Great Again Bot
I’ve been disturbed lately by the uptick in marketers' use of the phrase “make [noun] great again” or “make [noun] [adjective] again” in the wake of the Trump campaign. I get it, people are overworked and they don’t have much time to think about how that catchy phrase they’re using to sell networking solutions or beer or whatever is giving legitimacy to fascism. But it’s ugly to see it happening.
Darius Kazemi has done a great job in the past of talking about how bots can reveal the weaknesses of procedural writing, forcing humans to be self-critical. Now that bots can be done quick (with cheapbotsdonequick.com) I saw this as a good tool for articulating my frustration with people copypasting words from their tech products in alongside words that signal the values of the far-right.
The bot grew a little from conception to completion. First, I realised that I could easily generate riffs off of “Keep Portland Weird” using the same dataset, even though the intent of that phrase might be the polar opposite of the thing I intended to criticise. Then my landlady and friend and conceptual artist Jennifer Booth suggested “moving forward” as another kind of facile sloganeering. So I ended up with three categories of slogan:
- The appeal to a long-lost past
- The call to protect something under threat
- The vision of a longed-for future
Populating the word lists became an exercise in thinking about the parameters of dog-whistle politics. Which adjectives sound positive but can actually mask something quite harmful? Which objects of protection are sufficiently insecure to seem in need of defending, but enough part of dominant culture to be already in the charmed circle of those regarded as deserving of defense? I’ve peppered the list with internet jokes and some meta-humour, but found that the bot works best if 90% of the content sounds like it was taken straight from a political leaflet.
The shocking thing was how many of the future-oriented phrases sounded exactly like something I would say or write. This is obviously particularly true when referring to technology or meta-humour, but it started happening with words that I’d put into the list because they sounded typical of populist rhetoric when put into the appeal-to-nostalgia voice. I felt prompted to think about how easy it is to be complacent about the rhetoric that I use. Too often, the words and images that I rely upon have associations that I abhor, regardless of my personal inclination to progressing towards a future instead of conserving the past. The opposite is also true: ideas that I value very highly can easily be rearranged to support somebody else’s agenda.
It took making a simple bot for me to really appreciate how self-reflexive it can be as a way of engaging critically and playfully with language structures. What I mean by that is, I couldn’t avoid implicating myself in what I was doing, even as I tried to externalise it all onto a satirical robot. It’s easy as a critic to point the finger at other people, and it’s hard to recognise how your own writing can use images and ideas irresponsibly. My PhD has been another area where I get that productive challenge, as my supervisors call me out on the ways that certain images and terminologies can be subtly harmful.
I don’t want to suggest that we can ever make language unproblematic again. But there is always room to be in productive tension with your own words. And perhaps more scope for satirical bots to help us to take ourselves less seriously.