These aren’t the bots we were looking for..
And so here we find ourselves, having to address the elephant in the room, except it isn’t an elephant which has got our blood pressure elevated at johnandjane, but rather a bot, or more specifically, an army of them. One of undefined magnitude which, left unchecked, will hasten the demise of civilised society, plunging us into an abyss of chaos, wherein we’ll be cannibalising each other upon a charred landscape littered with the detritus of our broken dreams, or at the very least we’ll have to pay over the odds for the art we love, so almost as bad.. Away from dystopian visions of Skynet meets Fury Road there is a serious point to be made, and it centers around the notion of ‘fairness’ in the process of acquiring limited edition art.
We have been accustomed, for a long time to the practice of bot usage among online communities looking to gain a competitive advantage in obtaining limited, and highly desirable product, be it the newest clothing drops from Supreme or Obey in the mid 2000s, or, more recently the frenzy over PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles amidst a semiconductor shortage which has continued to see both machines in painfully short supply. The use of bots is prolific in all sectors, and none more so than the art community. Despite this, when failing to secure a print from the Graffiti Prints Vault sale back in November last year I vented my frustration about bot usage on Instagram only to be met with plenty of other frustrated customers asking what Bots were. It seems perhaps that their usage is not as widely acknowledged or known about as one might reasonably assume.
So then we come to the types of bot users, is there a line of acceptance to be drawn between a genuine art enthusiast using a bot to gain an advantage in procuring a piece they will keep and covet vs a user who is looking to flip immediately for a quick profit, and if possible to scalp a haul of multiple pieces for the same purpose? The litany of frustrated punters generating a raft of comments on Instagram after each release passes in which they failed to secure anything goes a long way to answering this question. Clearly bot usage is still in the minority and there are a large proportion of art appreciators who have neither the time, or inclination to want to start tinkering with a bot in order to secure a piece they covet. Too many people have recently been faced with the depressing experience of seeing ‘Coming Soon’ switch to ‘Sold Out’ as soon as the release time elapses, anyone reading this who has tried to secure works by the Connor Brothers, Findac, Pez or Martin Whatson over the past year will surely be able to relate.
So what responsibility do the printers and galleries have to ensure that their online space is democratic and that it comes down to the fastest human rather than the fastest program? Clearly in commercial terms it is of little consequence to the retailer, the sooner they sell out the better, they convert their work into cash and everyone wins, right? Well no, not entirely, to their credit Graffiti Prints for one, have engaged with their customer base on Instagram after each volatile limited edition bunfight concludes and those unlucky enough to even get a chance to add to cart are left licking their wounds on Instagram. For the recent Whatson release ‘The Stag’ GP actually with held the product page button and link until the live time, which means bots didn’t have a product page to poll and would therefore not have had any advantage, this seemed to work really well, and in fact johnandjane who pride ourselves on being bot free, snagged 1 of the large edition so we were able to see first hand how effective this countermeasure was.
It was quite galling then to see that GP didn’t carry this forward into the recent Pez release which, true to form went straight to sold out from ‘Coming Soon’. We firmly feel that if the galleries and the printers are going to give the impression of caring about their customers, and stamping out bot usage they need to really follow through rather than making some gestures which don’t then stick. After the Pez release GP posted a screenshot suggesting they had cancelled £28k of bot orders but this is of little comfort to those who had missed out because there is no transparency over exactly how GP are classifying bot orders, or whether there is actually any reallocation going on and this isn’t anything more than just a cosmetic exercise to try and placate those infuriated customers who lost out.
We have been saying for some time that some simple measures, applied consistently would go a great deal of the way toward levelling the field for all. Carry on making the product page available only at the time of the release, that was a strong start. But go further, inject captcha into the purchase process so that manual intervention is required in order to add to cart. And once in cart please lock the allocation for 1 minute so that the item doesn’t then disappear as soon as the user tries to actually pay for it! We have heard countless complaints of people elated to have managed to get something in cart only to find it then no longer exists when they try to finalise their payment, something we have experienced ourselves.
Ultimately though, I can take losing out on a piece over losing thousands because I fed my credit card details to a bot, and by extension the developers who wrote it. Bots are not regulated, they are not safe, and if you lose money because you have surrendered your payment details to one, and it emerges, you will not be covered by your bank or credit card insurance, as this practice violates the contract you have with these financial institutions to take reasonable care to protect your payment details.
So we’ll be remaining bot free then, but we’ll also continue to roll up for those limited releases on the understanding that should we edge it and get lucky, the thrill of scoring one will be all the greater for it.
