Nanni Balestrini's Tristano, published last month by Verso, is a novel co-authored by an algorithm. Its 10 chapters are each composed of 15 pairs of paragraphs, and the order of these pairs has been randomised. Such a printing was not possible when the book first appeared in 1966, but technology has made it so. Verso's print run of 4,000 copies, each with a unique, numbered cover, is but one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations. Conceptually, it is akin to BS Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969), lovingly resurrected in 2008 by New Directions, or Marc Saporta's Composition No 1(1962), which received the app treatment from Visual Editions last year – but in those cases, the co-author, subordinate as they may be, is the reader, who ultimately shuffles the pages of the work themselves.

While all of these works take aim at the fixed unreality of fiction, the traditional novel's leaden and dogmatic adherence to linear time and the preference of causality over chance (and all, in one way and another, succeed in surprising and beautiful ways), only Balestrini's has something new to say about times in which we live, and says it differently now than it did in the 60s. Balestrini's previous effort, Tape Mark 1, was created on an IBM computer, lines of poetry spliced by an algorithm. Tristano was born digital, and while the practical difference in its method may be slight, it best reflects the way we read today: across blogs and newspaper sites, down comment threads and through links, following a path co-created by the eye and the algorithms that place different texts before us at every moment.

As Umberto Eco notes in his introduction – a highly enjoyable primer on algorithmic texts – much of the genius of creativity lies in arrangement, not originality. As such, Balestrini's prophetic work presages our contemporary outsourcing of so much genius to the machines.