Someone must have spotted him on the show’s morning rerun, because Twitter was beginning to light up in confusion and amazement. “YouTube has frozen the count,” he said. “They usually do that when people are hitting it so fast they go, ‘Wait, this might be bots.’ ” He seemed really pleased with how this experiment in pure virality was playing out. “We worked really hard for no one to know it was happening,” he said, “to see if anybody would know that it was happening.”

Stephen Colbert on Making The Late Show His Own | GQ

This is very William Gibson from his “Bigend” trilogy.