PBS Idea Channel

Did Horse_ebooks Show Us that SPAM is the Webs Native Artform (2x26)

Air date: Oct 16, 2013

Horse_ebooks was a twitter spambot par excellence. It was algorithmic assembled poetry. It was the soul in the machine. But we recently learned that for the past few years horse_ebooks was in fact human authored, by a Buzzfeed writer, no less! And that made us angry. Why? Because when it was computer created, horse_ebooks was, as strange as this sounds, nearly perfect SPAM. It was SPAM that grabbed our attention, that gave us the joy of meaningful nonsense and, most importantly, we chose to participate in its ridiculousness. And that was its art. Horse_eBooks had perfected the art of SPAM!!!