Imaginative Autonomy in the

Automated Economy:
Twitter Bots, Creative Distance,
and the Algorithmic Contours of
Media Form
Adam Haley
@noendofneon | noendofneon.net

from a great height

up here, down there

distance and proximity

"Usually, a revolution is about to happen and it

announces itself with a 'roar'. The Algorithmic
Revolution has already happened, and, despite
remaining largely unnoticed, it has been all the
more effective. There is, namely, no longer any
area of our social and cultural life that is not
penetrated by algorithms: Cameras, cars, planes,
ships, household appliances, hospitals, banks,
factories, shopping malls, traffic, architecture,
literature, art, music. The Algorithmic Revolution
began around 1930 in science, around 1960 in art.
Peter Weibel

"Types of machines are easily matched with each type

of societynot that machines are determining, but
because they express those social forms capable of
generating them and using them. The old societies of
sovereignty made use of simple machineslevers, pulleys,
clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped
themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive
danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the
societies of control operate with machines of a third
type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and
whose active one is piracy and the introduction of
viruses. This technological evolution must be, even
more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism . . .
Gilles Deleuze

@HomeworkCopia (by @oncomouse)

@AmiriteBot (by @tinysubversions)

@TwoHeadlines (by @tinysubversions)

@TwoHeadlines (by @tinysubversions)

@TwoHeadlines (by @tinysubversions)

I did not set out to write a bot that writes near-future

late-capitalist dystopian microfiction. I set out to
write a bot that automates a particular kind of joke.
But if we pause to consider the bots algorithm, its
obvious where this tendency toward a very specific
fiction genre originates.
Googles algorithm tends to favor named entities
over abstract concepts. What this means is that the
subject of the news, as Google sees it, is almost always
a corporation, a sports team, a celebrity, a nation, or a
brand.

My algorithm builds its jokes by harvesting these

subjects that Google has picked, and swapping
them indiscriminately between headlines.
What is near-future late-capitalist dystopian fiction
but a world where there is no discernible
difference between corporations, nations, sports
teams, brands, and celebrities?
Darius Kazemi

serendipity, intentionality, creative distance

"your last question, about what it means to give a

computer the ability to express itself i dont quite
think of it that way. im giving the computer the ability
to express a parameter set that ive laid out for it that
includes a ton of randomness. its not entirely
expressing me but its not expressing itself either.
some of the parameter space is unknown to me
because i am too dumb and/or lazy but thats also
where some of the surprise and serendipity comes
from.
Beau Gunderson

"One thing I like about Magic Realism Bot is that it

showswell, sometimes, anywaythat machines can
actually produce content that not only merely mimics
human creativity in a somewhat clunky way, but
actually writes new types of ideas that humans
wouldnt necessarily have thought of. I notice this
sometimes happens when the bot writes stories that include
abstract concepts placed into a context where youd usually
expect concrete things. It also happens in stories which are
about something being constituted by something else
there was one recently about lightning bolts made of
cockroaches which wigged a lot of people out.
Chris Rodley

"What I hadnt realized in ten or twelve years of using regular

expressions is that they also can be turned on their head. You can
use a regular expression as a generative tool. There are tools out
there where you can put in a regular expression that might say
If you wrote a regular expression that said find every instance of
two vowels adjacent to one another you could also feed it into a
machine that says given the rule two vowels adjacent to one
another generate every string of characters that validates that
rule. and then it would spit out a few hundred vowel pairs for
you. You could get weirder than that. You can feed in sets of
syllables and you could have it generate whole new
languages and that sort of thing based on this tool that is
normally used for analysis and decomposition n and taking
things apart. You can turn it on its head and make it into
something generative.
Darius Kazemi

Thanks!

Adam Haley
@noendofneon | noendofneon.net