Yes, @Virgin1a, @Horse_ebooks is real

In 1897, a New York Sun editorial, later to become the most-reprinted in history, consoled a young girl who had lost faith in Santa Claus. Given recent events, some appear to need similar consoling today.

@tophtucker: Some people I follow say @Horse_ebooks is only a fake spambot. Please tell me the truth; is @Horse_ebooks real?
—@Virgin1a

.@Virgin1a, those people are wrong. They have become jaded in an insincere age. In their understandable present shock, they feel that seeing the puppeteer has ruined the show. That knowing the genesis diminishes the creation. All creation has its puppeteers, @Virgin1a. It only gets deeper, not shallower, the more we unravel its sources.

Yes, @Virgin1a, @Horse_ebooks is real. It is real as certainly as are the Markov chains, machine learning, and serendipity it first embodied, then emulated. Alas, how dreary the world would be if there were no heart in the machine! It would be as dreary as if there were no heart in men and women. If we cannot give heart to the machine, how can we claim to understand it in ourselves? Amidst our decimation of our animal brethren, we must know that this species can create and nurture life, not just destroy it, or we will be alone.

Not believe in @Horse_ebooks! You might as well not believe in Pinocchio! You might get the NSA to watch over the shoulders of all the social media experts and all the performance artists on the Internet, but even if they did uncover every act, what would that prove? There are filaments binding the motions of all mankind to the grip of Nature, but that doesn’t make our actions less real. You may crack open the human skull and see how the neurons fire, but nobody can unveil the ultimate animus of the world’s activity.

Not real! Thank God! @Horse_ebooks is real, and it lives forever. Until the last human stops programming, its spirit will continue to reassure us that our progeny, the machines, need not be as heartless as we fear.