Honor thy error as a hidden intention – my Brian Eno bot

Without getting too rose-tinted, when Twitter was still Twitter, it was full of what I consider social media’s most underrated quality: fun. I did my share of ranting about the ills of the world, but sharing jokes, surreal asides and old TV clips seemed far more valuable than turning it into a demented speakers’ corner.

One of my favourite forms of this fun was the Twitter bot. This may seem absurd, but I don’t mean the ones spamming the site with porn and auto-generated replies. My favourite Twitter bots were the ones that sent out fragments of books, quotes, and so on. There was a Thoreau bot, which quoted a line from his diary each day, a John Cage bot tweeting the stories from Indeterminacy, and many others depending on your interests. They popped into your feed once or twice a day and were just a little different. It was a way of consuming pre-existing material differently, akin to some of the textual experiments that John Cage carried out, such as Mureau, or his work with Finnegans Wake.

Whilst studying sonification for my PhD, I got interested in Twitter and delved into its API. I came to understand the technicalities of automating posting and how these bots might function, but it was the wrong way around for me: I was interested in Twitter as a source of data, not in generating my own feed. After they hosted me at the Birmingham Network Festival, I started following Charles Celeste Hutchins on Twitter. Reading their bio, I discovered that, as a protest (there was backlash against Twitter even then), they had arranged for their tweets to be bot-driven by a platform called Cheap Bots Done Quick. The site operated a bit like the party game exquisite corpse: sentences are constructed from fixed fragments and randomly selected lists. The lists can be replaced by almost any corpus, so the result can effectively become a random selection from a pile of text. An idea started to germinate in my head.

I had a samizdat PDF copy of Brian Eno’s diary A Year with Swollen Appendices (despite also having a legit paper copy). It turned out the text was OCR’d and so could be split, using some string operations, into sentences. I fed the list of sentences into Cheap Bots Done Quick. This wasn’t perfect: sometimes full stops would creep in after initials and be read as sentences or breaks, and the OCR itself was sometimes flawed. But, in keeping with the Oblique Strategy that is the title of this essay, I honoured these errors as hidden intentions with often amusing results.

In its final form, the bot takes two random sentences from the diary and posts them twice a day along with an #eno hashtag. This often produces nonsense or non-sequiturs, but sometimes results in amusing juxtapositions or hidden intentions. Some combinations were particularly good:

“Fax from Anthea saying I’ve been asked to present the Turner Prize this year. So many people have said to me it’s a no-win situation”

“Another difficult day. No thoughts of Wembley at all”

I never “went viral” but got a healthy number of followers for something so niche. There were some amusing interactions. Periodically I’d get notifications that the bot’s musings had been retweeted, or people had replied to it. In a couple of instances, they thought it was Eno himself, sometimes arguing, sometimes asking about themselves. In one entry Brian says “Reading a paper by so and so”, and they replied, saying “Oh yeah? Which one was that?” I had to laugh. Despite the bio explaining what the account was, I was sometimes tempted to reply, “This isn’t the real Brian Eno, you know.” I stayed hands-off.

When Twitter became X, its API was shut down. The bot fell silent. I, like many others, ditched X and moved over to Bluesky and forgot all about it. I don’t know what prompted it — a bit of nostalgia, perhaps finally getting around to deleting my Twitter account — but I googled “are bots possible on Bluesky” and found that the Cheap Bots Done Quick architecture had been ported over to that platform as Blue Bots, Done Quick! by Olaf Moriarty Solstrand. Brian’s random diary lived again.

One important note: I did excise some sentences from the diary. There was one passage where, responding to a Holocaust documentary, he imagines what is going on in the mind of a Nazi: the thoughts are deliberately presented as imagined quotations and are brutally frank.

“Watching a Holocaust programme. Why doesn’t anyone ask old Germans exactly how great it felt to be a Nazi? … ‘I really hated those fucking Jews. … ”

(Eno, 1995, p. 12)

When placed into the bot’s feed and separated into sentences, this passage could become unmoored from its context. Eno ends the passage with “that’s the abyss”, making clear his own view of the imagined quotations, but that context could easily be lost. I removed them from the list of possibilities immediately on seeing them appear. There may be other instances in the diary where reported speech or irony may lead to misconstrued meaning. I try to be watchful for these and may employ a judicious hand on the wheel if necessary.

This does lead me to some thoughts on copyright. Of course, this bot raises obvious copyright issues with Brian and Faber. I could invoke ideas around fair dealing, or the debates sparked by plunderphonics, and point out that no commercial gain is made or intended from using the material. But I can’t hide from the fact that I’m using copyrighted text without permission.

Whilst I couldn’t see a bit of fun, with at last count 77 followers, coming to the attention of the law, the example above — where Brian is potentially being misrepresented — did worry me. Eno has been such a strong influence for me, something of a hero, and his work remains a touchstone.

Perhaps this is more a question of identity and impersonation. Until recently, Eno had no official presence on social media, which may explain why people searching for him found the bot instead. To make the distinction clear, I added an all-caps disclaimer to the bio explaining that the account had no official connection to the real Brian Eno.

Sheffield, November 2025

References

Eno, B. (1995). A year with swollen appendices: Brian Eno’s diary. Faber and Faber.