Horse_ebooks

Transcription

Here's an idea: horse ebooks shows us what the internet's true art form really is Now, A horse is a horse, of course, of course and no one would tweet at a horse of course unless that is of course that horse was selling ebooks. horse_ebooks was a Twitter spambot. It started out as the project a mysterious Russian gentleman, made to tweet sentences programmatically generated from a corpus of ebooks about--you guessed it--horses. The tweets were weird, nonsensical, and hilarious though, occasionally they were poetic, and even MEANINGFUL. "Black Fury is the touching story of Chance, a young girl who saw something special in a beautiful black", "Nothing: I am not taught to make any thing", "LEARN TO FORGIVE YOURSEL LEARN TO FORGIVE YOURSEL LEARN TO FORGIVE YOURSEL LEARN TO FORGIVE YOURSELFFFF" And the people, they flocked! or... ummm... herded? horse_ was the twitter spam bot par excellence. It amassed a legion of followers, and inspired books, posters, and even tattoos. It consistently spewed out what was--or seemed like--machine assembled poetry; Horse was, in short, and maybe a little melodramatically, the soul in the machine. And it'd been spammy-business-as-usual for over 3 years when, when on September 24, 2013, in concert with the conclusion of an ominous countdown on the YouTube channel Pronunciation Book, we learned that what we thought was randomly-generated, mysteriously maintained, and accidentally meaningful SPAM... ...was in fact the human authored and purposeful work of a person. A person who works at Buzzfeed, no less. And people, I amongst them, were. PISSED. And that is what we're going to talk about: why the love for horse_, why the anger and why it matters. But first! In order to talk about horse_, we have to talk about spam. And in order to talk about SPAM, we have to talk about the ATTENTION ECONOMY. So I think we can agree that there is a lot happening on the internet. There's a lot to look at and watch and listen and a lot of people who want you look at and watch and listen to their things. Yet there are only so many hours in one day to look at things; and you want to look at only, or mostly, things that you like. These are the features that define the internet's ATTENTION ECONOMY: how, where and why people on the internet SPEND their ATTENTION. We've done a good amount of work to quantify the attention economy through the tabulation and display of favstars, likes, notes, reblogs, retweets, upvotes, views and so on... ...a higher # of which suggest that "this thing is worth your attention! You should look at it!" but we've also figured out how to GAME the attention economy. Sexy thumbnails, misleadingly labeled links, clickbaity headlines, in stream advertising, and repost after repost after repost all getting you to pay attention to something that you wouldn't have otherwise. In his book SPAM, Finn Brunton defines it succinctly as "...the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit preexisting aggregations of human attention." Clogging up YT comment streams, constantly @-ing you on twitter, in your email inbox--these things are distracting and irritating. But not Horse_ebooks! Horse_ never @-replied people, rarely posted links, and just went about its job generating these weird chunks of text. It was SPAMs relationship to the attention economy reversed: it was not asking, we were CHOOSING to pay attention because it was entertaining and non-threatening. Almost PET-like: It was domesticated spam. It was a precious and precocious little bot accidentally, it seemed, being creative and insightful. Horse_'s text was generated using a technique called Markov chains which, when applied to a body of text, creates a semi-coherent jumble of the source. A Markov transition of the text of this very episode, for example, generates the sentence: "But to consider it earnestly -- the soul of the distant past Mr. Andy Baio -- said that "the internet's native art form really is a horse". Brunton describes this kind of spam as "lit-spam": a "joycean gesture", he writes, "with flashes of lucidity in the midst of a fugue state, like disparate strips of film haphazardly spliced together." Litspam hopes to trick spam filters into thinking it is textual commnication actually typed out by a human... ...but it also triggers our predilection for finding meaning where it was not purposefully created. Which, at horse_'s beginning, it wasn't. But it certainly got us to PAY. ATTENTION. THEN! Around September 2011, horse_ started updating from the web and not the API... a signal of a transition from it's originally programmatically generated and posted text to text written and tweeted by human hands... ...then prounciation book started to count down and at the end of that countdown it was Susan Orlean who broke the news. She wrote that: "The creators of the two accounts ... will prove that they are indeed human, in a performance that is the final flourish in this suite of conceptual-art pieces, weaving together Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book." As it turns out, since 2011, horse_ had been a person "performing" as a spambot; and it certainly did end with a flourish. Of advertising. Not for horses or ebooks, but for another art piece, made in conjunction with the creator of Pronunciation Book. The internet had been, in a