I’m Johannah. On Twitter, I’m Johannah with eight Js, and I’m actu­al­ly not talk­ing that much about bots, [inaudi­ble] has an intu­itive sense of what they are and what makes them fun. So instead I’ll be talk­ing about how that relates to wacky inven­tions and wacky inven­tors, espe­cial­ly at the turn of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. Mostly I’ll be talk­ing about Rube Goldberg machines and also Heath Robinson machines, which are the British ver­sion. So here’s a quote:

The Goldberg inven­tions coun­tered the cor­po­rate imper­son­al­i­ty; they are the whim­si­cal solu­tions of an inde­pen­dent gad­geteer bent on assert­ing his right to dream.
Peter C Marzio, Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work

Paul Klee, ​“Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine)” (1922)

That remind­ed me a lot of you guys. Likewise, the ​“Twittering Machine” is actu­al­ly the name of a paint­ing by Paul Klee and the art crit­ic K. G. Pontus Hultén called these the ​“mod­ern machine” and also the ​“mock machine,” and said they’re machines that look like machines but accom­plish noth­ing. That is from the 1968 MoMA exhib­it ​“The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”

I’ll come back to this lat­er, but just to quick­ly run through what bots and Rube Goldberg machines share:

• They’re fun­ny.
• Justifies its exis­tence when it works, not because it’s solv­ing anything.
• Absurd, meant to be plau­si­ble but not real­is­tic. Mimesis is not a goal.
• Deliberately dumb com­pared to cut­ting edge technology.
• Popular while his­tor­i­cal­ly on precipice of machine-danger. (For Rube Goldberg that refers to the atom­ic bomb. For us I guess it’d prob­a­bly be AI, or drones, or I don’t know. Whatever you want.)
• And fix­at­ed on the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is an ani­mal (not a ghost) in the machine. (It’s com­pli­cat­ed, I’ll get to it later.)

This is a Rube Goldberg machine, in case you don’t know, and this is one of his ear­li­est machines. It’s called The Simple Mosquito Exterminator. You can see it’s com­pli­cat­ed, but mechan­i­cal and pur­pose­ful­ly not straight­for­ward and effi­cient. These Rube Goldberg car­toons start­ed in 1912, a dai­ly strip was added in ​’24 and con­tin­ued until ​’34. He con­tin­ued pro­duc­ing inven­tion car­toons until ​’64, and the inven­tor in the car­toons is called Professor Lucifer G. Butts. The ​“G” stands for Gorgonzola. ​“Rube Goldberg” did­n’t become an adjec­tive until ​’66.

Just to get an idea, this is a Heath Robinson con­trap­tion, again just the British equiv­a­lent. I’ve heard that there’s a Swedish equiv­a­lent as well. They were both work­ing [around] World War I, World War II. It was just in the air. 

Goldberg was very influ­en­tial. You can’t see because this is just a pic­ture I took of a book because I could­n’t find it online, but this is from Rube Goldberg’s liv­ing room. It includes the Gershwins, the Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, Jack Duncy, Fanny Brice, sev­er­al Ziegfield girls, and not in this pic­ture, but he was also real­ly real­ly good friends with Charlie Chaplin.

These machines are not like oth­er machines, and again at this point you should just imag­ine I’m also talk­ing about bots even though these spe­cif­ic quotes have to to with Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson machines. So

The essen­tial qual­i­ty of a Heath Robinson machine is that it has its own inex­orable inte­ri­or logic…When each time the machine shows that it works, it jus­ti­fies its own exis­tence, and the jobs of the huge num­bers of staff requires to oper­ate it. 

Maybe not huge num­bers of staff in bots’ case, but cer­tain­ly there’s a lot of staff going on behind com­put­ers, and every­body’s work­ing togeth­er. So in that sense there’s a huge staff.

And this is actu­al­ly about Duchamp:

By demon­i­cal­ly dis­trib­ut­ing com­plete clues of rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al decep­tion and an abstract pat­tern that is nev­er quite ​“abstract,” Duchamp makes sure that his refrac­to­ry pro­duc­tions frus­trate their own illu­sions of integri­ty by being nei­ther true nor false except to their own ratio­nale of divi­sive anamor­phism and self-reflexive plot.
Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., ​“Marcel Duchamp and the Machine” [PDF]

It means the same thing as [the pre­vi­ous quote].

