If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
“It seems like journalists are used to being in charge of editorial processes.” —“Algorithms for Journalism: The Future of News Work,” The Journal of Media Innovations (2017)
News breaks like a rain cloud, or a daydream. Roy arrives at his desk just in time to claim the story: Rival militias started a gunfight at a federal water pipeline that they both wanted to steal from. Nine people dead, another 17 injured.
Roy feels a bump of pleasure as he shifts from weary commuter to seasoned journalist, digging into the bare-bones wire-service report to turn it into an article, with quotes from law enforcement and details about both groups. (The Clean Hands Militia say they just want to be left alone inside their walled-off commune; the Big-Wheelers aim to destroy the government—and may have been trying to poison the Billings water supply.) Roy files the piece, slugged MilitiaWaterWars0809X, and it goes to the Farm for vetting.
Less than 15 minutes later, the article is kicked back to Roy’s desk covered with red marks. The Farm has found fault with almost every word.
Roy sighs. Once, The Daily Argus had fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers. Those people are gone now, and in their place there’s the Farm: a virtual machine populated with copies of a few trillion different bots.
Some of the bots are highly sophisticated, picking up on any hint of ideological slant. Then there are the ones that get activated only if you mention a particular slogo, like #!castratecapitalism!# or #!restoreamericanvalues!#. One particular bot has a tizzy anytime an article mentions egg salad sandwiches. Every news article must avoid upsetting too many of them, because the Argus top brass believe they represent how readers—and other bots—will react in the real world.
Every one of these red marks links to comments made by bots inside the Farm. Many of the libertarian bots loathed Roy’s article because he described the Big-Wheelers as “antigovernment extremists”; several Lithuanian bots were roused by the word “massacre.” Pro-gun-rights bots objected to the mention of fatal gunshots in the nut graf, while pro-ruling-party bots had a freak-out in several places because Roy noted that the government keeps changing its response to water shortages. Some environmentalist bots disputed the explanation of the water crisis in the second-to-last graf.
Inside the Farm, the bots are still screaming at each other and spitting invective nobody will ever read. Nobody except for Roy and other staffers, who can open a view tab and see a real-time feed of all the bot discussions of his article. (“Irresponsible rePOORting,” says one bot called Guns4All. “U can’t steal water bc its not a commodity smh,” says another, called FreeUrHead.)
Breathe, Roy tells himself. He pokes at his keyboard, hoping its rows of lettered blocks somehow harbor the right words to convey what happened without upsetting the Farm, and then he can go get lunch.
Roy lives in a cube-shaped apartment, the same size and shape as 857,003 other units in the city that are all enrolled in the same exchange. Once in a while, his apartment relocates while he’s asleep, to a better or worse neighborhood—depending on the current market bid for placement in the nice part of town. Some days Roy opens his front door and sees broken bottles and syringes. Other times he steps out into a neighborhood of florists and high-end coffee. This week Roy’s living in a trendy spot, dotted with parklets—so he can’t help believing that everything is headed in the right direction.
OK. Instead of a “shoot-out,” let’s say that there was an “exchange of gunfire.” Strike the word “massacre” entirely, and also cut some of the wonky stuff about fluctuating water subsidies. In the graf where he’d written about the clashing ideologies of the two militias, Roy injects some antiseptic: The Big-Wheelers are no longer “militantly antigovernment” but “concerned about regulatory overreach”; the evidence that the group tried to poison a city’s water supply is replaced with the line “They had a cache of potentially toxic additives.”
An hour later, Roy sends his article back to the Farm, clasping his hands in mock prayer. His chest scars are itching again, so he bites his tongue to distract himself. Maybe he’ll grab lunch at that new Uzbek taco joint.
The Farm’s reaction comes faster this time, with more yelling. A whole new cluster of bots is angry (“media jacka$$”): The revised lede suggests that this situation is the result of out-of-control water demand from smart cities. Plus, Roy’s new headline asks whether this is the first skirmish of the new water wars, and thus invokes Betteridge’s law (concerning yes/no questions)—leading to jeers from the mob of Betteridge bots. Plus, all the bots who were pissed before are still pissed, and now they scent blood.
Roy plunges into a third rewrite, this time staying as close as possible to the bare facts. What, where, when, how, and a minimum of why. But there’s nothing more guaranteed to whip the entire Farm into a frenzy than a stark recitation of a sequence of events that makes it way too obvious who fired the first shot, and the last. One bot shrieks that the “bRane-deDd MeedIa” is out to lunch—when going to lunch is all Roy wants to do.
After a fourth and fifth rewrite go down in flames, Roy finally stands from his desk and heads to the staircase.
Soon he’s face-to-face with Josh and Maven, the Argus’ managing editor and publisher, who are in their mid-thirties but look hipper and more exhausted than that. Josh steeples his hands and says, “We need to get every story right, no matter what.”
Maven frowns. “Complaints hurt advertising, and we don’t want to drive away subscribers. This is how we pay your salary.”
Josh says, “We need to be responsible” and “People trust us to be the paper of record” and “It only takes the slightest appearance of bias to ruin everything.”
“But,” Roy says, “I mean, these bots. They’ve always been terrible. But they’re getting worse. I can’t make them happy, whatever I do.”
“If the job were easy,” says Maven, “it wouldn’t be so important.”
“We think the bots are evolving,” adds Josh. “Something about keeping them in that virtual enclosure, it’s speeding up their progress. Maybe in a few years they’ll be able to write the articles by themselves.”
Roy’s empty stomach wrings so tight, he can’t even speak for a moment.
Then he asks the question.
“Do we keep these bots because we think they reflect public opinion at large? Or do we think that people are so simpleminded they let obvious bots tell them what to think?”
“Yes.” Maven lifts an eyebrow.
“We’re not trying to make your life more difficult here,” Josh says. “But this is good practice in using language with care.”
Roy goes back to his desk and—sixth time—retools the story, which by now is late; other major outlets have already progressed from factual account to think piece.
Roy finds himself staring at the live feed from the Farm. Certain names pop up over and over, until Roy feels like he’s getting used to their personalities as well as their preoccupations. Roy even feels something like affection when he sees CorruptUSAll yelling about an obscure conspiracy theory involving the Secret Quadrilateral Congress. These are Roy’s coworkers now.
“I went into journalism to help people make sense of the world,” Roy says aloud to the glowing live-feed display, and the bots keep chattering.
At last Roy returns to his open document, feeling weirdly calm, like he and the bots understand each other. This time, he writes an article in which it’s clear that something happened. There were gunshots. People died. There were toxic substances. Everyone blames everyone. Everybody has grievances, everybody is thirsty. Obfuscation wrapped in vagueness, covered with a layer of gibberish.
The Farm gives Roy’s 10th draft a clean bill of health, and he realizes all the lunch places have long since closed.
Roy gives in to a strange compulsion and loads an interface to the Farm onto his luxpod, so he can keep gazing at the feed during his train ride home. He stares at the rain of commentary while downtown shrinks away and people around him talk about craft beer and clothing. By the time Roy reaches his gorgeous new neighborhood, he’s holding the Farm’s live feed tenderly, as if carrying home a brand-new pet.
Charlie Jane Anders (@charliejane) is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night, out in February, and the Nebula-winning All the Birds in the Sky.
This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
- Introduction: What'll We Do?
- Real Girls by Laurie Penny
- The Trustless by Ken Liu
- Placebo by Charles Yu
- The Third Petal by Nisi Shawl
- The Branch by Eugene Lim
- Maximum Outflow by Adam Rogers
- Compulsory by Martha Wells
