Put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter, the old theory goes, and they'll eventually hunt-and-peck some Shakespeare. But on Tuesday, the wired world learned that a couple of conceptual-art bards had been masking themselves as the equivalent of gibbons, sending seemingly random spam into the Twitterverse.
Jacob Bakkila (of Buzzfeed) and Thomas Bender (formerly of Howcast) were revealed this week as the human brains behind the popular Twitter account @Horse_ebooks, meaning that its disjointed, nonsensical tweets were not in fact algorithmic spam-as-poetry. (The two men are also behind the YouTube channel Pronunciation Book.)
This unmasking, first reported by the New Yorker, didn't just mean that their own multiyear act of performance art could now be humanely euthanized. Their accounts had inspired so much spinoff creativity — from T-shirts to tattoos — that at least one other humorous read will need to be put down.