How one cent of fake engagement fuels a billion-dollar industry of lies, manipulation, and digital deception.

Author’s Note
This story is inspired by investigative reporting from Eric Schwartzman on bot farm disinformation and social media manipulation, along with insights from advertising veteran Bob Hoffman, who has long argued that digital ad fraud is not just a marketing problem—it’s a societal one. The title comes from a real stat: bot farms often charge just $0.01 per fake engagement—a like, a follow, a comment. One penny. That’s all it takes to deceive an algorithm, distort perception, and destroy trust – the only currency that ever mattered.

A penny wakes up in the dust of a couch cushion.

Shiny. Ordinary. Worthless to most. But not to the world’s most powerful machine: the attention economy.

This penny doesn’t land in a piggy bank or a donation jar. It’s digitized—converted into a microtransaction, sold on a Telegram thread called CloutFuel24/7, and absorbed into a global bot farm. It travels, silently and instantly, into a server rack of smartphones in Azerbaijan. Hundreds of screens glow like ritual candles, each one posing as a person.

The penny now has a job: to pretend.

It pretends to care. It pretends to be curious. It pretends to be outraged.

It “likes” a breaking video about a hospital bombing—before any facts are confirmed. It leaves a comment: “The media is LYING.” It shares the link. A thousand other pennies follow. The post trends. Journalists quote it. Politicians react. A population panics.

The penny moves on.

It drives traffic to a fraudulent supplement site selling “cancer-curing sea moss.” It boosts a meme coin called MoonButt just before it dumps. It clicks through five websites pretending to be news outlets, each one an ad farm in disguise. It reposts an AI-generated meme mocking climate protesters—then flips accounts and defends them. Conflict is currency.

It earns.

🪙 One cent per like. Five cents per follow. Thirty dollars for a smear campaign.

Who’s buying?

Influencers chasing clout. PR firms manufacturing buzz. Political operatives shaping discourse. Nation-states disrupting democracies. Criminal syndicates monetizing confusion. Could be a marketer you know. Could be you.

Behind it all, the algorithms smile. They don’t know it’s a lie. They just know it spreads.

Platforms like Meta, TikTok, and X can’t—or won’t—keep up. Moderation teams are cut. Transparency tools are buried. The system, trained on engagement, does its job. This penny brings engagement. So it is rewarded.

More pennies join.

The penny isn’t ideological. It doesn’t believe in anything. But it helps amplify everything—every outrage, every hoax, every hallucinated truth.

A teenage girl gets doxxed by bots after calling out a celebrity.
A journalist loses her job after a swarm of fake accounts reshapes the story.
A protest in the streets becomes a war online, orchestrated by scripts and faked emotion.

The penny lies.
The world listens.

📉 Behind the penny is an industry.

As Bob Hoffman says, “This isn’t advertising—it’s surveillance.”

Bot farms don’t just sell influence—they rent it. As-a-service. On Fiverr, Telegram, and black market dashboards. They click ads they never see. They visit sites no one reads. They inflate followers for brands that never ask questions.

The ad tech stack is a black box. A single campaign touches 40,000 sites—many fake. By age 13, the average child has 72 million data points scraped and sold, for what!?

Ad fraud pulls in $70–$80 billion a year—more than Coca-Cola. Bigger than Nike. It may be the second-largest criminal enterprise on the planet. And most marketers stay silent to avoid admitting how much money gets wasted.

One day, the penny finds itself somewhere new: in a hand.

A girl clicks a link for a free concert ticket. It’s a bot-boosted scam. Her phone is infected. Her profile reposts propaganda while she sleeps. She loses friends. She doesn’t understand why.

The penny sits in her pocket, nestled next to keys and gum wrappers.
Silent. Unrepentant. It doesn’t care.

It just does its job.

It lies.

And we pick it up, every time.

📚 Sources

1. Finance Yahoo: “Bot farms invade social media”

2. Uncensored CMO: “Why online advertising is a scam”

3. Business of Apps: “Ad fraud to reach $84B in 2023”

4. VideoWeek: “Ad tech collects 72 million data points on average child by age 13”

What a World Without Invisible Influence Could Teach Us About Attention, Trust, and Choice

Imagine a world where social media algorithms suddenly vanished. No invisible sorting. No predictive nudging. No unseen hands rearranging what you see and feel.

Only raw, organic feeds — chronological, popularity-based, and human. Or, maybe that’s what you think social media is anyway….

How We Got Here

Before algorithms dominated social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter organized content chronologically. The most recent posts appeared first; popularity was visible but peripheral. Discovery was driven by networks of friends, geography, and cultural gravity — not hidden mathematical models seeking to prolong attention.

