Horse_ebooks creator Jacob Bakkila: 'Everyone just wants a good love story'

It was a giant in the realm of weird Twitter: Jacob Bakkila masquerading as celebrated spambot @Horse_ebooks for two years, gaming the system and creating digital art. The tweets that had supposedly bubbled up from the ether through an automated system – thought to have been long-abandoned by a mysterious Russian spammer – were revealed as a real-life New Yorker's artistic "performance".

In September, shutting down the account down took less than 140 characters. It was the 742nd day of Bakkila's incessant daily tweeting, meant to appear like that of a spambot oblivious to a presidential election, the VMAs or sleep – a human mimicking a machine mimicking a human – and it was to be his last. He and a team of creatives were ready to launch a project they had begun two years before Horse_eBooks was even a twinkle in cyberspace: Bear Stearns Bravo, an interactive video game mythologizing the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns.

Readers of the Horse goggled at the news that Bakkila, rather than a self-sufficient algorithm, had culled every tweet over the past two years from obscure eBooks and spam. They had followed the Twitter account because they enjoyed the prospect of "Who Else Wants To Become A Golf Ball", "You Think Do You Think Do You Think Restaurants Restaurants Restaurants Do You Should Do You Should Should Provide? Provide?", or "Everything happens so much" showing up on their Twitter feeds. The tweets' dislocation, ugliness, nihilism, and max disorder all approach the textbook characteristics – as defined by historian Jacques Barzun – of Dadaism, a first world war concept originating from French babytalk for "hobby-horse".

But that's only half of it: on the same day of its shutdown, @Horse_ebooks revealed a partnership with another beloved social account; YouTube's Pronunciation Books, an equally surreal and "authorless" project heavily influenced by Google autocomplete (and really coming alive in its last 77 days). Turns out, it was largely the effort of Bakkila's childhood friend and collaborator Thomas Bender.

The two accounts then shut themselves off in a grand reveal of the video game, which had been coming the internet's way since 2009, with hardly any financial return (one of two parts costs $7 to play, and the team included over 100 people). In the game, powerless regulators wade through the system among corrupt bankers in a corporate 1980s utopia – a utopia seemingly spawned from the expansive "literature" of sickeningly disingenuous promotional flyers, press kits and in-house instructional guides for new corporate employees. 

"When we see a stock ticker, generated by high-frequency trading information being summarized and spat out through a news station and displayed at the bottom of a screen … that is a story," Bakkila, a Buzzfeed employee since 2012, told the Guardian. "That is an amazing story. That's a story about a business: a rise and fall. Perhaps it's comedy, perhaps it's a tragedy."

So far, the launch has been moderately successful: 30,000 people have played the game in the past two weeks. Bakkila's using lessons learned from @Horse_ebooks as he pushes forward with Bear Stearns Bravo and other projects.

"I gained a broader appreciation for the language of promotion or promisehoods. It's the equivalent of what happens when you watch several infomercials for a teeth-whitening product. You start to wonder whether your teeth are white enough. Or like reading countless bodybuilding sales packages that have nothing to do with your life. It's an abstract voyeurism – getting superlative answers for problems you don't have, and which you aren't even sure exist."

Bakkila aims to explore corporate personhood and digital personhood in his projects. "Are you the culmination of data that you create? Are you nothing more than the history of emails that you sent, the history of tweets you created? Do you count as your own personal brand? Are we as individuals already corporations, are we post-human to a certain degree?"

And, importantly, "can two automated systems fall in love?" Bakkila proposes to take mundane commonplace of business expression and use them to to "make the world a more inviting place with fiction." 

In the Horse-Pronunciation-Bravo universe, humanized systems own a whole new realm of what they can do, to the outside world, to passersby, and to each other. They can fall in love, as Bakkila proposes @Horse_eBooks and Pronunciation Book had, just before they tumbled away to reveal Bear Stearns Bravo.

"Everyone just wants a good love story," says Bakkila. "Not much has changed since the Greeks." 

He took a few minutes to fill out our traditional MySpace survey. 

What was your first screen name?

I had America Online in 1994 or 1995, but I seriously can't remember my first screen name. Probably something earnest. There was such a polite honesty about screen names during that era, people would actually pick pseudonyms like MovieChick2 or RaceCarDriverRon. It's like a Norman Rockwell painting.

What was your worst day ever?

In college I got food poisoning from an undercooked sausage, was violently ill all night instead of studying, took three finals the next morning, occasionally running to the bathroom to continue to be violently ill, tanked each of the finals, then got on a plane, still violently ill, and went home for the holidays. I went vegetarian for a number of years after that.

What is your favorite smell?

Heat. Is heat a smell? I love hot weather. Eggplant Napoleon is great, too.

What cocktail are you most like and why?

There's almost no good answer to this. What's a cocktail that's really good at sports and isn't afraid of death? I'm that cocktail.

What are three items you will always find in your refrigerator?

My girlfriend and I go out to eat as much as everyone else does in NYC, but we usually have broccoli, Diet Coke and prosciutto. Technically a meal!

What were you doing at midnight last night?

I was hanging out with a friend, having some wine, when he informed me that he had eaten some mushrooms about a half an hour before we started hanging out, and was starting to feel them kick in. So we kept talking, and I tried to explain what the "deep web" is before I realized that I don't actually know what it is, and he wasn't listening anyway, and then he excused himself to go watch the DVD menu screen of a documentary.

What did the last text message you received say?

"I have heartburn almost every night" from my friend Sam in LA. We mostly just text each other the words "bro" and then pictures of sports bar menus. It was ironic when we first started doing this but I'm not so sure these days.

What is a word you say a lot?

"Emphatically" is a big one. "Dope" as a positive acknowledgment or affirmation.

Who was your first crush?

This girl Kate in second grade. She was faster than I was and tripped me when I tried to pass her when running a lap in gym class. I still have cinder marks on my knees from that.

What was your worst injury ever?

In high school I invited a game with Tom, the co-creator of Bear Stearns Bravo, where we'd get some friends together and throw a set of keys up in the air as high as possible and try to catch them in difficult and unusual ways: behind the back, non-dominant hand, directly in front of our face, things like that. We called the game Keys, and within a week or two we had a dedicated set of keys that we'd made for the game, like a huge janitor's set with 20 keys on it, and we'd sharpened some of the edges of the keys to make it more dangerous and difficult to catch. One day I tried a running left-hand-behind-the-back-through-the-legs catch, and one of the keys lodged into my hand, like a pen knife sinking into a vacuum-sealed package of baloney. I just kept running and screaming, waving my hand, trying to dislodge the key.

What is the last song you listened to?

Pouches of Tuna off Action Bronson's Blue Chips.What a ridiculously good album. Bronson is out of control, and Party Supplies has the sickest production: the whole thing sounds like they made it in two perfect hours.

What’s one of the scariest things you’ve ever done?

There was this tornado that touched down in Brooklyn and Queens a few years ago, like 2010, just as I was getting off the train. I hadn't heard any warnings, I just walked off the subway and realized the sky was green, and I had no idea what that meant. Totally didn't see it as a nefarious sign or anything – I was just: "Hey, isn't the sky normally blue? How about that!" Then it started to rain, then it really started to rain, and before I knew it I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me, dumpsters and street signs were being blown around, and junk was flying everywhere.

Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party?

Steve Wynn. I love going to Vegas, but I don't gamble, I just like standing around in nice hotels, and Steve Wynn makes great hotels. Perfect website for his hotels too. He narrates parts of it, like "Hi, I'm Steve Wynn. Welcome to the website for my hotels" in this perfect baritone. I watch this every day.

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