The swarm on the wall
A very short story
Quite a milestone. The leather creaked as he settled back. The sense of satisfaction was irresistible. Leaning to meet the glow of his laptop, he marked the day in his calendar. All those followers.
A preoccupation with the right type of content had grown in him, gathering people as he went. He tried to picture them. Not as individuals. As an anonymous crowd. A mass. On the front row he placed those who were most familiar. He knew their faces, voices, their email sign-offs. Beyond that, the crowd was a blur of faceless heads and shoulders. Sketchy, featureless, but intent.
Numbers like that are hard to imagine. Sports stadiums. He recalled once going to a football match with a similar attendance. It gave his imagination a reference point. Sports stadiums also needed heroes. As his mind wandered he pictured scoring a winning goal. Each post he typed was like that goal, he thought, as he brought himself back into the moment.
The TV was playing in the background. The early evening news. A technology segment. Recognising the primary coloured social media logos, he reached across to unmute. The report was of a “click farm”. As the camera stretched slowly outwards, he saw a wall covered in mobile phones. And then another wall. A whole room. Hundreds of phones. Each rapidly flashing away, automatically clicking and moving on. Not a human in sight. A swarm of flickering devices. Each click was part of a pattern. The devices were pushing in the same direction.
The reporter spoke hurriedly of the unknown scale of these click farms: directing, promoting, mimicking, imitating. As the camera roamed something caught his eye. He paused the TV and moved closer. His face almost touched the screen. At first it seemed too grainy to be sure. As he narrowed his stare the doubt drained.
His own profile picture illuminated one of the small screens at the centre of the wall. He pressed play and watched as the image flickered momentarily on one screen and then swarmed, in formation, across the other phones. It took only an instant. As the picture spread it disappeared as quickly. He played it back, watching the flocking of that familiar image as it moved and vanished. Squinting, he shook away the question that came to him.