Today, that landscape is radically different. Modern feeds are precision-designed to sustain engagement by prioritizing:

• Controversy: Outrage clings longer than agreement

• Novelty: The new outcompetes the familiar

• Emotional Intensity: Strong feelings crowd out muted ones

• Tribal Identity: “Us versus them” narratives take precedence

This architecture does not reward the best ideas. It rewards the ideas that keep you suspended inside the feed.

Conspiracy theories, hyper-partisan news, surreal micro-trends — they did not thrive accidentally. They were mechanically advantaged.

A World Without the Algorithm

If the hidden engines were silenced overnight, a profound shift would unfold.

In the short term, social feeds would appear slower, flatter, even mundane. Polarization would ease. Virality would cool. The engineered emotional high would dissipate.

Many brands, media outlets, and influencers, built on the scaffolding of algorithmic leverage, would see traffic collapse.

Longer Reverberations

Over time, deeper cultural transformations would take root:

• Localism Resurfaces: Friend groups, neighbors, and geographic cultures regain primacy over abstract ideological factions.

• Creativity Rekindles: Untethered from algorithmic incentives, new forms of expression — strange, slow, sublime — would reemerge.

• Communities Stabilize: Subcultures would grow without radicalizing feedback loops driving them into extremes.

• Visible Curation Demanded: Raw feeds, overwhelming by nature, would spark a hunger for honest, transparent curation tools.

The social fabric would slowly stitch itself back together, not through elimination of disagreement, but through reduction of manufactured emotional flooding.

Why It Matters

Research by organizations like the Alaska Humanities Forum highlights how polarization flourishes through mistrust, fear, and tribal loyalty — exactly the emotional fields algorithmic systems plow and harvest.

In a blackout, disagreement would persist. But the machinery that escalates every friction point into existential battle would falter.

Public life would no longer operate in “war mode” by default.

A Closing Reflection

The true antagonist is not algorithms themselves, but their invisibility, their opacity, their silent shaping of experience without consent.

If users could choose their curation engines — transparent, customizable, aligned to their own aims — the benefits of personalization could survive, without the corrosions of manipulation.

Imagine a future where algorithms are not unseen masters but visible instruments. Some designed for calm. Some for exploration. Some for discovery. Some for depth.

The feed would no longer be a trap disguised as a gift. It would be a tool, chosen freely, and wielded with understanding.

In the real world, right now, we could unplug from social media entirely. But then we’d conglomerate in another way, on another platform, and someone would show up with ways to corral us, and we’d be thankful to be in the barn, for a while, until it started burning, like the last ones.

Here are three things everyday people can start doing right now in light of the algorithm blackout thought experiment:

Reclaim Your Feed
Switch your social media settings to chronological where possible. Mute or unfollow accounts that inflame or exhaust you. Curate consciously — not passively — and treat your feed like a garden, not a slot machine.

Pause Before Sharing
Algorithms reward emotional reactivity. Resist the urge to repost things that provoke immediate anger or outrage. Ask: Do I understand this? Is it helping or harming? Slowing down can stop a toxic loop before it spreads.

Seek Out the Unexpected
Algorithms narrow what you see. Break that pattern by following people outside your usual circles — different geographies, politics, cultures. Genuine discovery rarely happens inside a predictive cage. Invite some randomness back in.

From Scriptoria to Silicon: When Remembering Becomes Rendering

Between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance, when much of Europe’s cultural infrastructure had collapsed, it was monks—tucked away in dimly lit scriptoria—who became the custodians of civilization.

They copied by hand what the world had nearly forgotten: the logic of Aristotle, the medicine of Galen, the math of al-Khwarizmi, the poetry of Virgil. They preserved pagan texts alongside sacred scripture. They didn’t simply transcribe words—they transferred memory. Without them, much of ancient thought would’ve vanished into silence.

This work—slow, devotional, anonymous—was partly done in service to the Church. But the knowledge outlived its guardians. The books became libraries, then universities, then Enlightenment. The past, painstakingly resurrected, was handed forward. It belonged to all of us.

Now, another kind of scribe is at work.

Artificial intelligence is ingesting, replicating, and indexing human knowledge at a speed and scale no monk could fathom. Trillions of words—books, blogs, forum posts, sacred texts, codebases, scientific papers—are scraped and modeled. The act of preservation has become a computational process.

But unlike the monks, who brought the past into the present, AI isn’t reviving memory—it’s flattening it.

What monks did with intention, AI does with indifference. The models don’t know what they’re preserving. They don’t distinguish Homer from homepages. They don’t illuminate texts with care—they ingest and abstract, tokenize and compress. They codify culture without culture.

And the more we lean on them, the more we outsource the act of remembering. The more we let our present become prediction.

Instead of being carried out of the dark, we risk wandering back in—this time, not from the absence of knowledge, but from the illusion of having all of it.

