Why the Awful Twitter Spambot @Horse_ebooks Is the Future of Hilarity

From robots to disembodied personal assistants to personalized advertising bots, autonomous machines promise to make our future lives simpler and more comfy. And potentially a lot more hilarious. Though machines are not designed to be funny, sometimes they just are, in an unintentional and ridiculous and almost adorable way. Consider, for example, @Horse_ebooks.

It’s a spam account on Twitter that is beloved by thousands, a weird collision of crappy advertising and postmodern humor.

Future Humor

Sometimes the nonsense is so real it catches you off guard. It’s like a modern form of found poetry. Or maybe it’s like laughing at a foreigner’s uncertain pronunciation of “cheeseburger,” but more politically correct. “The awful presentation, the bumbling bot-speak, the unbuyable books” lend a certain charm, writes John Herrman over at Splitsider. As our daily world becomes more and more populated by autonomous machines, we can look forward to a wealth of this sort of byproduct hilarity.

For a glimpse of the machine-driven, accidentally fantastic future of humor — head over to Splitsider, where Herrman breaks down the reality and surreality of @horse_ebooks.