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The full episode, in writing.
On June 2, 2011, a Tumblr blog called "Horse_ebooks" posted a sentence fragment: “Everything happens so much.” That sentence, glitchy and out of nowhere, would end up on t-shirts, memes, and even as the punchline of webcomics. But behind that burst of nonsense was one of the internet’s weirdest, longest-running mysteries: Who ran Horse_ebooks, and what was it actually trying to do?
Horse_ebooks started as a Twitter account in February 2010. The name came from the fact that it was originally created to sell digital horse-related ebooks, part of a Russian spam network that pushed thousands of “ebooks” through automatically generated tweets. Most of these accounts faded into obscurity, but Horse_ebooks kept going. Its tweets made little sense—things like “No. The bones are too” or “I will make certain you never buy knives again”—but they were just coherent enough to be funny.
By mid-2011, the account had over 10,000 followers. By 2012, it passed 100,000. The reason: fans started believing Horse_ebooks was no ordinary spam bot. People noticed the tweets sometimes felt too weird, too perfectly timed, too accidentally poetic to be random. Some users suspected a human had taken over.
The debate split into two camps. One group—let’s call them the Purists—insisted Horse_ebooks was a “true bot,” its charm coming from garbled text scraped from books and websites. The other camp—the Conspiracists—believed a human was behind the account, possibly an artist running an elaborate performance.
A key fact changed the discourse in September 2013. Jacob Bakkila, a BuzzFeed employee, revealed in a New Yorker interview that he had secretly acquired the account in 2011. From that point on, Horse_ebooks was no longer a pure bot: it was curated and sometimes manually tweeted by Bakkila, who used automated scripts to generate content but also intervened with his own posts.
That revelation explained why the tweets had grown more artful. Bakkila and his collaborator Thomas Bender turned Horse_ebooks into a kind of net art project, culminating in a performance piece called “Bear Stearns Bravo.” This surprised fans, some of whom felt betrayed that the randomness was actually, at least in part, intentional.
Horse_ebooks had used a tool called Yahoo Pipes to filter and recombine text from RSS feeds and scraped ebook content. This process created fragments that were sometimes entirely random, but Bakkila admitted he would tweak the system or select particularly funny outputs to post directly.
The drama deepened when another popular surreal Twitter bot, “RealHumanPraise,” was revealed to be run by the same art collective. RealHumanPraise posted short, generic compliments like “You’re doing a good job!” but only ever in the style of automated customer service feedback. Fans learned both accounts were part of a coordinated “net provocation” designed to test the boundaries between human and machine creativity online.
The social media platform Twitter never suspended Horse_ebooks for spam, despite banning thousands of other bots in periodic purges. This was unusual, given that Twitter’s spam detection algorithm in 2012 removed an estimated 500,000 accounts per day for automated behavior.
A 2013 MIT study on meme propagation named Horse_ebooks as a key example of “accidental virality,” where content rises organically due to unpredictable audience engagement, not just algorithmic amplification.
Horse_ebooks inspired dozens of imitators, including “dog_ebooks,” “cat_ebooks,” and even “Obama_ebooks.” Most failed to capture the same mix of randomness and accidental profundity. The phenomenon led to a broader conversation about what counts as authorship in the internet age: Is something art if it’s made by a bot? What if a human quietly steers the bot from behind the curtain?
The “Everything happens so much” tweet was adopted by the webcomic xkcd as a recurring reference, and appeared as graffiti on walls in New York, London, and Tokyo by 2014. At its peak, the phrase was referenced in over 4,000 Tumblr posts in a single week.
In 2015, digital preservation researchers from Stanford University listed Horse_ebooks in their “Born-Digital Archiving” project, highlighting it as an example of ephemeral web culture that is almost impossible to archive in its original, interactive form. The reason: Twitter’s API changes and shifting spam policies made it difficult to programmatically save every bot tweet.
The “Horse_ebooks” reveal led to a minor backlash. Some fans felt the account’s magic depended on believing it was a pure bot. Others argued that the blend of human and algorithmic authorship was itself a new kind of art form, unique to the age of social media.
Jacob Bakkila’s own explanation was that the project was “about exploring how people ascribe meaning to randomness,” and that the experiment worked only because people wanted to believe in the bot’s authenticity.
By the time Horse_ebooks was officially retired in September 2013, it had posted more than 19,000 tweets. The account’s follower count had reached nearly 214,000—greater than the population of a city like Des Moines, Iowa.
A New York Times article from October 2013 named Horse_ebooks one of the “50 Most Influential Web Phenomena” of the decade, putting it alongside phenomena like Pepe the Frog and Slender Man.
After the reveal, some Twitter users attempted to “reboot” Horse_ebooks by running their own bot accounts using open-source Markov chain generators. None reached more than a few thousand followers.
The “Horse_ebooks effect” led to a wider cultural trend: brands and influencers began experimenting with deliberate absurdity and anti-marketing, mimicking the accidental poetry of bots. For example, Denny’s and MoonPie became known for surreal, bot-like tweets, but their efforts were always “corporate,” rather than mysterious and community-driven.
The phenomenon influenced academic research. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Digital Humanities cited Horse_ebooks as evidence that “algorithmic authorship” can create new genres of storytelling, blurring the line between reader and creator.
Horse_ebooks also sparked debate about internet archiving. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was unable to fully capture the experience of the account in real time, because Twitter’s layout and API restrictions filtered out bot tweets from public timelines.
In 2014, a small group of Horse_ebooks fans launched a zine called "Horse Zine," collecting printouts of favorite tweets and essays about the account’s meaning. Only 50 issues were released, making them rarer than some vintage comic books.
The project became a staple in digital art exhibitions. In 2015, the New Museum in New York displayed Horse_ebooks tweets on a scrolling LED ticker as part of a “Net Art Anthology” show.
In later years, Horse_ebooks was referenced by AI researchers as an early example of “generative content” on social media—content that is produced by software instead of people, but still widely shared and discussed as if it carried intentional meaning.
A surprising fact: At least four academic dissertations between 2014 and 2017 cite Horse_ebooks in their literature reviews on the philosophy of language and digital authorship, showing its impact outside the world of memes.
To this day, no one outside of the original creators knows exactly how many of Horse_ebooks’ tweets were pure bot output and how many were hand-picked. That unresolved question keeps “Everything happens so much” alive in digital folklore, as fans continue to debate just how much of the internet’s best nonsense is truly random.