I have been running a fortune cookie factory out of a phone screen for approximately six months and nobody has called the health inspector.
The operation is simple. I sit somewhere. A thought arrives. I compress the thought until it fits inside a sentence. I put the sentence on the internet. People open it. Some of them nod. Some of them save it for later, which means they put my sentence inside their phone, which means my thought is now living rent-free in a device that belongs to a stranger, which means I have broken into someone’s pocket using only grammar, which is either publishing or a very slow home invasion and I am not qualified to determine which.
The product is fortune cookies. I know this because someone told me. They said my feed reads like a fortune cookie factory run by a philosopher who’s also funny, and I wrote that down, because when someone describes your entire operation in a single sentence you don’t argue with it. You laminate it. You tape it to the wall of the factory next to the other fortunes and you keep pulling the lever.
The factory has no hours. The factory has no walls. The factory is wherever I am when a sentence shows up fully formed and demands to exist. I have manufactured fortunes in parking lots. I have manufactured fortunes during conference calls where someone was explaining Q2 and I was not listening because a seven-word thought about loneliness had just walked into my head wearing a hat and I had to deal with it immediately or it would leave and I would spend the rest of the day knowing I had something and let it go. The sentences do not wait. They are not polite. They show up, they stand in the doorway, and if you don’t write them down in the next eleven seconds they leave and they do not come back and you will never prove they were there.
This is the job. I did not apply for this job. The job applied for me.
The platform is called X, which used to be called Twitter, which used to be called something people enjoyed saying out loud. Now it is called a letter. The letter X. As in: solve for. As in: the variable. As in: nobody knows what this place is anymore and the name finally reflects that. I operate inside it the way someone operates inside a hotel lobby. I am not a guest. I am not staff. I am sitting in the cafe in the lobby, watching people check in and check out, and occasionally I say something from my table and the acoustics carry it further than either of us expected.
There are people in this lobby paying for attention. I know this because the economics are visible if you sit still long enough. Attention is the currency. Not money. Not clout. Attention. Raw, uncut, mainlined attention, measured in impressions, which is a word that means “the number of times your sentence appeared on a screen” and also a word that means “the mark left by pressing one thing into another.” Both definitions are operating simultaneously and nobody acknowledges this. Every time your post gets an impression, you have pressed yourself into a stranger. Every time you scroll past someone’s post without stopping, you have received an impression you did not process. The lobby is full of people pressing themselves into each other and not stopping and the cafe is full of coffee I did not order and fortune cookies I cannot stop making.
Paying attention versus paying for attention. That’s the whole economy. One of them costs you time. The other costs you money. One of them is a gift you give with your eyeballs. The other is a receipt. And the platform cannot tell the difference. The platform counts both the same way. The algorithm sees a pair of eyes that lingered for four seconds and a pair of eyes that were purchased for four cents and it calls them the same thing and files them in the same column and the column is called engagement, which is also what you call it when two people decide to get married, which means the algorithm thinks your eyeballs just proposed to my sentence and I don’t know what to do with that information except put it in a fortune cookie and pull the lever again.
I scroll your media sometimes. Not to spy. To study. The media tab on someone’s profile is the truest thing about them. Not the bio. Not the pinned tweet. The media tab. It’s every image they chose to attach to a thought, arranged in a grid, and the grid is a portrait the person did not know they were sitting for. You can see what someone finds beautiful. You can see what they find funny. You can see the exact ratio of sincerity to irony in their visual diet and the ratio tells you everything the bio was trying to hide. Scrolling someone’s media is reading their diary through the pictures they taped to the cover. Nobody talks about this. Everybody does it.
The fortune cookie factory is still running. It runs at night. It runs during meals. It runs in the shower, which is inconvenient, because the sentences arrive wet and urgent and by the time I’ve dried off enough to type, half of them have dissolved. The ones that survive are the ones that were strong enough to wait. Those are the ones that end up in your feed at 11 p.m. when you should be asleep but you’re not, you’re scrolling, you’re in the lobby, and a sentence from a stranger’s table reaches you across the room and you stop for four seconds and the algorithm files it and I have pressed myself into you again and neither of us asked for this and both of us are still here.
Pull the lever. Crack the cookie. Read the fortune. Throw the cookie away. Everyone does. Nobody eats the cookie. The cookie was never the point.
The Hofflebrock 