https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/18/5118566/the-accidental-dystopia-of-twoheadlines-twitter-bot
“Darius Kazemi, the bot’s creator, was initially trying to automate the kinds of jokes people make when, say, Ben Affleck is picked as Batman the day before Steve Ballmer announces his retirement from Microsoft. Besides Two Headlines, he’s created generators for terrible topical puns, dangerously pointless startups, and he’s currently running a version of National Novel Writing Month for computer-generated prose. In building Two Headlines, though, he’s also accidentally created a cyberpunk story generator.
“What is near-future late-capitalist dystopian fiction but a world where there is no discernible difference between corporations, nations, sports teams, brands, and celebrities?” he writes in an excellent explanation of the account, referencing a tweet by a fan. “@TwoHeadlines is not generating jokes about current events. It is generating jokes about the future: a very specific future dictated by what a Google algorithm believes is important about humans and our affairs.””
