House of Cards

Bots coast on the credentials of the real users of the computers they hijack. Bots were observed to click more often (but not improbably more often) than real people. Sophisticated bots moved the mouse, making sure to move the cursor over ads. Bots put items in shopping carts and visited many sites to generate histories and cookies to appear more demographically appealing to advertisers and publishers. - The Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising. December 2014. White Ops, Inc. and the Association of National Advertisers.

The study cited above looked at 5.5 billion ad impressions over 60 days across 36 organizations. 23 percent of all observed video impressions were bots (p16).

Like too many things in our world, most useful internet services must justify themselves financially. The business model of much of the internet is based on advertising, and that whole schema is based on the assumption that advertising increases consumption. The further assumption there is that the subjects viewing the advertisements both can be influenced by ads and have the capacity to make purchases - that is, that they're human.

These behaviors are easily simulated, up to the point of purchase - although perhaps it makes economic sense for a bot to occasionally make a purchase in order to maintain the broader illusion of human engagement. There's something here about the dissolving of the internet human subject but I can't quite put my finger on it.

These bots are deployed by fraudsters to increase revenue, but since the purpose of automation is for outsourcing things we'd rather not do ourselves, maybe we regular folks can have bots simulating our own advertising engagement.

It's worth flipping through the report, if only for this title: