EXCERPT Bots Since around 2018, the social media platform Weibo has seen a curious rise in bots, by which I don’t mean automated zombie accounts for hire, or coordinated troll armies, but rather humans simulating bots by creating accounts with ‘bot-sounding’ handles. Some are innocuous and fun, like ‘cat bots’; others serve specific subcultures as quasi-archives, like the ‘Millennium bot’, or deliver quotable gems, like the ‘French literature bot’. Then there are accounts like the ‘Soviet Jokes bot’ or the ‘Lu Xun bot’, which have now, after several rounds of censorship and resurrection, largely disappeared—save for scant remaining search results—likely owing to coded political expression in their output. Compared to their Twitter counterparts, which often similarly employ algorithms to autogenerate content, the nuance here feels exquisitely culturally mediated. The combination of Chinese characters with the English word ‘bot’ in the handles creates a unique dissonance. It escapes no one that these accounts are managed by humans, since the content often relates to current events, which begs the question: What makes this performative simulation of machines and algorithms so appealing? And what makes it culturally specific? ‘Lu Xun bot’ was named after one of modern China’s most formidable and incandescent writers (1881–1936), whose trenchant critique of the ills of impe- rialism and Confucian conservatism continues to resound in national textbooks and public discourse alike. His cultural and political thoughts have been widely recited and, more crucially, promoted by the authorities as representative of their central values. One may argue that he constitutes an essential dataset on which generations of modern Chinese people have been trained, which makes Lu Xun’s words uniquely potent and thorny when deployed to critique the social ills of today. Examples range from his feminist quips on slut-shaming and calling out feudal values as anti-human (or, cannibalistic, as he likes to put it), to his descriptions of the general apathy he observed in Chinese society at moments of crisis: ‘the joys and sorrows of humans are not connected after all’—a sentence that has been repeatedly evoked to address increasing gaps and lacerations across social strata. Coded yet performative, ‘Lu Xun bot’ exemplifies a uniquely creative form of cultural and political expression within Chinese cyberspace. The writer’s lasting cultural impact and prominent status within the CCP canon make him an apt weapon and a shield when navigating constant (and often erratic) censorship and erasure on platforms such as Weibo. While the censors do eventually catch on, a far more intelligent algorithm than those currently in use would be required for autodetection and prevention. It is an indirect yet nimble form of speaking back to power precisely by mobilising its sanctioned voices …
Documents China and AI: Human Bots, Black Tech, the Dark Forest, and the State Bogna Konior, Anna Greenspan, Vincent Garton…