The problem with computer-generated books is that they are almost never as interesting as human-written books. Most examples so far have been remarkable more for being made with software than because they are compelling works of literature. However, there is one computer-generated novel that I’ve read cover-to-cover and loved, and that is All the Minutes (which only appears to be available via the Internet Archive).
This book is built up from 1,440 tweets, one for each hour of the day. The makers looked for tweets that began with the time, and printed them in sequence. We’re not following a single person and skip between timezones, but the text still flows. It begins:
It’s 6:00AM and I’m wide awake. Good friday morning peeps. Its 6:01am and im sleepy… It’s 6:02am and I’m still up. I have no life. It’s 6:03am and I can’t sleep I think I might have insomnia and if I don’t than I messed up my sleep track.
Seeing the tweets in aggregate means certain patterns become obvious. Sleep is a particular obsession. One voice recurs, repeating how ‘Michigan still sucks’. There is mourning: It’s 1.28am and now officially the year anniversary of my friend Daniel Degale’s death. RIP hun xx. There’s a lot of booze and a lot of shaming people about the things they drink, alcoholic or not: It’s 1.30pm and I’m craving bubbles. Christmas has officially broken me :-S. Its 1:31pm and I just woke up lmfao. It’s 1.32pm and I’ve just seen two girls walk past me with a can of lager! Classy Plymouth.
Using an API to gather the data allows fragments of meaning from across the whole world to be brought together. It’s a chorus, but there’s also an impulse to see this as a character.
It’s 4:21am and i just got out of a meeting that started at 5:48pm. It’s 4:22 AM and I am up! Ready to leave baltimore. It’s 4:23am and the first “normal” passenger just showed up for the 6:05am flight we’re hoping to get on. It’s 4:24am and I still haven’t slept. I have been so sick all night. This is the most sick I’ve been in years. It’s 4:25am and the birds are already tweeting outside.
I read All The Minutes from start to end, just like any other book. I found it enthralling, and it also reminded me of Peter Manson’s long poem Adjunct. Being made up of social media posts, this book had the same raw energy as Darcie Wilder’s excellent Twitter novel literally show me a healthy person (which I reviewed in May).
All the Minutes captures a particular feeling of reading Twitter, how the site ebbed and flowed as the world turned. It would not have been easy to produce something like All the Minutes without the open APIs that Twitter was built on. These allowed artists and creatives to build interesting bot and works based on the site. Now the APIs are no longer free but costs an astronomical price to access. Works like this cannot happen now. Open systems and the gift of an API are incredibly important
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