Behind the curtain of our idle pleasure

by Prof. Shawn Sobers

(excerpt from Beggar’s Honey, 2023)

In the early 2000s, part of my role as a lecturer at university was to work with local schools on projects that would inspire creativity and raise aspirations to work in the creative industries. One of the things I regularly said to young people back then was that about 70% of the jobs they would eventually work in after leaving school hadn’t been invented yet (this was a bit of a buzz phrase for many of us working with schools at the time). I’d often repeat it for dramatic effect, and look into their eyes to see their brains ticking over, trying to visualise jobs they could not yet imagine. Of course, the school children were more than likely just bored and thinking about their lunch, but perhaps, just maybe, one of those young minds is now the proud owner of their very own click farm – selling fake likes, clicks and followers to influencers, politicians, celebrities and companies across the world, employing their own army of low-paid labourers at the rate of one penny per click 1. The clicks are sold at hugely inflated rates to their influencer customers, who are buying cultural capital to not only make themselves look popular and culturally powerful, but also to enable them to generate substantial amounts of money via advertising revenue. Admittedly, this is not quite what I had in mind when I ran those ‘inspirational’ Widening Participation projects, but it does 100% fulfil the brief.

Notwithstanding the fact that click farms are committing fraud and are highly illegal, it must have taken a genius mind to invent such an innovation of technological and economic acrobatics. Click farms tap into a core human desire to belong and be liked, albeit at hyper ego-driven levels and with possibly devious intentions. Human Rights journalist Brooke Binkowski describes the commodity which click farms create as ‘artificial interest’, and in the context of political clientele, she says:

‘I think politicians definitely pay for fake followers, because that gives their messaging a boost. They probably tell themselves that it’s no different to political advertising. Disinformation and propaganda are extremely lucrative. Swaying entire populations of people and monitoring crowd behaviour is something that ad people have been doing for a very long time.’ 2,

Growing up in the 1980s, we would often hear rumours of certain songs in the charts being bulk bought from the registered record shops by music-company-funded gangs – a fraudulent way to boost their top ten position. In 2013, a London court heard how advertising mogul Charles Saatchi had paid his own staff to buy his books to get them in the charts. Saatchi’s former PA Elisabetta Grillo told the court:

‘Charles had written a book and he wanted it high in the list. He gave me £200 so I went to different stores like Waterstones and other shops. He doesn’t like me to go with the cards to buy the books. Maybe because it was Conarco (Saatchi’s own company) and they would find out it was him. I went on my break, all afternoon, in taxis from east London to west London, to buy books. It was like four times a week. It was my job.’ 3,4

So, in some sense, click farms are fulfilling new solutions to the age-old ‘needs’ of cultural producers – the need for audiences, influence and money. Though of course, it is also an entirely new innovation, serving the needs created by social media platforms, fed by mouse clicks and like buttons (which Facebook introduced in 2009). With new scams come new laws, new taskforces, new enquiries, and new ways for the scammers to fly below the radar. And so the cat and mouse chase continues. Whenever I hear of a creative person using their skills and genius for illegal gains, I think to myself, ‘why couldn’t they have used their ingenuity for the good of mankind?’. Though according to Binkowski, that is precisely what many of the politicians and influencers who buy clicks might say; that they are gaining attention to a political policy that would improve society, that they are raising awareness of a product that is good for people, that they are making people happy and bringing a smile to their followers’ faces.

As we can see from Jack Latham’s photographs, the images that people have paid lots of money to buy artificial interest for, range from the weird and wonderful, from the mundane to the possibly profound. With many, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to pay to bring attention to such seemingly random, innocuous images, while with others, such as the sex images, I’m surprised they have to pay for that attention at all. However, I am sure if we tracked down all the influencers, politicians and cultural producers who have paid for a click farm’s services, they would all have reasonable-sounding explanations as to why, for example, a photo of an empty road with a white arrow would be a catalyst for paying for likes and other forms of fake engagement. Maybe after the first time, using click farms becomes an addiction – to satisfy our craving for the dopamine spikes we receive each time we see a notification. According to Marcus Gilroy-Ware:

