The Internet is still defined by a 10-year-old tweet

An utterance of a pseudo spambot that is cryptic never loses its significance.

Despite everyone complaining about Twitter, there is no denying that it has brought some incredible phrases into our lives. Things we couldn’t imagine reading in any other place or time in history.

The now-defunct @Horse_ebooks account would have many entries. It is near the top of any list that lists the most treasured sentence fragments. Twitter users continue to re-use old favorites like “(using fingers for triangular shape) SMELL, SMELL, SMELL GOOD NEW NEW slice drink MATCHSPARKLER (thrown into air) STARS, STARS, STARS” but the most well-known @Horse_ebooks Tweet, which was posted 10 years ago today is remarkable in its clarity, and salience. It was a description of the internet and the human world. “Everything happens so many,” @Horse_ebooks tweeted June 28, 2012.

It was a huge success immediately, with thousands of retweets. spread quickly across the site as if it were a prayer. Since then, its popularity has grown exponentially. It has become a place of pilgrimage and a shrine for people who spend most of their time in front of computers over the past 10 years. People search for “Everything happens so many” when the news is overwhelming. They reply to it or post it to their social media accounts with notes like ” more than ever” and ” the eternal mode.” This acknowledges what feels like ancient wisdom. The best thing we can say is that everything is occurring, as it always has, and will continue to happen so much.

These tweets are combined to provide a confusing list of recent history’s most shocking events. The retweet from January 30, 2017 was likely related to President Donald Trump’s immigrant ban and subsequent protests at New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport. One from September 25, 2019, seems to be connected with the announcement of the Trump impeachment inquiry. While the replies and references to “Everything Happens So Much” in March 2020 signaled the onset the pandemic, a February 24, 2022 reply is likely to mark Russia’s invasion Ukraine.

The first sacred tweet was discovered to have been the result of an algorithm. @horse_ebooks was created as a spambot that pulled text from an online e-commerce site, and then posted it as marketing. Because it was poorly written and its random phrases often sounded like a dream, the account gained a following . In September 2013, 15 months after “Everything Happens so Much”, @Horse_ebooks fans learned the truth. The “bot” had actually been dead for many years. Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender took over the account and made it into a performance art project. Bakkila purchased the account from an e-commerce spammer and began tweeting fragments of found text, but carefully selected, from all over the internet. This included instructional ebooks and scans from public records. Bakkila said to The New Yorker that he could not remember where his most famous tweet came from. However, he thought that the context was, “Everything happens so fast when you’re retiring.” Orlean pointed out that Bakkila had made the sentence koan-like. He agreed that he was trying to extract wisdom from the wisdomless piles.

Many fans felt that the reveal had ruined everything . Robinson Meyer , my colleague at the time, wrote that we believed we were listening to the digital work speak happily about us and its anxious masters. “We believed we were agreeing to a program, which is a thing that doesn’t need obliging,” Robinson Meyer, my colleague, said. We had figured out what happens to computers when they are programmed to use wells of human-generated material. They either end up spewing hate speech or collecting excessive amounts of data or producing biased outputs.

For a while, however, @Horse_ebooks appeared to be doing the opposite. It was sorting through the online chatter to find a percus that could be both beautiful and strangely true. It stated in July 2012. It tweeted five more months later. and: Avoid situations. Finally, the “algorithm”, which was just a guy, was exposed in coordination with a same day performance at Manhattan’s gallery.

The insult seems to be over. Over time, @Horse_ebooks gained its status as a mysterious resource of wisdom and art. “Everything happens so many” became a mantra. It is often called the “general tweet” of the decade and the “defining text of our age” by Twitter users. Bakkila recently emailed me to find out his feelings about this legacy. “Whenever someone uses a Horse_ebooks tweet from 2012 to respond to the everything that, despite our efforts, continues to happen so much, they’re adding another sedan to the infinite re-re-recontextualized pileup,” he responded. It’s the best way I’ve ever seen to address the horrifying future we live in.

Our shocking future has, oddly enough, produced a moment of renewed wonder about the mysteries of machines and their relationship to humanity. A writer attempted to revive his girlfriend using an AI text generator. Some found it beautiful and haunting. A Google engineer was convinced that a chatbot of his company had become sentient. This conclusion was made “in his capacity [as a priest] not as a scientist,” according to The Washington Post’s Nitasha Tku. That was interesting. OpenAI’s HTML3 and DALL–E 2 programs have been a hit with nerds and everyone. The former was used to create the cover of Cosmopolitan. It shows a woman wearing a spacesuit and marching towards the viewer. OpenAI employees were quoted in the magazine as saying that she saw the picture with stars in her eyes and felt like she was “swaggering forward into a future I’m excited to be a part”

This sentence was published in the eight weeks between last week’s official announcement that Roe was overturned , and the revelation that Roe would not be overturned . It was the only way I could think of to respond to it. The public version of DALLE (now called Craiyon) generated nine images of Carrie Bradshaw leaping off a cliff. Our AI toys are not doing a good job of reflecting our current situation. They’re just generating absurdities.

@Horse_ebooks may have shared some human wisdom, but it was only because it had a human author. “Everything happens so many” captures how horror can recur even though it feels final. The Roe decision was made and I was knocked to my feet. It can be described as ” this Week”. It makes sense to be ” feeling this today” and it is always true that ” has never felt more true than it does now.”