The point being that this isn’t just some ran­dom thing about Rube Goldberg machines, it’s also about changes in art. It’s a broad pat­tern that hap­pens when­ev­er there’s a major tech­no­log­i­cal shift, at least for the last hun­dred years. You get these use­less machines that self-justify.

Again, they are total­ly inef­fi­cient. These are both Heath Robinson con­trap­tions. The one on the left is for pour­ing water on a cat, and the one on the right is for tak­ing a self­ie, so I thought you guys would appre­ci­ate that.

This is anoth­er Heath Robinson con­trap­tion, but I’m show­ing this to show how this is a response to the effi­cient machin­ery of World War II. This was for pour­ing hot water on German sol­diers, and as you can see it’s very inef­fi­cient, very low-tech.

Men around the depart­ment who have trou­ble puz­zling out some­thing in the blue­prints yell out after refer­ring in some man­ner to the Lord, the Devil, or Rube Goldberg…Some man may yell out, ​“This **oo**!!?! blue­print looks like some­thing Rube Goldberg made!” Or, ​“If Rube Goldberg were here, he could tell us how this engine goes together.”
Anonymous engi­neer from Detroit

One of the things that’s real­ly inter­est­ing about this phe­nom­e­non is it’s appro­pri­at­ed by big busi­ness, even though it seems to be resist­ing the ideas behind big busi­ness. This is a quote from an engi­neer in Detroit. The cen­sor­ing is in the quote, I did­n’t put it in there. That’s what those stars and Os are. They real­ly adopt­ed him as an icon, and just to give some back­ground of what was going on at the time, inven­tion around this time became cor­po­rate instead of indi­vid­ual. This was around 1920, as Bell Telephone, General Electric, and Westinghouse came to promi­nence, and Rube Goldberg said ​“with few excep­tions no sin­gle per­son can stand out as the inven­tor of any great mechan­i­cal appliance.” 

Also, Professor Lucifer G. Butts real­ly hat­ed big busi­ness, even though he was adopt­ed as an icon of it, and I’m quot­ing from Rube Goldberg’s biog­ra­phy from this guy Marzio. He says

Butts was an emo­tion­al guy who con­demned the big whole­sale lab­o­ra­to­ries for ignor­ing the inti­mate needs of the peo­ple. ​“The social demands are grow­ing more urgent and noth­ing is being done about them,” the Professor shout­ed one after­noon in 1928. One of Butts’ great­est machines was the self-destroying mem­o­ran­dum pad. As soon as some­one jots down a note, the pres­sure of the pen­cil squeezes a small accor­dion, which fright­ens a light­ning bug. As the bug flies up, it ignites a row of can­dles on the edges of the memo paper. The can­dles burn paper and the bug, still exhaust­ed from his flight, pants heav­i­ly and blows out the can­dle, leav­ing a fresh piece of white paper for the next nota­tion. According to Rube, Butts drew a plan for this device, but ​“rep­re­sen­ta­tives from white col­lar asso­ci­a­tions around the world hired crooks to steal Butts’ only copy.” 

So, Butts and big busi­ness were ene­mies in this mythol­o­gy even though big busi­ness adopt­ed him as an icon.

The machines are delib­er­ate­ly dumb. That’s an ad from the ​“Ideal Home” exhi­bi­tion in ​’34, which is a British fair. Heath Robinson cre­at­ed a full-scale home called the Gadget Family for the 1934 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, where it stood phys­i­cal­ly oppo­site the mod­ern stain­less steel Staybright City, and Daily Mail wrote

At the heart of the exhi­bi­tion, set where it could poke a bad­ger­ing kind of fun at the exhi­bi­tions of inven­tions the world has ever seen before the Heath Robinson house turns the creak­ing wheels of its wood and spring machin­ery, yet like every­thing else in Olympia the grotesque satire on an ide­al home works perfectly. 

So again, even at the time these were thought of as low-tech and stu­pid or dumb machines, sort of like how bots are not meant to be real­is­tic AI and they’re sup­posed to sound flat or stu­pid or whatever.

