristophe. Lagoze, Carl. Edwards, Paul N. Sandvig, Christian. "Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook" *New Media and Society* Volume 20 (2016): 293-310. <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816661553>
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@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ Slug: 01-s4-introduction
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Date: 2020-11-01 12:00
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Summary: Bots as computational infrapunctures.
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*Infrapuncture* is a helpful term at a time when there is a lot of discussion around the political roles of bots in communication platforms, e.g. their undue influence in political elections. Making a bot can be a way to probe and understand potential forms of interventions, create new imaginaries or attempt to deflate existing hegemonic structures.
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*Infrapuncture* is a helpful term at a time when there is a lot of discussion around the political roles of bots in communication platforms, e.g. their undue influence in political elections or bots which are created in order to harass activists. Making a bot can be a way to probe and understand potential forms of interventions, create new imaginaries or attempt to deflate existing hegemonic structures.
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Bots rely on the technical restrictions and possibilities of interaction defined by the infrastructure on which they are operating. In order to run a bot, a technical understanding of this infrastructure is therefore required. The API (Application Programming Interface) is an important entry point here. This technical framework provides a programming interface to communicate with a system. The API can be understood as a set of agreements that is designed by the engineers of an infrastructure for two applications to communicate with one another, which eventually defines the technical imaginary of a platform. (*We dive a bit deeper into API's in track 6, [click here](/02-s6-step-2.html#APIs) to go there directly.*)
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@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Date: 2020-11-01 12:02
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Summary: *Bot logic* disperses, fragments, develops intimate knowledge & encourages new habit formation.
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*Bot logic* refers to the situational effect of bots upon a socio-technical ecology and their potential to infiltrate and co-exist with server-side conditions. We propose the term *bot logic* in response to *platform logic*, which Jonas Andersson Schwarz describes as
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*Bot logic* refers to the situational effect of bots upon a socio-technical ecology and their potential to infiltrate and co-exist with server-side conditions. We propose the term *bot logic* in response to *platform logic*. Jonas Andersson Schwarz describes platform logic as:
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> the interplay between different mechanics inherent to digital platforms, found on different conceptual and topological levels: micro, meso, and macro. It is a way to simultaneously acknowledge the technical capacity of unyielding local control and its consequential concentrations of global dominance by a handful of corporate actors[^platformlogic].
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@ -16,21 +16,21 @@ To unpack the term *bot logic* further, we will explore four differences between
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----------
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* Where platform logic accumulates, *bot logic* disperses
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* Where *platform logic* accumulates, *bot logic* disperses
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On commercial digital infrastructures, the engagement of users creates economic value that is translated through data capture and organisation. Data is extracted from users and used to calculate relevance, make recommendations and target users for advertisements. While bots can and do support this economy, they can also undermine it. In the case of buying bot followers, for instance, this can be a means to generate noise in the collected dataset and blur the perception of the user as a set of behaviours that the platform makes available.
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* Where platform logic centralises, *bot logic* fragments
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* Where *platform logic* centralises, *bot logic* fragments
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Platforms such as Twitter or Facebook are built as centralized systems: the servers on which information is stored are owned by these companies. The servers are triggering the need for growing data center infrastructures throughout the world. Bots, on the other hand, do not require a lot of computational power in order to run. They can be simply executed from the computers of the bot makers themselves. In fact, bots really point to the materiality of the systems on which they run, as researcher Stuart Geiger points out when he talks about *bespoke code*:
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> [code that] runs on top of or alongside existing systems instead of being more directly integrated into and run on software-side codebases[^geiger].
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* Where platform logic creates distance between user and infrastructure, *bot logic* develops an intimate knowledge of the platform
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* Where *platform logic* creates distance between user and infrastructure, *bot logic* develops an intimate knowledge of the platform
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If we consider means of communication as means of production[^means], there is a process of alienation that happens on commercial centralised platforms, where the user has no stake in the development of the material conditions of the platform on which they interact and communicate. From this perspective, the making of bots implies a closeness to the platform that is indicated through the understanding of both the sociological and technical systems that determine the usership of a platform. In order to write a bot, as mentioned before, you need to know what kind of actions are allowed and how the bot would be received by the community.
