As part of the Esc and Ctrl series, Jon Ronson recently published two videos on Comment is free in which he confronts a spambot version of himself and accuses it of stealing his identity.

We're two of the people in the second episode. Although we didn't create Ronson's bot, we provide research and consultancy for the company that did. Like Ronson, we're interested in bots, algorithms and issues of identity on the net. The bigger story that Ronson misses, but that we have been researching and to which we tried to alert him, is that it's not just Ronson who has bots manipulating his life. It's all of us.



Automated trades comprise 70% of the Wall Street stock market, whereas in the UK over 30% of equity trading is conducted by algorithms. The pressures of global capitalism led by and built upon this "black box" trading are forcing us to be economically reliant on the algorithm, prompting technologist Kevin Slavin to suggest that we are now "living in an algo-world" – or as novelist Daniel Suarez describes it, a "bot-mediated reality". Automated softwares perform the analysis of medical x-rays to find abnormalities, while risk-assessment algorithms decide a person's suitability for a credit card based on their financial history. Our lives are in their hands, if indeed they have anything resembling hands.

But increasingly it's getting personal. In the online environment of social media, Edgerank algorithms edit and remix our Facebook identities, determining which friends we interact with. Google's page-rank algorithm anticipates what we want to find, creating what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble, where we see what Google thinks we want to see.

Bots create 24% of tweets. Half of the internet traffic clicking through our websites and profiles is not human. Even Wikipedia is not immune: 22 of the 30 most prolific Wikipedia editors are bots. And as increasing numbers of us use online resources and social media in connection with our jobs as well as our personal lives, we need to realise how many of our "co-workers" are in fact algorithms, because we will have to live up to their standards. Bots are becoming our peers.

It used to be an insult to speak of someone "behaving mechanically", but now such behaviour is becoming both economically and socially desirable. It pays for bloggers to write articles optimised for search engines and crawler bots rather than human readers. Twitter, on the other hand, asks us to reduce our social discourse to 140 characters of hashtags, links, and @ handles, in imitation of the code webpages are written in.

We're at a turning point in the development of the internet. Bots, like any other scientific innovation, can be used for benign or malign purposes. The identity issues that Ronson raises are only the thin end of the wedge.

We've started to see numbers of humans pretending to be bots, a strange development that signals a shift in the power and identity politics of the internet. Ronson had a bot pretending to be him, which is annoying. But following the release of Ronson's videos, we have been confronted by Twitter versions of ourselves – @dan_o_hara, @lookrobertmason – accounts that are humans, pretending to be bots, pretending to be us. In such an online environment, where your true identity is reduced to an algorithmically generated collage, and where humans – already an endangered species – are simulating machines, it's hard to say if being "you" online has any real meaning.

At least Ronson's bot could be killed, in theory. The other bots out there, beyond anyone's control or even understanding, are not so killable. When Ronson looks for the people trying to control the internet, he's looking in the right place, but at the wrong species. The internet is increasingly becoming a post-user environment, regulated by something much more uncontrollable than humans.

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