Also, they are not at all oppres­sive. This is a still from Modern Times; that’s Charlie Chaplin at the feed­ing machine. Machinery obvi­ous­ly has the capac­i­ty to be very fright­en­ing, but Rube Goldberg machines are fun, and break­fast actu­al­ly is a theme of Rube Goldberg machines.

On the left that’s a Heath Robinson pancake-making machine, and on the right that’s a still from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I can think of a bil­lion exam­ples of the break­fast machine. It’s a huge trope pre-dating the 20^th cen­tu­ry even, and I think it’s an exam­ple of some­thing that’s very fun. Bot cul­ture is sim­i­lar­ly fun. I don’t think there’s a break­fast equiv­a­lent, but I thought that was a cool trope to point out.

It also reminds me of bot cul­ture’s love of school­marmish apho­risms. I think that’s maybe a way that you can com­pare the oppres­sive­ness of mechan­i­cal machines from the Rube Goldberg era to the oppres­sive­ness of text on the Internet con­stant­ly advis­ing you, the oppres­sive­ness of intel­li­gence, whatever.

This one I haven’t real­ly ful­ly worked out yet. We can talk about it lat­er or on Twitter. Something that’s real­ly inter­est­ing to me is obvi­ous­ly a lot of bots have a feel­ing of there being a ghost in the machine. But a lot of them don’t feel like there’s a ghost in the machine, they feel like—you get para­noid that there’s an actu­al per­son there and obvi­ous­ly that came to fruition with @horse_ebooks. I notice it a lot with Olivia Taters. And in Rube Goldberg machines yout get a lot of that—I chose this one because there’s a drag­on there. Rube Goldberg said that he often has to have emo­tions and ani­mals in his cartoons.

When I have a goat cry­ing in one of my car­toons, I have to give a sat­is­fac­to­ry rea­son for hav­ing it cry, so I have some­one take a tin can away from him.
Rube Goldberg

He also has the idea of some­thing called [yok yoks?] which are lit­tle bugs that make machines mess up, which is—I don’t know if inten­tion­al­ly or not—but is an updat­ed ver­sion of the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift.

This is the part that I feel least con­fi­dent about in terms of relat­ing Rube Goldberg machines to bot cul­ture, but I’m just throw­ing it out there.

I want­ed to point out again, even though I’ve talk­ing about Rube Goldberg machines and Heath Robinson machines, it’s not spe­cif­ic to those two moments even though I think of those as the wack­i­est machines, and I think of bot cul­ture as being very wacky. Useless machines also came to promi­nence in mod­ern art. That’s Duchamp, obvi­ous­ly. I already showed you the Twittering Machine from Paul Klee.

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple of a use­less machine, less famous, but just to show that’s it’s not just Duchamp doing it. This is ​“Fakir in ³⁄₄ Time” by Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young, and this is a machine that makes a rope stand up on its own.

To return to that slide I showed you guys before, what bots and Rube Goldberg machines share. They’re fun­ny; jus­ti­fy their own exis­tence when it works; Absurd, delib­er­ate­ly dumb; pop­u­lar while on the precipice of machine-danger; and fix­at­ed on the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is an ani­mal, not ghost, in the machine

And that’s all I got.

Darius Kazemi: We do have time for a few ques­tions or com­ments. We’ll start in the room and I’ll take a look at IRC and make sure we’re get­ting that rep­re­sen­ta­tion here, too.

Audience 1: The ani­mals trapped in the machine, would you relate that to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and dis­trib­uted labor appli­ca­tions like that?

Johannah King-Slutzky: Definitely. That’s a great point. Something I for­got to men­tion, that a lot of these bots do lit­er­al­ly use human labor, because they form the cor­po­ra for the way we’re talk­ing, and also bots respond to peo­ple all the time. So I think it’s the same phe­nom­e­non def­i­nite­ly. But a lit­tle dif­fer­ent because Mechanical Turk is so men­ac­ing and it’s sort of uncan­ny, which is at the crux of the ghost in the machine as well. The drag­on in that car­toon I showed of the Rube Goldberg machines is not at all uncan­ny; it’s very sooth­ing. So I have a hard time dis­tin­guish­ing between those two ideas all the time.

