Bot Puppets

In the 2016 election, bots were busily posting and reposting weird memes to people who confused cynicism with sophistication, people who found credible claims like, "the Pope endorses Trump!" and "Clinton has used the Clinton Foundation to make Millions!" Millions of bots on Facebook and Twitter were busily forwarding fake news to gullible users who still didn't understand that a brand new site labeled "TrumpWillMakeAGreatPresident.com" or "MelaniaWillBeAMoreBeautifulFirstLadyThanBill.com"  is less likely to be offering objective news than the New York Times. Given they had already believed that the New York Times and other "mainstream media" sites were not to be believed, they actually found this put up overnight sites more credible than the mainstream media that still practiced journalism according to standards that predated the internet.

These bots were particularly busy swaying what the social media algorithms had identified as "soft Clinton" supporters. While they couldn't hope to win many black voters in Philadelphia over to Trump, they could feed rumors to voters likely to vote Clinton and thus convince them there wasn't enough difference between Clinton and Trump to justify voting. Just getting Clinton voters to stay home was enough to tip the election in the three states that gave Trump the national victory while only giving him the edge of 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It was as if someone had concluded that a car salesman and a car thief were no different but it worked.

My elderly mother was having trouble with her computer during the election. After a lot of finagling I got her back online and signed into her Facebook account. This was either late October or early November.  I was aghast at the sheer volume of "news" articles posted to her Facebook feed. Obviously bogus news sites that looked credible to her were decrying Michelle Obama's lack of fashion sense and lauding Melania, showing Trump's promise to restore America or Hillary in an angry face. I honestly scrolled through about 50 of these posts while seeing only a couple of personal posts from her friends or family. And each post seemed to be from yet another fabricated site. It was absurd.

I don't know how many people will ever admit they were swayed by bots. It's not flattering to be duped by computer code. (Although I imagine that by 2017 we all have been at least once.)

My term for the folks who were swayed by bots? Either to believe that Trump somehow cared for them or that Hillary was just as bad? Bot puppets.

If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you to incorporate the term into your daily vocabulary. Here is how you use it.

"Oh don't be just a bot puppet Justin. You've got to be smarter than three lines of code. Your argument doesn't even make sense."

"Did you just forward that argument from a bot? What are you, a bot puppet now? Just doing whatever the computers tell you? Think for yourself Justin."

"Well, Shelley is such a bot puppet that she doesn't know the difference between nytimes.com and notyourtime.com. Seriously, that woman will forward anything from anywhere as long as it blames Bill Clinton for whatever she's upset about today."

The goal is to make it shameful to rely on memes to do your thinking, to make bot puppet have all the stigma of racist.

Wait. That might not be enough to sway some of Trump's base that it's a bad thing to be a bot puppet.

The Universal Digital Port - the next killer app

Years back, I remember reading about a couple of sisters who were trying to get their older mother to use the Internet.

"It's great, mom. Here look," they said, pointing her to a search engine. "You can ask it anything you want."

"Oh, I don't know," their mother said hesitantly.

"Come on. Ask a question."

"Okay. Ask, How is Aunt Helen doing?"

Of course, in this stage of the Internet before social networking sites, this was quite funny. But now, given that Aunt Helen might well have a Facebook account, this is a perfectly valid question and one that could be answered in Aunt Helen's latest status comment.

Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg the world's youngest billionaire when it became the latest killer app. Social networking sites followed on the heels of search engines and online news and online stores and email as the Internet application that changed lifestyles and created billions in wealth.

The more an application personalizes the vast amount of information on the Internet, the more value it creates for users and the entrepreneur who creates it.

I think that the next killer app is the universal digital port - the one place you go for a prioritized look at everything you care about - from Aunt Helen's health to Albert Pujols' latest game stats to the email from your client to the YouTube video that is going to become your favorite movie for all time - or at least for this week.

Right now you have to toggle through a couple of email in boxes, look at a few news sites, check in on one (or two or three or ...) social networking sites. And as the digitization of all things is complete - from TV shows to your phone calls and everything in between - the real value will come from a personal google that filters and prioritizes everything that competes for your time.

People will have to train this - just as they would a pet. And they will train it mostly by the choices they make. And the universal digital port is trained, you could even set it up to filter things you would not choose in the moment. It might limit you to 15 minutes of YouTube or Facebook a day but give you unlimited access to your e-textbooks for your classes. It might even seize up and give you no new digital data until the heart monitor you wear lets it know that you have engaged in 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.

It is well known that our long term aspirations are inevitably loftier than our short term choices. We want to be trim but we choose the ice cream over the evening jog. We want to learn French but we watch a rerun of Star Trek instead. A universal digital port might make it harder for us to putz around and easier to improve ourselves.

But ultimately, the game of life in a digital world is a zero sum game. If we watch the movie we don't call our mom. If we work on the presentation, we don't work on our back stroke in the pool. It might be that the next killer app doesn't just make it easier for us to access what matters to us but - by juxtaposing it against everything else that matters - makes us more aware of the opportunity costs involved in each action. And that might do as much to change lifestyles as anything the Internet has yet done.