vox non-populi

It seems @Horse_ebooks is coming to an end.

A lot of people seem dismayed to have discovered that it was an actual art project and not an accident, whereas I have always assumed there was a human behind the tweets; I know too much about the current state of machine intelligence to find essays on the "spambot gone rogue" anything but credulous. After all, as a closed captioner, I make my living as a human intelligence shaping the output of a computer so it reads as human-like, and I have seen the ways it fails when drawing from a significantly more constrained input.

The people who think it's "ruined" now that they know a person did it are, to my mind, people who resent the continued existence of poets. "The medium is the message" does not mean the meaning-maker is obsolete, but that the means of communication is part of the communication. So it is with @Horse_ebooks. I feel no sense of diminishment. Or of triumph.

I'm just sad the game is ending. It is as though my favorite band has broken up and my bus route has been discontinued.

I will try to muster some excitement for the follow-up project, "Bear Stearns Bravo," but so far it seems awful.