Despite Twitter’s hellish descent into an app full of extremists and propagandists, it still remains a storied website. Rich with history, cultural moments and foundational texts, one of those texts being from the now-defunct account @Horse_ebooks.
The account was a spambot, pulling text from e-commerce websites and posting it as marketing for books, catalogs and magazines. The account often posted nothing but nonsense, incoherent sentences with occasional moments of profound clarity, almost as if the machine running it would gain a full consciousness, if only for a second.
On June 28, 2012, @Horse_ebooks delivered maybe its most profound realization after hundreds of hours of combing through digital text, “Everything happens so much.”
I don’t think there’s a phrase that captures the essence of the deeply confusing, profoundly stupid, chaotic and interconnected world we find ourselves in. It is the ethos of the 21st century.
Almost everyone will agree with you; everything does, in fact, happen so much whether it’s your personal life, in politics, at work or school, or just things in the news. There’s an overwhelming amount of “stuff” happening at any given moment. Being on the internet and having a 24/7 news cycle worsens this feeling.
But I think that this phrase also has another meaning that’s relevant to the world we live in. In a world so full of irony and disingenuous interaction, this phrase is a shattering of the walls. It’s an admission of the fact that we don’t know what we are doing.
There’s a wrinkle to this post, though. At some point before 2012, @Horse_ebooks changed from being a chatbot that was spewing out posts from random words it found in online literature to being bought by two artists who turned the account into a carefully curated account that resembled the original spambot. The two of them pulled the phrase by splicing a sentence that roughly said, “Everything happens so much faster when you’re retired.”
The spambot had a rugged wilderness to it. I was surprised to learn that it was now under the control of two people deliberately trying to emulate something that was wholly organic and nonsensical. But maybe that’s the magic of the account. “Everything happens so much” as a phrase was so powerful because it was a moment of human-like clarity for a machine, but it was in fact humans trying to replicate their own clarity in a machine and preserve its wild nature.
“Everything happens so much” is such a sobering statement from a machine. It’s an admission that even the digital minds that are supposed to be perfect and understand all are capable of feeling the growing anxiety we’ve all felt in the 21st century. And of course, because everything happens so much, a person would be replicating that machine. Everything has happened so much that we are looking to find our humanity in the very machines that have brought us to this current moment.
In an age where everything is ironic, meta and subversive to our expectations, even our most foundational texts on the internet would reflect that. Everything is a subversion of expectations; we are in a perpetual state of it happening so much. Even our spambots, designed to be stupid and unable to have any thoughts, want to be people, and our people want to be spambots.
