Whether you consider it brilliant machine-curated poetry or the incoherent by-product of an overseas Internet scam, there is no denying the allure of Horse_ebooks. The mysterious equestrian Twitter account would just be another spambot, were it not for its ability to procedurally summon surprising, nonsensical and accidentally poignant bits of context-free prose into our social streams. In an Internet of increasingly predictable and derivative memes, Horse_ebooks is a loose cannon, an enigmatic relic of the weird and untamable network that once was.Aside from evidence that the account originated in Russia, however, no one until now had been able to trace the bot's human origins. In a post on Gawker last week, Adrian Chen claimed to have unmasked the man behind the horse. But was it for the best?Read the rest at Motherboard.
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