Re: <nettime> Contents of Nettime-l Digest, Vol 36, issue 11, Message :1 [Internet Policy] There are now more bots than humans on the internet.

[Gerard Hovagimyan via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Ted,

Your point about "rigorous methodology" being used to obscure a larger reality resonates with an experience I had more than twenty years ago.

In 2004 I carried out a small intervention called IFC Hack. IFC was running an online short-film competition where users uploaded videos and voted on submissions. After posting several deliberately provocative video rants, I noticed that the same handful of entries remained permanently at the top of the rankings. The system presented itself as a democratic mechanism in which popularity emerged organically from the collective choices of participants.

I became suspicious.

By creating multiple accounts and experimenting with voting patterns, I discovered how easily the rankings could be manipulated. My intervention was not particularly sophisticated. What interested me was not breaking the system but revealing that the system's claim to democratic legitimacy rested on a fiction. The voting process appeared transparent, but there was no way to know who was voting, how many identities they controlled, or whether the apparent consensus reflected genuine participation.

Eventually my IP address was banned. In correspondence with the administrators, I argued that the problem was not my behavior but the architecture itself. The platform assumed that identity and participation were stable, singular, and authentic when in fact they were none of those things.

What strikes me reading this discussion is how primitive that intervention now seems. In 2004 I was manually creating multiple identities. Today entire populations of synthetic actors can be generated automatically and operate continuously across platforms. The scale has changed dramatically, but the underlying issue remains familiar: systems that derive authority from participation are vulnerable when participation itself becomes opaque.

Whether the number is 57%, 70%, or 80% may ultimately be less important than the epistemological problem. We no longer have a reliable way to distinguish between human consensus, coordinated activity, commercial influence, state actors, autonomous agents, or some combination of all four. The metrics remain visible, but the social reality they supposedly measure becomes increasingly uncertain.

In retrospect, what IFC Hack exposed was not simply a flaw in a voting system. It was an early indication that networked public would eventually become impossible to audit from within the systems that produce them.

— GH Hovagimyan
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