This is what Google suggests when you search for Casting 360:

Casting 360 is run by Igor Reiant, who previously ran Talent6, a similar casting service that was fined $45,000 by San Mateo County for fraud, as revealed by an anti-scam blogger.

Reiant, according to his Twitter feed, appears to like skiing in Squaw Valley. He has 16 followers. I contacted him to ask him about his company's marketing tactics, but he has not responded.

* * *

This is the current state of play in the Internet economy. At the top of the heap, there are the Twitters and the Apples, the name technology companies that are creating billionaires.

Then, down at the bottom, there are the bots, simple pieces of code that do one thing and one thing only, but do it relentlessly.

And in between, there's you and me and Olivia and Igor and LeBron James, and we're all connecting to each other and the Apple brand and Google and Twitter and the bots. These are strange relationships. The same bots that help scam some credulous person who wants to get into acting might make a San Diego high schooler feel famous.

We all want something from these networks of technologies. In a strange way, we all depend on one another. Igor needs the bots. The bots need Igor. I need Igor and the bots and Olivia. Twitter needs all of us, though they claim in regulatory filings that only five percent of their accounts are fake, based on an internal review. (It should be noted: the spambot problem definitely used to be worse.)

And yet, despite all of our connections and interdependencies, the logic of the bots remains mysterious to human beings. We know why Casting360 or whatever shady marketing company they hired sent out the bot swarm: to get "customers" and make money. But why did the bots decide to follow a San Diego girl and a bunch of golf caddies?

Trying to answer that question is like staring into the eyes of a snake. Or as Olivia summarized the existential state of social technology: "5,000 pornstars follow me and idk what to do."

But, I am willing to take a guess at the idea behind the metabot that created all the spambot accounts, with a huge assist from my colleague, Ian Bogost.

There are two things to keep in mind here.

One is that the tools of the metabot are the tools of the Twitter API, which is the interface that other software uses to interact with Twitter. That API allows coders to do some things that the standard user cannot, like return a list of all the people someone follows all at once. The metabot, that is to say, is not using only the tools you have available on your phone.

The second thing is that Twitter does have people working on bot detection, and regular users themselves are hip to the spambot game now, too. So, bots have to make some effort to disguise themselves. They have to "look" human. That's why they have those stupid bios; those are just snippets from other humans' real bios that have been chained together. That's also why they have those porny pictures. In some book of best practices for spam, it has probably been determined that you are X percent more likely to get someone to follow an account, if the avatar picture is sexy. And they want to be followed because that makes them more likely to be classified as "real" by Twitter's anti-spam bots.