2011·The social era
Horse_ebooks
A Twitter account everybody loved for being a broken machine, which turned out to be a person.
You might remember it as Everything happens so much
A post
This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Registered in 2010, @Horse_ebooks appeared to be a spam account promoting e-books, padding its timeline with fragments scraped from books to evade filters. The fragments were beautiful by accident: "Everything happens so much". Tens of thousands of people followed it as found poetry, on the understanding that no one was writing it.
It first appeared in 2011, during the social era.
It became the internet's favourite argument about authorship. The appeal rested entirely on the belief that the account was a machine, and on 24 September 2013 it was revealed that since 2011 it had been written by a person — Jacob Bakkila of Buzzfeed — as part of an alternate reality game for an art project. The New Yorker's headline was "Horse_ebooks is human after all", and a great many followers felt genuinely deceived.
The account stopped posting that day and has never posted since. The episode is still the standard reference for two arguments the internet has never settled: whether art made in the guise of an accident is a con, and whether an audience is owed the truth about what it is looking at.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Registered in 2010, @Horse_ebooks appeared to be a spam account promoting e-books, padding its timeline with fragments scraped from books to evade filters. The fragments were beautiful by accident: "Everything happens so much". Tens of thousands of people followed it as found poetry, on the understanding that no one was writing it.