It went down and I don't want to move.
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 25, 2015
And the profane:not a single PR has sent a really good e-mail.
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 19, 2015
There's a danger to this, though, as the Dutch owner of an _ebooks Twitter bot found out last week. From cobbling together Jeffry van der Goot's tweets, a robot version of him managed to say, "I seriously want to kill people," which led to the police turning up at Jeffry 1.0's door and suggesting that maybe he delete the murder robot. To that end, the programming community promotes a vague nu-Asimov's Law etiquette for bots that, though it doesn't stop them from becoming Skynet-style self-aware and firing rockets at them, at least stops them being less annoying to people as they try to go about their daily social media lives.Anyway, while a robot was issuing vague death threats to the Dutch, an alternate version of me was trying to intimate that I have a medically shrunken penis:Want carbs but do a spellcheck you're going to see them retweeted every day until you die
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 25, 2015
I suppose it's all to do with the original content. Seeing as it just regurgitates words I frequently use or entire turns of phrase (apparently I tweet about my penis shrinking down to a thimble on the regular) my bot tweets, undeniably, in my "voice," which can actually be a bit disconcerting. It reminds me uncomfortably of something I might shout in a fever dream: words I say, in the way I say them, but fired through a prism that completely removes context. I guess this is the kind of thing I would say if I lost my mind and started shitting myself into adult-sized Pampers in some sort of futuro nursing home, squawking about Mario Gotze's pubes and complex carbohydrates while a doctor slowly injects me with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. This is the way my life ends: not with a bang, but with me whispering, "I HAD TO SEE A CROTCH HOLE!"Just got back from two hours of football in the freezing March cold — Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 25, 2015
I mean fucking hell the girls are basically building Kryton
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 25, 2015
bringing you triple-X pants talk since the start of his Geography class
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 25, 2015
Sometimes, annoyingly, it's just straight-up funnier than I am:just went to the bathroom to weep and peel it out.
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 23, 2015
But mainly, it shares the same themes. Two of the main things I am obsessed with—Lou Bega and my non-existent legacy following my inevitably early death—are both summed up in this tweet:RIGHT, WE ASK: would Kevin James be a movie star if he wasn't such a FATTY?
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 24, 2015
People who work in creative agencies and Javier Mascherano's tattered asshole are also firmly in "my wheelhouse":hit the ground, Lou Bega will endure, and I will be a footnote
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 23, 2015
Shitting myself? Doing the splits? Something like that? Either way, I probably ruin three pairs of jeans a year just by falling over really solidly onto my knees on the pavement, so this is pretty accurate.
Then there's this: my own self-worth scraped thin and exposed for the world to see; the true essence of my identity, knocked around the Twitter echo chamber like a squash ball.retroactively ruining my own trousers.
— Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 21, 2015
It's strange to know that your life is divided into themes—death, carbs, humiliation, Lou Bega. Also strange to see long-dead and mostly useless thought trains dredged up anew. For instance, here's that time I got really mad because a Kickstarter I'd only backed to be polite had been resolutely not completed by the dicklord who undertook it; here's that afternoon I got really sad about scratching my Ray-Bans; here's that time I watched that Isabella Rossellini duck fuckin' video about six times in a row.In a way, you could argue, Robogolby is a study in intertextuality: that everything that will be said has already been said; all we are doing with our mouths and our fingers is rehashing and amalgamating old thoughts into something vaguely new; that nobody has had an original idea in their head for over a thousand years. On the other hand, Golb-bot has dredged up a lot of strange, fragmented memories about Isabella Rossellini wriggling into a gigantic concentric duck vagina, reminding me: Man, you think about some trash.With your Facebook feed now essentially just screenshots of other people's Timehop pages ("Relive my mundane memories," you are saying every time you post from Timehop. "Relive that time I went to Brighton and it was quite gray, but not gray enough to not go in the sea"), we're coming to the point where the internet is feasibly old enough to get misty-eyed and nostalgic about. And, as a generation, we're narcissistic enough to heave great importance on the swathing, zig-zagging path we make across the web. In a way, it's a shared nostalgia—"Heh, remember this thing I did? You saw me do it the first time and here is me doing it again"—that could hint to the way we share memories in years to come.Is this how our lives will be marked out? Instead of photo albums, will we print and mount all the Twitter arguments we ever had with the Waitrose corporate account? When we try to relate to our teenage children in some vague and distant future, will we bequeath them a bound archive of our completed Buzzfeed quizzes and a load of Instagram photos of us wearing leather jackets ("Mommy used to be cool, look!"), which they won't even read because they will have invented new and unique ways to take heroin by then? Are the best days of our youth completely over, and is the only thing left to do look back?I would say: yes. My bot would say: "there's no need for a thing."Follow Joel, RoboJoel, and Dan on Twitter.Those who don't like me, you're a month behind the curve: — Joelbot Golbybot (@joeIgolby)February 19, 2015