Last week’s issue of The New Yorker featured a piece by Susan Orlean on Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, the masterminds behind the semi-recently deceased Twitter sensation @Horse_ebooks. For anyone unable to penetrate the magazine’s paywall and/or lagging behind on the meme cycle, @Horse_ebooks captured hundreds of thousands of followers by tweeting out mysterious, Dadaist phrases like “Demand Furniture” or, most famously, “Everything happens so much” over a span of about two years. 

The account bewitched social media. Was it a bot whose faulty algorithms were inadvertently blurting out nonsense? If so, what was the source material it was pulling from? Who had created the thing in the first place - and why were they content to let it do whatever the hell it was doing? No one knew the answers, which of course only amplified the speculation.