#7 - Serendipity and Twitter Bots
Serendipity and Twitter Bots
This week’s newsletter is a day late because of work-related madness! But, we shall press on with a slightly short newsletter on Twitter bots. Welcome to the seventh issue of Camp of the Children.
Twitter bots
One of my favourite parts of Twitter are bot accounts — no, not the malicious, annoying bots distributing odd links and inflating follower numbers, but cute bots, nice bots, bots that are friendly and fun, if a bit odd. The kind of bots that you would be friends with for their oddly-timed and always-slightly-irrelevant-but-ultimately-endearing interjections.
Magic Realism Bot
Meet the Magic Realism Bot (@MagicRealismBot), which has 118.1k followers (as of today). Every four hours, the bot generates a premise for a story in style of magic realism. A sampling of some of my favourite recent outputs will give you a better idea:
Perhaps one of the most poetic ones I’ve read:
You can read more about the creator and the project here and here.
Every word did 9/11
Something a bit more macabre but equally fascinating is EveryWordDid9/11 (@EveryWorDid911): “Slinging wild accusations to literally every word in the English language in no particular order. Will have accused everything by 2024.” This bot puts random words in front of the phrase “did 9/11”, in a play on conspiracy theories surrounding the “true perpetrator” of the attacks of 9/11. This one is a bit darker, but for good reason — the syntax of conspiracy theories is easily mocked. Of course, once in a while, you get some real gems:
It would be fascinating to take all these posts and see which ones have received the most likes.
Every DNA
Back to the fantastical and pointless again, we have Every DNA (@EveryDNA), a bot which generates the classic helix of DNA using two emojis.
Part of the joy of this bot is looking at the juxtaposition of the two emojis — it could be aesthetically pleasing, or there could be some meaning read into the pairing, or it could just be funny. I haven’t been quite able to discern any patterns in which posts are more popular, but there must be some reason for the disparity in favourites and retweets.
The joy of serendipity
There is probably something quite deep I could reflect on about automation and creativity, but for now, I just want to observe that so much of the joy of these bots is in how apt seemingly random combinations of things can be. These bots can be said to be “generative”, in that they put together things that the human mind would not consider, but which, when done so, generate meaning and meaningful reactions. The serendipity of these combinations put together by the bots gives rise to associations that provoke, tickle, or confuse. This relationship between bot and human (generator/assessor or generator/connector) is, in my view, quite a productive one.
Status Board
Listening: For some reason, I am liking Grimes’s music a lot. Art Angels and whatever songs of Miss Anthropocene have been released have been quite a constant companion in the past few weeks. To think that I stumbled upon her when Twitter exploded over rumours that she and Elon Musk were having a baby.
Reading: The reading hiatus continues — I do feel slightly more refreshed not rushing to read at every opportunity.