When more conspicuously technological entities, such as robots or mechanical devices, are applied to basic acts of human life such as cooking, sex, health or sociality, the most common response is suspicion, and rightly so as we resist the ongoing technologisation of our intimate lives. We recognise that pleasure occurs least often in automatic, predetermined, or technologised areas of our lives. Yet in social media we are happily welcoming massive technological edifices into our lives, our homes, our beds, our cars because they have found a way to be pleasurable without being too conspicuous.5

Whether we pay directly for the services of click farms or not, all social media users are their consumers, and derive pleasure from their labour. Popular posts appear in our feeds even when we don’t follow the accounts ourselves. We see them, like them, maybe even share them, and we too are caught in the web of the click farm network, hooked in with our genuine engagement, after the post has been promoted and propelled via artificial interest and the exchange of fees. Although the social media companies themselves say they are working to block the activities of click farms, it is widely acknowledged within the industry itself that they also rely on the fake engagements, as it drives traffic and usage of their sites, and ultimately boosts profit, so they are ‘unlikely to push back too hard’.6

It must be noted at this stage, that the labour in click farms is not automated. The labour is very real, sweat off the backs of hundreds of people, who are paid very little. Each person potentially operates 200 or more networked phones dedicated to liking, following, sharing, reposting, commenting, even leaving fake reviews. Johan Lindquist however, argues that click farms should not be viewed strictly as ‘sweat shops’, but more as evolving work spaces:

The labour that underpins click farming is not so much centred on ‘clicking’ as it is on developing new forms of automation that decrease the reliance on manual labour. Manual labour becomes necessary primarily with regard to customer service, marketing, and occasionally data- entry when automation breaks down.7

Predominantly found in Asia and South America, click farms are mainly populated by ‘low skilled’ informal gig economy workers, and often heavily weighted towards female workers seeking ‘extra income’.8 Add to this mix the fact that these activities are classed as illegal and facing clampdown and you have a far from ideal scenario for good working conditions and labour rights.

Latham’s work provides a fascinating glimpse into the environment and workings of this largely invisible and inaccessible world, from the dual perspectives of the click farm worker and the unsuspecting consumer. At various times during writing this, I have been scrolling through social media, as we all do. With Latham’s work, we get to peer through the curtain. We are no longer blind to mechanisms which feed our idle pleasure, and can now join the dots between the newsfeed images on our screens, and the mined silicon microchips which power the phone itself (which is a different, but closely connected story). Where this ends, none of us knows. We are all too aware that the means of production, communication and resistance are the same which shackle us and others. It is highly apt therefore that this work is analogue – a book to be held in our hands. When analysing the digital world, it is important to step outside of it – to momentarily keep it at arm’s length, to see it anew from a different perspective. At least now we cannot say that we have not been told.

1 Grohmann, R., G. Pereira, A. Guerra, L. Abilio, B. Moreschi and A. Jurno, ‘Platform scams: Brazilian workers’ experiences of dishonest and uncertain algorithmic management’, New Media & Society, 24(7), 2022, pp.1611–31

2 A look at the click businesses manufacturing social media engagement. Sean Mantesso, ABC News, 29 March 2019

3 ‘Saatchi PA bought copies of his book to push it up bestseller list’, court hears. The Guardian, 13 Dec 2013

4 ‘Charles Saatchi made me buy his book to boost it up charts and Nigella Lawson let the children smoke weed’, PA tells court. Paul Cheston, Independent, 13 Dec 2013

5 Gilroy-Ware, Marcus. Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media. (London: Repeater Books, 2017).

6 A look at the click businesses manufacturing social media engagement. Sean Mantesso, ABC News, 29 March 2019

7 Lindquist, Johan. ‘Illicit Economies of the Internet: Click Farming in Indonesia and Beyond.’ Made in China Journal, vol.3, issue 4, Oct 2018, pp.88-91

8 Grohmann R., C. Govari, A. Amaral and M.C. Aquino. ‘Click farm platforms and informal work in Brazil’, ‘Future of Work(ers)’, SCIS Working Paper no.34, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, Wits University (2022).