Why couldn’t @horse_ebooks be left alone as a weird internet phenomenon? Because while it might not be run by a major corporation, it maintains the same ideology: that anything that attracts attention is too valuable to be left to its followers. It has to be turned into a tool for promotion, be that corporate promotion or the self-promotion of an artist.

Jacob Bakkila could have made his own Twitter account to post gibberish to. But the point was to appropriate something people were already paying attention to. What we thought was marketing rediscovered as art has turned out to be art rediscovered as marketing. The total victory of corporate media and social ownership as a way of looking at the world is that we can’t just like anything without it becoming part of a brand or a product, or without somebody taking it over to stick their name all over it. What’s disappointing is the confirmation that this is just the world we live in.