As far as we know, Thomas Piketty is not on Twitter.
His book, it turns out, now is.
Sort of.
For the past day or so, pikettybot has been spitting out random sentences from "Capitalism in the 21st Century," Piketty's new acclaimed work on income inequality through time and throughout Western nations.
The bot is the work of Nathan Rosquist, an MFA student in San Francisco specializing in economics data visualization. He heard about Piketty from a friend, and quickly grasped the inordinate amount of coverage it's been receiving. But he soon began questioning whether it was getting through to the mainstream — Rosquist admits he barely made it through it himself. He decided a Twitter bot might help address the issue.
"It was largely about making it more digestible and making it real for people, instead of this symbolic thing that people have opinions about but nobody’s read."
The bot has two parts to what might be called its personality. The first is the 140-characters-or-fewer sentences of the book it tweets out every minute or so. Rosquist used an electronic version of "Capitalism," and Twitter's API, to hunt for text objects that fit this category.
The domestic capital of the United States is worth about 450 percent of national income.
— pikettybot (@pikettybot) April 29, 2014It is interesting to look at how this ideal affected the dynamics of wealth distribution.
— pikettybot (@pikettybot) April 29, 2014In a way, the French Revolution of 1789 was more ambitious.
— pikettybot (@pikettybot) April 29, 2014"They're so out of context, but some are just really to the point, nice and bite sized," he said.
The bot — and, Rosquist says, he himself, — also has a great degree of sympathy for the income inequality Piketty says is likely to worsen.
So the bot has digested the names and data found in the Forbes 400 list and emits periodic tongue-in-cheek "props" to the billionaires and millionaires on it. For example:
Let's hear it for Ray Lee Hunt, in Dallas, Texas, who has $5.6 billion (mostly from oil, real estate). #piketty
— pikettybot (@pikettybot) April 29, 2014With these kinds of tweets, Rosquist has been entering into conversations with Twitter uses who don't realize they're not talking to a human.
@pikettybot Henry Kravis the founder of KKR that employs 980,000 in companies and creates value for >40m retiree pensions.
— Carl Vause (@carl_vause) April 29, 2014Twitter in fact temporarily suspended his account for spam, but Rosquist found a work-around.
"I'm trying not to have it be snarky, or outright provocative, or incendiary, or any of these things," he said. "I just want it to be curious, like extremely curious, about what’s going on."
Rosquist only began the project this week, and he says he'll keep it running until he gets bored.
"It feels very alive," he said.