Audience 2: Building on that, though, I wish Rob [Dubbin] was still here, because he’s a friend. I simul­ta­ne­ous­ly love Olivia Taters and I’m grow­ing to dis­like her a lot, because she’s built off of the body of work of teen girls. And I think it’s explic­it­ly girls because of the words that he’s cho­sen to scrape from and the body of text that he’s cho­sen to build from. And it’s sup­posed to be like, ​“Oh teens! Oh well.” But it’s explic­it­ly like ​“LOL teen girls!” and, ​“Check out this teen girl! She’s the most incred­i­ble teen girl.” There’s actu­al incred­i­ble teen girls. Did we need to build a fake teen girl for every­one to admire on Twitter? Because there’s a bunch of those and they talk about One Direction more than Olivia does, and they talk about actu­al teen girl things. So if Olivia is the ​“dad great­est hits” of teengirl-dom because she does­n’t talk about any of the things that actu­al girls like, she just talks to you thirty-something adults some­times. It’s this weird decon­tex­tu­al­ized expe­ri­ence of what being a teenage girl in America is. It lets you feel like you’re watch­ing a teenag­er with­out ever hav­ing to actu­al­ly… So in that way it’s like but maybe she’s real, this is get­ting too creepy. Sometimes she’ll actu­al­ly talk about hair­styles. Sometimes she’ll express an opin­ion about some­thing and that’s like, ​“Oh my god, did some­one actu­al­ly write that? This seems too close.” And it’s like the parts where ​“Oh, it’s get­ting like a per­son.” But then some­times, ​“Oh she’s fun­ny.” And I’m like yeah she’s fun­ny. I don’t know [crosstalk]

Joel McCoy: There was the fol­low a teen [inaudi­ble] a lit­tle while ago and that’s legit­i­mate­ly weird and creepy. [crosstalk]

Audience 2: Like ​“adopt a highway.”

Joel: Follow the teen and just don’t talk to them, because that would be weird. But what you can total­ly do is sub­tweet what your teen is tweet­ing about to your adult friends. It’s that one lay­er of abstrac­tion where it’s like at least you’re not active­ly harm­ing a real teen despite [crosstalk]

Audience 2: Just car­ry this egg around for two weeks.

Erin McKean: No teens were harmed.

Audience 2: It seems like this very odd thing to do where it’s like learn to lis­ten to women? No. Build a bot. Build a bot. I think it speaks to some of that, like some­times she seems real because her text is real. It comes from young women and the uncan­ni­ness there. Same with dis­trib­uted labor. The uncan­ni­ness makes you aware that there are mil­lions of peo­ple on this plan­et, alive at the same time that we are, and they’re active. And when they’re active on the same but­ton, shit happens.

Darius: We also have a ques­tion from IRC ask­ing if there are bots based on Amazon’s regrettably-named Mechanical Turk ser­vice. I know of art—

Audience 3: The sheep.

Darius: There’s Clement Valla. He sent a line through the ser­vice ask­ing peo­ple to retrace a line over and over again and you can sort of cre­ate this ani­ma­tion or col­lage of it mov­ing and mutat­ing and that sort of thing. I believe he’s done oth­er work with the ser­vice as well. I don’t know if there are any— It’s hard to to Twitter bots because it’s not a real-time API-based thing. You put a request out and then you wait for things to come back. I think the way that I would approach it if I were to do some­thing like that would be to make a bulk amount of requests and build a cor­pus that way, and then tweet from that sta­t­ic cor­pus. That seems to me the only way that you could real­ly build up a bot based on that.

Audience 3: There’s a [inaudi­ble] project by Matt Richardson called ​“Descriptive Camera.” It was­n’t a Twitter bot, it was a phys­i­cal instal­la­tion. But it was a lit­tle hard­ware cam­era he built with Raspberry Pi inside with no viewfind­er. When he clicked the but­ton it would take a pic­ture, not show it to you, send it to Mechanical Turk, have a Turk job where some­body would describe what they were see­ing in the pic­ture, and you’d get back two sen­tences with a descrip­tion like five min­utes lat­er. It’d be like, ​“This is two peo­ple stand­ing in front of a brick wall and one of them’s kind of smil­ing and the oth­er one looks dis­tract­ed.” That would be a kind of nat­ur­al Twitter bot. He was able to get sub-five and ten minute laten­cies for a small task like that.