Because when a civilization turns its cultural memory into machine training data, it no longer remembers in a human sense. It indexes. It optimizes. And eventually, it forgets how it remembered in the first place.

The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a haunting metaphor for AI: a man whose perfect face never ages, while his hidden portrait absorbs the consequences of his moral decay.

I read a brilliant post from Fiona Tribe, where she likened AI to a non-material prosthetic, and in the comments, I stumbled my way into a comparison with AI and Dorian Gray. Dorian Grai? Maybe?

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde gives us a lasting image: a man who stays outwardly perfect while his hidden portrait records every act of corruption.

That’s what AI is starting to look like.

AI Is The Polished Surface

AI is the clean, idealized version of us — productive, articulate, tireless. It remembers everything, talks like a human, and performs without pause. It looks like progress. It acts like control.

Meanwhile, people are fraying. Burnout is rising. Social connection is thinning. Cognitive overload is constant. AI shines, but the human side is quietly degrading.

What Are We Losing?

As AI takes over tasks we once handled ourselves, we stop using the muscles that matter — attention, cognition, empathy, internal narrative. These don’t just weaken; they wither.

We lose the habit of thinking things through. We click instead of reflect. We scroll instead of relate. We consume meaning instead of making it.

The portrait decays, even if we avoid looking.

The Mask Comes Off

Sooner or later, we’ll have to face the gap between how we appear and how we actually are. When the external self — optimized by machines — moves too far from the internal one, things break.

This isn’t a rejection of AI, rather a stolid and sober recognition of what AI is displacing. Tools change us. This one changes how we think, how we feel, and how we relate — all beneath the surface.

What Comes Next

We need to stay in contact with the parts AI doesn’t touch.

That means:

• Making space for slow thinking

• Defending emotional effort

• Noticing when delegation becomes disconnection

• Designing with the human, not just the user, in mind

Your self-portrait is in the attic. It’s changing whether you look at it or not.

Look now — while it still resembles you.

Reality is actually a verb….

“A particle doesn’t exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.”

Heisenberg and Bohr established the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics a little under 100 years ago. Heisenberg was like a boss level genius, and Einstein hated the guy but found no flaw in his work.

One of the most legit minds in all of science came to the conclusion, at the very fundamental level of nature, that physics ought not to concern itself with REALITY, but rather with what we can SAY about reality.

Heisenberg explained elementary particles are not things, but possibilities. The transition from the “possible” to the “real” only occurred during the act of observation and measurement.

“When we speak of the science of our era,” Heisenberg explained, “we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world.”

When I read all this in Benjamin Labutut’s brilliant and disturbing book, “When We Cease To Understand The World” it snapped something in my mind.

In our lives we desperately want objective-based certainty – we want to know there is a PURE version of reality/success/relationships/wealth/health – these elementary particles of a life-well-lived formally exist – and all we have to do is set up our clean room experiments and scientifically, methodically, disassociate and detach ourselves from the observation and application of the work, to get to the objective view from nowhere.

The Copenhagen Interpretation says this is all bass-akwards. And if we take the statement above and apply it to other things it starts to make sense at our level of observability.

• Businesses don’t exist, the act of measuring makes it a real business.
• Love doesn’t exist, the act of measuring it makes it real love.
• etc. etc. etc.

The point is, what if it isn’t what gets measured gets managed – but what gets measured, gets MANIFESTED? According to quantum theory, how could it not be?

Somewhere along the road we supplanted the most advanced interpretation of reality, (that we are active participants and reality is attainable only through subjective means and applied measurement) arrived at by the most intense and powerful minds of history, with an ancient and out-of-touch belief that there is a cold truth, on any and every subject, away from our warm and fuzzy bodies.

Read the book – apply this idea where you want, how you want – but it is a concept worthy of your time, as we try to figure out the next certain steps…

“Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk.” — Antonio Machado

As more myths go missing, what do we replace them with?

When I was a kid, we had tall tales like Paul Bunyan, these larger-than-life characters and stories that essentially acted as creation myths for the United States.

We knew they weren’t true—no one really believed a giant lumberjack carved the Grand Canyon by dragging his ax—but these stories were shared widely and worked as a kind of social glue. They connected us to larger themes, gave us something to rally around, and even helped some of us understand actual facts by wrapping them in a layer of fanciful storytelling.

This past Thanksgiving, I found myself reflecting on the myths of my childhood and what they’ve been replaced with. As a kid, our school Thanksgiving pageants divided the room into pilgrims and Native Americans, with cornucopias and happily shared meals.

Sure, these narratives were oversimplified and deeply inaccurate, but they provided a foundation, a shallow starting point for collective understanding. Now, those myths have been largely dismantled, and rightly so. But in removing them, I can’t help but wonder—what have we put in their place?

