It’s impossible to explain to your friends what @horse_ebooks is if they aren’t already familiar with it. In that way, it and its many admirers have maintained an informal sort of cult that, as cults tend to do, created a divide. On one side, you had people tattooing themselves with nonsense phrases formatted like they were screenshots from Twitter; on the other, people who looked at their tattooed friends strangely and began to back away.

For those in the know, though, @horse_ebooks was a never-ending source of amusement and conversation. In the interest of full disclosure, I had a favorite @horse_ebooks tweet as my Facebook cover photo for months.

“Your girlfriend or boyfriend, but you have no idea.”

If you’re up on your niche Internet drama, you may have seen some flailing about @horse_ebooks authorial revelations. That is because, as I am sad to announce, Sept. 25, 2013 marked the death of @horse_ebooks. It turns out that the silly little random Twitter account was in fact a piece of online performance art, a preamble piece to a sort of ARG (Alternative Reality Game) by two Buzzfeed employees, Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, called Bear Stearns Bravo.

If my biases aren’t already apparent, I am in the negative camp on this news. In fact, the more I learn about the project, the more frustrated I become. The brilliance of @horse_ebooks was never purely in its content; it was the understanding that the content came about through chance.

Indeed, prior to 2011, when Bakkila and Bender purchased @horse_ebooks, it was owned by a Russian spammer by the name of Alexey Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov had programmed the algorithm that ran @horse_ebooks and its sibling accounts with the goal of redirecting potential customers to websites where he sold e-books clustered around the theme of the Twitter account. In order to avoid being shut down for simply posting links to ad content and perhaps hoping the vagaries of phrasing would provide free SEO work, Kuznetzov set the accounts to skim phrases, words, and letters from places all over the web.

For the first few years of @horse_ebooks’ growing fame, this was the situation, and it meant that for every gem of a tweet, there were 4 or 5 or 20 that were either unintelligible or just not funny. The audience was certainly there, however; t-shirts and tattoos of @horse_ebooks tweets had already starting springing up, which is probably what drew Bakkila and Bender to it in the first place. By the time Gawker contributor Adrian Chen tracked down the actual Kuznetsov, the boys from Buzzfeed had already had control of the account for months.

This seems like bizarre drama in a tiny subculture, right? Can’t we chalk this up to the silliness of those who spend too much time online and move on to talking about lit football games or the impending chill in the air?

No, actually.

The Internet is junk. A majority of the Internet is composed of useless data. Only a small portion, the web we experience, is different, and that portion is overrun with another kind of junk, that which is created by humans at keyboards with more time on their hands than brains in their heads. The charm of @horse_ebooks was the impossibly optimistic belief that somehow a little poorly-conceived marketing algorithm, in the hunt for better spam, could create gems of beautiful poetry, art in chaos.

Finding out that the past two years of @horse_ebooks have been deliberately manufactured is like getting a hilarious drunk text from a friend, giggling about it all night, and finding out the next morning that the friend was stone-sober and just playing drunk to get you to appreciate his humor. Those who defend Bakkila and Bender’s actions as artistic don’t understand that self-defeating conceptual art has no relevance. When you have two link-bait writers sitting at their desks composing fake randomness, the whole thing crumbles.

You might think I’m being too hard on Bakkila and Bender. I’m not.

Any discussion of the hoax perpetuated by the two gentlemen would be incomplete without talking about Gabrielle Dunn. Dunn is a writer who has contributed to the Daily Dot, Cosmopolitan, New York Times Magazine, and others. She was also one of the first to clue into the fact that Bakkila and Bender were running the YouTube channel Pronunciation Book as well as @horse_ebooks.

Way back in July, Dunn figured out that Bakkila was the man behind the YouTube channel and confronted him with the knowledge. From there, he spun a huge web of lies to prevent her from publishing the information; he called her on the phone and sobbed, begged, told her that if she outed him his life would end, both socially and literally. He spun stories about investors and company take-overs, tens of thousands of dollars exchanged and lost. He recruited her friends in the stand-up world to reinforce his story. Against her journalistic instincts, Dunn delayed going public.

Fast-forward to today.

Everything Bakkila was spinning has turned out false, and his campaign of emotional manipulation appears to have been a deliberate, targeted one. Many of Dunn’s friends are, in fact, involved in this grand art installation. According to Dunn, her friends have mocked her since the news broke, and it seems likely that Bakkila was in it to humiliate her the whole time.

Take from that what you will. I take from it a confirmation of my prior opinion: this whole thing stinks. If you believe that an editor of a Koch brothers-owned link-bait site that steals other people’s content is somehow a man of artistic integrity and vision, then I would like a turn with those rose-colored glasses when you’re done. Are they prescription?

If you believe, as I do, that this illustrates a tragic loss of innocence, and that while others may yearn for the days of their youth you will forever yearn for the days before you heard @horse_ebooks was fake, I thank you for fighting the good fight.

 

Halin is a member of the class of 2016.