word, hors'd. Outrage was in no short supply. This thing that people had... adopted in a sense... turned into something else, the opposite of itself but also weirdly ... exactly what it was. When horse_ebooks was ineffectual spam, it was beloved; but when it turned into incredibly effective spam, reviled. In reference to horse_ebooks, Dan Sinker wrote: "never love anything you meet on the internet, ever again." Now -- at some point in the not too distant past, blogger extraordinaire, former Kickstarter CTO and all around neat guy Mr. Andy Baio said that "the internet's native artform is the animated GIF" ...or Jyfe. And up until this whole thing, I have totally agreed with him. Heck, I recently wrote a book chapter premised on that very idea... But in the wake of horse_ebooks, I'm starting to think that, whatever it might mean, the internet's native art form ... might be SPAM. It is created by, on and for the internet; it expresses and inspires a whole gamut of emotions; it is constantly changing, always surprising, and unlike the GIF it has been around as long as the internet has--LONGER even. It is purpose built to grab your attention, it requires skill and planning and it inarguably has an audience. There is good spam, bad spam, and everything in between. Now, I know it's easy to laugh at a group of people who are upset because they found out that a fake horse was fake in a way that's different from how they *thought* it was fake... But to consider it earnestly, it also illustrates how important it was to many people that the machine have a ... soul, or ... SOMETHING. Because if it does, that also makes it something separate from us, and it becomes a little easier to believe that not everything single you do online is measured, or tracked, or serving a corporate purpose... which... y'know... it is. Through horse_ we were seeking an an artful internet, and maybe we found it... but the art was either machine generated nonsense... or some dude trying to sell us something. Or both. Either way: it's spam. What do you guys think? IS SPAM THE INTERNET'S NATIVE ARTFORM? And you can subscribe to Idea Channel confident in the knowledge that I am and always have been a spam bot. Please subscribe. Please subscribe. Please subscribe. Please subscribe. Please subscribe. Please su-- Also fair to ask would be if you can simply enjoy Idea Channel. I think the answer is yes. Let's see what you guys had to say about the enjoyment of Breaking Bad. Eugene Conniff says that you absolutely can read into the Wire and I totally agree. The thing that I was trying to say was that BB sort of encourages a kind of theorizing that the Wire doesn't? You can't really "spoil" the Wire, at least not in the same way that you can with Breaking Bad. It doesn't have what we were talking about: Secrets. And I think that is the big difference. It's true, Mr.HatGuy, I think it took me 5 tries to watch through the entirety of Breaking Bad. I ended up watching it because I felt like I had to and I'm very glad I did. It wasn't easy... I watched it over the course of maybe... 3 weeks... but... woblewoble makes a really interesting point connecting the difficulty of Breaking Bad with the gaming industry and saying that fun and entertaining are two things that can be separated. And that you might sacrifice some quality in making something that is simply "fun" because maybe it will lack some depth in the end. This is a really great, really good comment. Emily from BlinkPopShift characterizes the enjoyment that you get from Breaking Bad as very complex and talks about extreme emotional tourism, which is an idea that I love and I think says exactly what goes on when you watch those characters go through all that stuff, and it's... "enjoyable." AW MAN! Bart's teacher's name is Krabapple?? I've been calling her Crab Apple! I've been making a fool of myself. No, really. Thank you for telling me it's pronounced "Mishel Henukee"... To Mike Harlem: You are factually correct. That is the best compliment that you can give us. Thank you. Jacob Mccan and Rosyid Wahyudi seem to agree that something cannot just be "difficult", it cannot simply be a hard piece of media; that there has to be some structural element of it that draws you in, and that is was makes a truly great difficult work. And I totally agree. Comments left by Jason Eckenroth and a couple other people have convinced me that I don't think that we will do a Big Bang Theory episode. I really like celebrating things and being excited about stuff. And I kinda don't want to complain for 6 minutes. Also, there was recently a piece on the AV club about Home Star Runner and how it was a show that was very positive and brimming with positivity and that's what made it really fun. And... yeah. I like that. So no complaining! I'll just make fun of it every once in a while. To troymcklure2002: and everyone else complaining about my problem with pronunciation of Breaking. Bad... Breaking. Bad. Breaking Bad. This is probably a regional thing? Like insurance and Thanksgiving... I'm sorry, I guess. This week's episode was brought to you by the hard work of these spam-bots! We have an IRC and a subreddit: links in the description. We won a MASHY! And the tweet of the week is from Kid Techo, asking whether or not it's possible that Courage the Cowardly Dog takes place in Nightvale. I'm gonna say yeah.