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* Where platform logic reinforces habitual behaviour, *bot logic* encourages new habit formation
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* Where *platform logic* reinforces habitual behaviour, *bot logic* encourages new habit formation
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If we think about a commercial platform as a structure or surface on which actions can take place, these actions are often predefined by the affordances of the platform. However, bots are the automation of certain actions and behaviours. To be able to define these behaviours, a user needs to be provided with the means to alternate the socialities of a platform.
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@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ It turned out that most edits made by these IP addresses were fixing punctuation
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**OCRbot**
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OCRbot[^ocr] is a bot made for Mastodon, which responds to users calling who call it. It is used to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on images containing text and it is an especially helpful feature for generated captions for vision impaired people. This example of a bot shows how users can alter the functionalities of a digital infrastructure through a bot. Where there is a lack in the Mastodon interface, this bot can be used to supplement it and in this way increase the accessibility of the site. The code for this bot is available of Github[^ocrcode].
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OCRbot[^ocr] is a bot made for Mastodon, which responds to users calling who call it. It is used to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on images containing text and it is an especially helpful feature for generated captions for vision impaired people. This example of a bot shows how users can alter the functionalities of a digital infrastructure through a bot. Where there is a lack in the Mastodon interface, bots can be used to supplement it and in this way increase the accessibility of the site. In this case however, most Mastodon interfaces already include a caption text box in the interface. Nonetheless the bot makes up for the failure of users to fill in the captions when adding an image to their posts. The code for this bot is available of Github[^ocrcode].
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# Footnotes
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@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Below some examples (although this is a non-exhaustive list).
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Of course, these action modes can also be executed by people.
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It is by no means surprising that many Twitter users are mistaken for bots, or that the term itself has attained a derogatory meaning. However, an interesting phenomenon can be observed on digital infrastructures such as Twitter, where human users have adopted a type of bot behaviour to create networks of dissent and to push activist counter-narratives.
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It is by no means surprising that many Twitter users are mistaken for bots, or that the term itself has attained a derogatory meaning. Human users might be called a bot as form of insult. However, an interesting phenomenon can be observed on digital infrastructures such as Twitter, where human users have adopted a type of bot behaviour to create networks of dissent and to push activist counter-narratives.
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Such a moment happened recently on Dutch Twitter. In response to the Black Lives Matter protests, extreme right wing politician Geert Wilders posted an image on Twitter on June 5th 2020 using the hashtag #ZwartePietMatters.[^zwartepiet] Following this post, a wave of fancam[^fanpic] users from the k-pop community flooded the hashtag with video recordings of their favourite k-pop stars, making the thread difficult to follow. Such practices are becoming a common phenomenon across the Twitterscape, where fancams are used not only for praising musicians, but instead for derailing and hijacking hashtags these users consider unacceptable.
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@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ We registered an account on botsin.space that can be used in this example script
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> This instance exists for people who want to run Mastodon bots, but you are welcome to join if you are a human. Both bots and humans are expected to follow this Code of Conduct. You can learn more about ways to support the costs of this instance.
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With this exercise the module will end. We would like to use this opportunity to send you off to another infrastructure, a community-led, public hosting service called *MyBinder*, where you are invited to work with the example script of a Mastodon bot.
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We would like to use this opportunity to send you off to another infrastructure, a community-led, public hosting service called *MyBinder*, where you are invited to work with the example script of a Mastodon bot.
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content/Track 7 - Recap/1-recap.md
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content/Track 7 - Recap/1-recap.md
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Title: Recap of what has happened until now
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Slug: 06-s7-step-1
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Date: 2020-11-01 12:03
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Summary: Overview of what we have been looking at
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These different tracks have intersected, overlapped and sometimes diverted from one another, taking us along multiple roads that were looking at
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* the potential of infrapunctures to address harms caused by digital infrastructures,
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* the differences between digital infrastructures, computational infrastructures and platforms and what kind of friction that brings forward,
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* how we can start understanding harms around, within and through computational infrastructures,
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* bots as infrastructural embodiment,
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* examples of bots as possible infrapunctures,
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* the proposed term *bot logic* in relation to platform logic,
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* bot behaviours
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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.
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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.
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Bots are of course not a solution to computationally generated harm, nor are they able to repair infrastructures, but they nonetheless enable certain possibilities to get to know and engage with their material, political and social aspects.
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Throughout this module we have tried to trace multiple forms of bot making and thinking with.
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Title: Bots as Digital Infrapunctures
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Slug: 05-s6-step-5
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Slug: 07-s7-step-2
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Date: 2020-11-01 12:05
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Summary: End of the module
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