Q REPORT: CLICK FARM

 

It sat in the corner of pale brown grass that used to be farmland, back when land was for growing food instead of engagement. The soil still remembered corn. You could smell it when the wind shifted, ghost-sweet, and vaguely of spoiled jizz. Solar panels stretched to the horizon in disciplined rows, tilting their faces toward the sun like penitents who had discovered too late that forgiveness now required a login and password. Beneath them, cables ran into corrugated sheds and data silos that hummed with the low, steady anxiety of machines doing what they were told because they had no choice. Mining the bitcoins for an economy that ran on selling antidotes to the world they poisoned. The hum wasn’t electricity. It was obedience.

I came because I needed money, and money had become allergic to me unless I agreed to generate something called “value”. Which in the old days would have been called labor, or creativity, or reasonably priced dry hand jobs. I didn’t care which. I cared about getting enough cash-equivalent liquidity to keep my bloodstream occupied and my thoughts from turning feral. Violent. Drugs, at this point, weren’t an indulgence. They were maintenance. Like oil changes. Like prayer, if prayer actually worked.

The road was a former highway, too wide for the number of regrets it carried. Asphalt gave way to sand, sand to cracked earth, and then to something else entirely, a fine gray powder that stuck to your shoes and made you feel like you were walking across the cremated remains of a generation. There were no birds. No bugs. There were antennas. Bent ones. Rusted ones. They leaned at odd angles, still listening, still hopeful, like soon to be widows waiting by the phone. A sign hung at the perimeter fence, hand-painted and sun-bleached, nailed to a solar post that had once been a telephone pole.

WELCOME TO THE CLICK FARM

Monetization Is Work

Someone had added a smaller line underneath, maybe years later, maybe yesterday, in a different color and a shakier hand: Tourists must sign waiver.

I signed it without reading it. Waivers are just pre-written apologies for things that haven’t happened yet. My name looked fake even to me. Inside the gate, the air changed. It was cleaner than the outside world, filtered and cooled, but there was something medicinal about it, like a hospital that had given up on healing and focused instead on dying with efficiency. The smell wasn’t manure or ozone but warm plastic and dusted silicon, the scent of phones that had been touched too many times by too many people who rarely washed their hands. A synthesis of technology and pink-eye. Conjunctivitis. 

A woman in a denim jacked met me just past the gate. Boots worn smooth at the toe. Greying brown hair pulled back tight.. Around her neck was a laminated badge that read TOUR DOCENT, printed in a cheerful corporate blue that suggested the color had been chosen by committee and then approved by an algorithm.

“You’re late,” she said, checking a tablet that was older than time.

“Sorry. I don’t have a watch,” I said.

She smiled the way people smile when they’ve heard that line enough times for it to lose its teeth. 

“Everyone says that.”

We walked.

The first barns were long and low, built cheap and reinforced later, like most things meant to last forever. Inside them was the sound. Not loud, not dramatic. Just constant. A rain of taps. Fingernails on glass. Clicks layered on clicks until they formed a texture, like static you could almost lean against. The chickens were real.

That surprised me, though I’m not sure why. By this point I should have known better than to expect irony. They were actual chickens, feathers dulled by indoor light, eyes sharp and restless, but their wings had changed. No longer wings, really. Fingers. Pale, jointed, too long, tipped with flattened nails worn smooth by repetition. Each bird sat in front of a rack of phones mounted at chest height, tapping, scrolling, liking, reacting. Their heads bobbed with the rhythm, not in confusion but concentration.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The screens showed endless feeds that never resolved into meaning. Faces yelling. Products pleading. Headlines written to provoke emotions that had already been exhausted. Everything was urgent. Nothing was important. Each interaction released a microscopic unit of value that traveled down the wires like a kidney stone.

“Selective breeding,” the docent said, like she was talking about heirloom tomatoes. “We started with chickens because they already understood pecking.”

