There are few pages on this personal web site more potentially unsettling than catdick. See? I didn't even link it. You can find it if you like. I'll tell you now, there's not a whole lot posted there about lipstick.
So you can imagine my bemused surprise when I received this note:
In the 1990s, I got comments from other weird people; now I get comments from weird algorithms. This kind of solicitation for "please post a link on your site" is the bulk of email I receive these days in response to these rangy pages I've written! What a wild shift of human attention flows. Twenty years ago I wanted to see more people online; now I have more machine intelligences online probing my internet orifices.
Sometimes I feel antagonized by the impersonality of these solicitations. I reply "unsubscribe" to silence.
Other times I try to play with them, "Sounds great - let's collaborate on more articles like the one you found on my web site! Please review Links.net content and suggest how we might work together." Perhaps I'm fantasizing that some understimulated human bot-jockey will see my atypical response and be inspired to collaborate on some wild network poetry. I actually had one person reply "yes!!" and say she would ask her company if they could somehow work with Links.net to make weird stuff, but that didn't go anywhere.
Ultimately thus far it's not been so fun to argue with robots - they aren't easily baited beyond their quite-limited scope of profit-seeking. So I just get daily emails akin to this one, with no way to filter, and no sign that any human actually thought catdick might help sell lipstick clicks.
