DMB Digest: Mouse Click Vs. Handshake
There's no out-botting the bots.
Sneaker bots. It’s the beginning of the end. This is how it unfolds:
I’ve never really done Black Friday, that is until this year. A few weeks ago, the Reddit vine began to pick up rumors of a Target promotion involving Pokemon Elite Trainer Boxes from the Sword and Shield era. Not just a promotion, but nearly a liquidation. Sixty percent off. Not sure if you’ve been monitoring the matter, but the age of true door-buster promotions has come and gone.
Now it’s more like a reduction in otherwise artificially elevated sticker prices dragged out for a few weeks using chain-linked marketing terms like early bird, black Friday, cyber Monday, giving Tuesday, and last chance that result in nearly a month of frenzied commercialism.
Boiled down, everything is on sale. So much so, that nothing is on sale. But now, into this ironic landscape of constant savings, imagine the shimmering emergence of a genuine bargain—Pokemon cards for less than $3.00 a pack. It caught my eye.
It caught the eye of many others as well. By November 24th, the buzz had grown so intense, grounding rods had to be driven throughout the internet to prevent total melt down. Just the week before, video had gone viral of shoppers gone primitive in an effort to obtain a Pokemon promotion via Costco. Ugly stuff. Then there was Target.
7:55am, on the morning of November 24th, I found myself in a short line of guys standing in the cold outside of the Target in Nampa, Idaho. The youngest was in his twenties, a young father. I was the oldest, easily. We had all heard the same rumors—a third party vendor promotion involving Pokemon ETBs for less than $20 a pop. None of us had been able to confirm whether this particular Target was participating. We shuffled around with our hands in our pockets. Laughed about the madness of collecting Pokemon. Hinted about our sources of information.
At 8:00am a curious Target clerk opened the doors. As a singular organism, the dozen of us speed walked into the atrium and then into the front isle. The guy next to me asked if I knew where the display would be. There were only two possibilities—one at the end of the registers. That one was less likely and quickly eliminated. From there we performed our best Richard Simmons speed walk toward the back of the store—the isle between toys and electronics.
A preteen in roller-shoes wizzed past. But the impetulance of youth quickly revealed itself as he took a wrong turn and was forced to loop around. We arrived at the place were the display would have been. But it wasn’t there. A few scattered clerks did their best to swallow their surprise. The display wasn’t coming to Idaho.
The interwebs would be our only recourse. But a sad consolation the internet has become these days indeed. There be dragons lurking on the internet. Monstrous spiders patrolling the interwebs. It’s no longer a safe place for simple schmucks like me. Like me and like you.
Thus we’ve come full circle—meet the sneaker bots.
In case you’re wondering, the term sneaker bot (more generically known as shopper bot) entered the popular parlance several years ago amidst the emergence of sneaker heads and the online marketplaces that make buying and selling collectable sneakers (athletic shoes) possible. When a desired collectable “drops” often there are less than minutes to procure said collectable before they are all gone. Sometimes it is a matter of seconds. If you don’t have some form of speed payment locked and loaded on your device, you can forget about it.
Many of you, I’m sure, can see where this is headed. Wherever desperation and money converge, opportunity rears its tempting head. The internet is vast. Commercial opportunities are rife. But how to capitalize? How to outrace the rest?
Thus sneaker bots were born. All it takes is an amalgam of technical knowhow and ethical mushiness stirred with a smattering of proxy accounts and some money. The result? In a matter of milliseconds these shopping bots are capable of navigating the online shopping cart process and completely cleaning out a promotional offer.
Thousands, even millions of products, can be cleaned out by an army of bots in under a minute. At which point the market price comes under the control of the scalper behind the army. If you want it, come and get it. But it’s gonna cost you well above MSRP.
I have to ask the question: is this how it all ends? When the singularity occurs (assuming it hasn’t already), will this be the first choke point? The first vulnerability the AI takes advantage of? To cut us off from the supply chain? I’m being totally serious (or as serious as I’m capable of being anyway). What happens the moment we humans are no longer able to purchase stuff online because the AI gets to everything before we can? Do we have enough human relationships still in place to provide for ourselves and our communities? Do we have the skills to source the necessities without need for online orders and computerized inventory oversight?
All of this has been enough for me to admit I have a problem: online shopping. No matter how much research I put into it, I’ll always be outdone by bots. You can’t out bot a bot. If I want to win, I’m gonna have to push into the thing I have that bots never will—my humanity.
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