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

Without getting too rose-tinted about it, in the days when it was Twitter, not X, it was full of what I consider to be social media’s most underrated aspect: fun. I don’t need to get political here and I did my fair share of social media ranting about the ills of the world, and had to train myself out of it, but the fun element of tweeting, sharing jokes, surreal asides, and old TV clips had, to me, far more value than it being some kind of demented speakers’ corner.

One of my favourite species of this fun was the twitter bot – now again, I’m sure plenty of people are thinking “What? Those annoying things?” and – hold on! – I don’t mean the ones spamming up the site with porn and AI replies. Even amongst the well-intentioned ones, I disliked those that replied to keywords, so you’d mention something in a tweet and they’d pop up in your replies – memorably, there was one that corrected anyone who mentioned the Czech Republic and pointed out it was, in fact, officially Czechia now. My favourite twitter bots were the automated 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, and 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.

I was intrigued by Twitter as a source of data to sonify as part of my PhD studies and I delved into its API and read up about how bots worked. The technicalities were not impossible but I didn’t really understand how to deploy a bot permanently. After hosting me at the Birmingham Network Festival, I started following Charles Celeste Hutchins on Twitter but was confused as to why their posts were mostly random quotes about communism that seemed to repeat. Reading their bio I discovered that – in protest against Twitter (there was backlash even then) – they had arranged for their tweets to be bot-driven by a platform called Cheap Bots Done Quick. This site operated a bit like the party game ‘exquisite corpse’ - sentences are constructed with parts replaced by lists so for instance: “Today I went to [x] and saw [y]” and x is a list of venues and y a list of people. Not so interesting but you get the idea. The connecting parts can be omitted and list [x] can be replaced by any corpus. The tweet effectively just becomes a random pick from a pile.

An idea started to germinate in my head. I had a samizdat pdf copy of Brian Eno’s diary A Year with Swollen Appendices that I’d downloaded at some point despite having a legit paper copy. It turned out the text was OCR’ed (saving me a job) and so could be split – using some string operations – into sentences. This wasn’t perfect – sometimes full stops would creep in after initials and so on 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. It made for some amusing bloopers. I fed the list of sentences into the Cheap Bots… which uses Tracery to write the tweets based on a corpus of material in JSON (a bit of transformation was required here). In its final form, the bot takes two random sentences from the diary and posts them twice a day along with an #eno hashtag. Admittedly this often produces nonsense or non-sequiturs, but sometimes results in amusing juxtapositions or hidden intentions. e.g.

“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”

There were some amusing interactions – I never ‘went viral’ but got a healthy amount of followers for something so niche. Periodically I’d get notifications that the bot’s musings had been retweeted or in a couple of instances people had replied to it thinking it was the man 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 twitter bio spelling out the nature of the account I was tempted sometimes to log in and reply “this isn’t the real Brian Eno you know” but I stayed hands off.

Of course, Twitter is no longer Twitter (and arguably not fun at all anymore) and as part of its change to X the 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 particular passage in the diary where, responding to a Holocaust documentary, he imagines what is going on in the mind of a Nazi – his thoughts on this are brutally honest and very frank.

Watching a Holocaust programme. Why doesn’t anyone ask old Germans exactly how great it felt to be a Nazi? What were they getting from it? We know, at last, the victims’ stories. What about the perpetrators? ‘I really hated those fucking Jews. Kicking them about was a game for us.’ Or ‘I was in it for the sex. There’s nothing like a frightened Jew - plus you can just get rid of them when you’ve finished.’ That’s the abyss ...

(Eno, 1995, p. 12)

Put into the bot, the lines in quotes appear unmoored from their context (“that’s the abyss”) and become extremely offensive. I removed them from the list of possibilities immediately on seeing them in the context of the bot’s feed. 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 is in complete violation of Brian and Faber’s copyright. I might invoke ideas of fair use or the debates sparked by plunderphonics and argue that no commercial gain is made or intended from using the material, but I can’t hide from it. If I received a cease-and-desist, I would, of course, comply.

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 inadvertently defamed, 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 case of identity rights: until recently, Eno had no official presence on social media, hence the confusion of people searching for him and finding this bot. In mitigation, I added an all-caps disclaimer to the bio to clarify that this account has 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.