I don’t have the knowledge / experience to argue or agree with your premises and conclusions, or to evaluate the design of your software, but I thought the writing itself was excellent.

Before I read the article, I had been wondering about a small subset of one of the other Democratic presidential candidates, a highly blindered group from my perspective (NOT the Bernie Bros — a much smaller and more extreme subset). My question was whether or not there was something in the candidate him/herself that encouraged such extremism, even though the candidate was not so extreme and would never have encouraged the kind of posts and activities that this subset tended to make.

So as I read your article, I began wondering if there was something in Yang’s messaging or rhetoric (NOT in Yang himself or his ideology) that would encourage the use of bots to promote a political agenda and might lead bot creators to conceal the “botness” of their strategy.

Then I read the comments on your article.

(DISCLAIMER: I am not anti-Yang, whatever that would mean. I think he would make a decent president, but I think that about all the Democratic candidates from 2019, except Michael Bloomberg, who already has enough power as a media mogul.)

Responses varied widely, but there was a kind of fervor in defending Yang that I haven’t seen among any of the supporters of any of the other Democratic candidates. Now this isn’t inherently bad — it would be ideal if more people were fervent in their desire to improve the nation. But it makes me wonder if there might be something going on with the Yang Gang other than the solutions proposed by Yang himself. Nothing sinister, just a reason to be more committed than most people.

Some time ago, a young woman attacked me for a criticism of Donald Trump and accused me of being a typical liberal. We went back and forth for a bit; she explained that it wasn’t that she particularly liked Trump; she was also considering supporting Yang. From what I could tell, she preferred these two men, in spite of their political differences, because they would shake things up. And she was pretty unhappy with the state of things.

(My liberal self is making me state the opinion that Trump is shaking up things for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful, while Yang would shake things up for the victims of the wealthy and powerful.)

So if there is a tiny subset of Yang supporters who believe in using automated technology in order to advance the candidate most opposed to the dehumanization of automated labor (and I’m not claiming that such a group does exist or that they represent the views of most Yang supporters if they do exist), it may be that this subset fervently believes that the end justifies the means.

And in my view, this amorality makes them very dangerous. They may as well be robots.