Valerie Solanas Bot World (and other denizens)

#1

Continuing the discussion from Comprehensively addressing the stupid, intellectually dishonest critique of Anita Sarkeesian:

##added content
SolanasBot01 - extracts from the SCUM manifesto
SolanasBot02 - poor quality markov of the SCUM manifesto
SolanasBot03 - template-city (MadLibs meets a combination of SCUM manifesto phrases and corporate slogans)

I have some more notes on my website.

##original post below

I’ve got version 0.1 up at https://twitter.com/SolanisBot01
It only posts every six hours, as there’s not a lot of there there in this variation (yet?).

As you can see from the name, I got the spelling dead wrong initially. It’s been updated in the settings, but the original URL is fixed forever. Men, right?!!!

It’s using this google spreadsheet process to send out a handful (20-ish) of cropped selections from The SCUM Manifesto.

I ran into some authentication issues and… I’m still not sure how I resolved them. Initially, on Wednesday, I couldn’t get the app set to do read+write, said I needed a mobile phone, and twitter would crash when I tried to add one (I think because my mobile number is already connected an account. My real one).

Anyway. Tonight it worked, without prompting for mobile.

GO FIGURE.

At any rate, I hope to do some variations. This was a proof-of-concept. And harder than I thought, due to the auth-thing.

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#2

I’d never read the SCUM manifesto before, it’s amazing and hilarious.

#3

I only know the excerpts I heard in the movie about her… I should read it too. I keep thinking that I’d like to incorporate stuff like that into my history class. This and like The Turner Diaries…

#4

I’ve got “tech” notes up here.

#5

I’m not on twitter, btw, but I passed this along to some people who I know who are that either like odd-ball things or are into weird stuff in US history…

#6

I’ve modified bot01 to have a larger number of sentences – it’s now about 150, all original sentences (or fragments) from the manifesto. The selection code has also been modified to pick from a single column, instead of from a single row (since it is easy to paste column of sentences).

minor changes.

I hope to have a bot02 doing something different later this week.

#7
#8

Oh! My!

[blushes]

#9

SolanasBot02 is live.

It uses a simple markov engine (uses my modification of Edde Addad’s charng engine (pronounced “carnage”)).

Also scrubs some “bad words”, since “faggot” (!!) appears in the original manifesto, and was re-appearing in tweets.

It does some super-dumb text manipulations – adds final punctuation, and capitalizes the first letter. There’s some issue with google-apps-script + twitter-OAuth that doesn’t seem to allow exclamation marks to go through, so final puncts are periods and question-marks.

I’m thinking of jumping the google-apps ship for Heroku, but this is dead-simple, and working so far. Which was the goal in the beginning.

#10

Hokay, den - things are getting “interesting”:

https://twitter.com/KewlMCserver/status/510550813157359616

#11

Clearly, this person has no clue who Valerie Solanas was or what art is… FUN TIMES!!!

Think this will go viral?

#12

Incidentally and somewhat relatedly, did you see this - an interesting read:

#13

Thanks for that. Related: I see Richard Dawkins is being his usual charming self on Twitter again, too.

#14

It’s stuff like that which just reinforces my belief that it’s power and the pursuit of power that is the problem, not necessarily religion, atheism, nationalism, communism, or whatever sort of ideology/ideal people are trying to champion.

#15

It depresses me when people get famous for coming up with one thing and then labor under the delusion that their opinions on other matters are equally trenchant.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

#16

Are you suggesting that the world needs a Valerie Solanas bot variant that only replies to new Dawkins tweets?

#17

#18

Yeah, it’s also, I think bureacratization or institutionalization that goes along with modern power structures, that direct and shape how power works. It’s the whole Kafka thing, right? Just look at people who come into political systems with the best of intentions and what happens to them or how institutions will often shield wrong doers within their structure. Everyone points to the Catholic Church as an example of this (correctly so), but you can see it at work within the American political system, the police (the thin blue line), and in this case in the freethinkers/atheist community. But then again, you can also point to positives of each of these bureaucracies or in the modern system overall.

It’s a funny problem to have to sort out and I have no clue how you have these sorts of institutions and have them free of corruption. Maybe you can’t, maybe it’s a whole problem of the whole system is corrupting?

#19

Gimme another week or two. Unless somebody else does it first.

#20

I’m going to have to stop researching things. It’s leading me into areas that are a real waste of time and bandwidth:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/miscellaneous/the-art-of-effective-trolling-or-how-i-trolled-radfem-fakerobotgamer-the-7th-most-hated-redditor-worldwide/

https://twitter.com/jackoutisburn3

I found this by following the hashtag somebody responded to the bot01 with.