In 2012, the WWII propaganda phrase “ Keep Calm and Carry On ” was having a moment — and Michael Fowler decided to capitalize with a simple bit of coding .

It was a t-shirt. Not just any t-shirt, mind you — an incredibly niche work of art, adorned with a phrase that perfectly encapsulated who she was: “Never underestimate a MOTHER who listens to IRON MAIDEN and was born in AUGUST.”

Ran Into My Brother Randomly Out Shopping And He Was Wearing This Beauty. He Has Only One Cat

At the time, his company, Solid Gold Bomb, had a catalog of around 1k t-shirts, each conceived by a human. But Fowler knew that the t-shirts were “a numbers game, a quantitative culture” — and to scale, he needed to dramatically increase his output. As it turns out, Fowler’s algorithm had served as a sort of demented Mad Libs, generating phrases like “Keep Calm and Rape Them,” and “Keep Calm and Grope On.”

As Michael Fowler and others learned, big data comes with big responsibility — and big potential consequences.The internet is rife with hundreds of fly-by-night t-shirt companies that operate in a similar fashion. But as it turns out, the key to these operations (huge volume) can also be its curse — and oftentimes, these “algorithmically-generated” products can go terribly, terribly wrong. Keep Calm and… destroy your company In his 2006 book, The Long Tail , Chris Anderson argued that retail was moving away from a model where only a small number of popular products were sold, and toward a system with billions of niche products. The future, he wrote, would be “selling less of more.”