I watched one pause, head cocked, finger hovering over a screen like it was considering mercy. Then it tapped again, faster, making up for lost time.

“What do they think they’re doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. We stood there, bathed in the glow of recycled phones, the light flickering across our faces like welding helmets.

“They’re working,” she said finally. “Same as everyone else.”

There were human workers too, of course. Supervisors in headsets. Technicians monitoring uptime. A few people like me, drifting through on tours, trying to decide if dignity was still a negotiable asset. But the chickens were the backbone. They didn’t unionize. They didn’t complain. They didn’t ask what any of it meant.

I felt the itch start behind my eyes then, the familiar pressure, the warning tremor that meant some part of my brain was beginning to recognize itself in the machinery. I reached into my pocket out of habit, fingers brushing the smooth rectangle of my phone, warm and useless, like a talisman that had lost its god.

Beyond the barns, the land sloped downward toward the cows. Calling them cows felt generous. They were enormous, swollen creatures with hides stretched tight over bodies that no longer obeyed traditional geometry. Too many udders, arranged in asymmetrical clusters. Legs thick as columns. Eyes that reflected not faces but graphs, rising lines, falling lines, volatility rendered as color. Their breathing was slow and labored, each exhale accompanied by a faint hiss as if something inside them was venting pressure.

“These are the Validators,” the docent said, lowering her voice. “Please don’t touch them.”

I hadn’t planned to. The cows fed on waste. Not garbage in the old sense, but discarded content. Posts that failed to perform. Videos abandoned halfway through. Comments deleted before they could metastasize. All of it funneled into digesters, then into the cows, where it was processed into something thicker and darker than milk. Crypto slurry. It moved through transparent pipes that pulsed gently, like veins. The slurry glowed faintly, an unhealthy color somewhere between bile and gold. It flowed toward the Well.

The Well sat at the center of the Farm, a reinforced shaft sunk deep into the earth, ringed with servers, prayer flags, and Japanese Ofuda blessings printed with QR codes. This was where the value emerged. Not mined but extracted. You couldn’t access it directly. It was locked behind layers of monetization thresholds, engagement requirements, proof-of-work rituals that had less to do with metrics than belief.

“People think this runs on computation,” the docent said, almost fondly. “It doesn’t. It runs on attention. Attention is a resource. Like water. Like oil. Like blood.”

A line of people waited at terminals around the Well, fingers moving in tired patterns. Influencers whose faces I recognized from old feeds, now aged past relevance. Journalists who had mistaken visibility for truth. Artists who had learned too late that exposure didn’t pay for medicine or rent or whatever kept the lights on inside their skulls.

They clicked because the alternative was silence, and silence had become indistinguishable from death. One man caught my eye. His hands shook slightly as he worked, fingertips raw, a thin smear of blood on the gorilla glass. He looked up at me and grinned, wide and sincere.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The algorithm loves consistency.”

I nodded, because that’s what you do when someone tells you something weird. They offered jobs openly. No shame about it. A tablet appeared in front of me at the end of the tour, preloaded with onboarding materials. Flexible hours. Competitive micro-compensation. Health coverage contingent on engagement metrics. A signing bonus paid in platform credit.

“Just clicks,” the docent said. “You’re already good at it.”

She wasn’t wrong. I had been training for this my entire adult life. Clicking for meaning. Clicking for connection. Clicking for absolution. Clicking for drugs. The Farm didn’t judge motives. It only measured output. As the sun dropped lower, the panels adjusted automatically, the chickens accelerated, the cows groaned softly, and the Well came alive, roaring with monetized belief. Somewhere far away, numbers changed hands without ever touching skin.

I didn’t take the job that day. Not because I was better than it, but because I wanted to pretend, just a little longer, that there was still an outside. As I walked back down the dead highway, dust clinging to my shoes, phone buzzing uselessly in my pocket, I felt the weight of the system settle behind me like a weather front.

It knew I’d be back.

We all come back.