Susan Orlean revealed on Tuesday that @horse_ebooks, a Twitter feed passing itself off as a self-tweeting algorithm, is actually operated by humans:
[Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender] have been working on the project for almost four years, keeping their identities secret from just about everyone, including their colleagues at BuzzFeed, where Bakkila is a creative director, and Howcast, where Bender, until about a year ago, was the vice-president of product development.
Russell Brandom interviewed Bakkila, who defends the project as a work of art:
For starters, Bakkila says he never scheduled a tweet. That meant late nights and fitful posting hours, but for Bakkila, the hardship was part of the art. He modeled the project off of the performance art pieces of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh, in which the artist’s endurance becomes a central focus of the art. “The point was to never automate it,” Bakkila says. “Part of the installation was performing with no breaks for two years. You begin to see things differently.”
Jason Farago scoffs:
If we were really to believe that @horse_ebooks was art, we would have to find some meaning or importance in its central conceit. Yet the indistinct border between human and machine is about as clichéd as it gets these days, and the hoodwinking of hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is not a sign of some digital sprezzatura, but of the meaninglessness of the distinction in the first place.
Natalie Kane’s perspective:
The interesting thing is that, in being announced as human-controlled performance art, Horse_eBooks loses most of its power. Knowing that each post wasn’t algorithmically generated, but individually, manually created, tells us differently to what we thought we knew about the technologies that use this technique, less about data and scripts, and more about our need to emulate machines, so as to prove our own supposed authenticity.
Above is the most popular Horse_eBooks tweet, according to FavStar.
The Dish 