Thanksgiving is now about….just eating, and shopping for sweet deals. I’m glad it is no longer a way wrong and racist dog and pony show; but we subbed out a fantasy and a lie for Black Friday.

The absence of myths feels like a void, and into that void has crept something far more corrosive: fake news, inescapable cycles of exploitive capitalism, conspiracy theories, and misinformation.

Perhaps our societal demand for 100% truth has paradoxically left us more susceptible to worse lies?

The Role of Myths in Society

To understand the implications of losing our myths, it helps to consider why myths existed in the first place. Throughout human history, myths have served as cultural scaffolding, giving people a framework for shared identity and meaning.

Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist, argued that myths are universal—archetypal narratives that resonate deeply with our human experience. They connect us to universal truths about love, courage, sacrifice, and the struggle to understand our place in the world. Similarly, Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out that shared myths, whether about religion, nations, or even money, enable cooperation on a massive scale. These stories don’t have to be factually accurate to be meaningful. Instead, they offer emotional weight and societal coherence.

Cognitive scientists, like Jonathan Gottschall, have also demonstrated that storytelling is intrinsic to human cognition. We process and remember information better when it’s embedded in a narrative. The story of Paul Bunyan didn’t replace the scientific fact of erosion; it enriched it, giving it a memorable, engaging frame.

What Happens When Myths Disappear?

The problem with dismantling myths is not the pursuit of truth itself—accuracy matters—but the failure to recognize that myths served a purpose beyond the literal. In removing flawed narratives without replacing them with new ones, we’ve inadvertently created a cultural vacuum. And vacuums don’t stay empty for long.

1. Social Fragmentation

Myths once provided a shared cultural script, a set of stories everyone knew and could draw from. Without these, society becomes increasingly fragmented, as people turn to smaller, more polarized narratives that divide rather than unite. Sociologist Robert Putnam has documented the decline of social capital and communal rituals in his book Bowling Alone. This decline mirrors the erosion of shared myths, leaving individuals disconnected from a broader cultural identity.

2. Loss of Wonder and Imagination

Stripped of myths, facts alone can feel sterile. Tall tales added a sense of wonder and playfulness to our understanding of the world. Without this imaginative layer, there’s a risk of disengagement, particularly among children, who might find the world of pure facts less compelling.

3. The Rise of “Worse Lies”

Ironically, in our effort to eliminate false narratives, we’ve opened the door to more pernicious forms of misinformation. Myths like Paul Bunyan were never meant to deceive; they were meant to entertain and unify. Fake news and conspiracy theories, by contrast, are designed to manipulate and divide. Without positive, unifying myths, people may turn to harmful narratives to fill the void.

4. Erosion of Civic Rituals

Rituals like Thanksgiving pageants or even Fourth of July parades—problematic as they might have been—provided opportunities for communal reflection. In dismantling these traditions without thoughtful replacements, we’ve lost occasions for collective storytelling and connection.

5. The Vanishing of “Act-As-If”

In a discussion with my good friend Ryan Estes, he mentioned the important role of “act as if” behavior, which means our job isn’t to verify truths, just to accept them and act as if they were true. If we applied it to religion, it would mean that if we were raised Christian, and went with our friend to their mosque, we wouldn’t countermand all of the teachings, we would “act as if” everything we’re hearing is true. You can see this takes a hearty serving of mental fortitude, so it’s no wonder there’s less and less of it.

6. The Self-Made Crown is Weighing Us Down

As myths have been expunged from our record, gods and goddesses removed from the cast of characters that influence and guide our lives on Earth, the functions, foibles, and fortunes of those myths have been placed directly on our shoulders. Whereas in the past, you might blame Zeus or Fortuna, pray to God, or curse Satan, now it is all YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you’ve done bad, it is 100% your fault. If you’ve done good, you’re 100% the reason. Our futures, both good and horrible, are 100% ours. And guess what; this too is a myth.

Reclaiming the Power of Myth

So, what’s the solution? How do we regain the benefits of myths without falling back on outdated or harmful narratives?

1. Create New Myths

We need contemporary myths that reflect modern values and diversity. These stories could be grounded in themes of sustainability, global unity, or scientific exploration. For instance, a modern “tall tale” might imagine a character who plants forests faster than they can be cut down, inspiring a new generation to think about conservation.

2. Reimagine Civic Rituals

Rather than eliminating flawed traditions, we can reinvent them. If we could recast some of the old myths in new outfits, find new natural or social phenomenology to retrofit myths onto, or find new ways to characterize/mythologize already popular social functions, we might be able to bring back some magic.

3. Blend Facts with Wonder

Educational systems can embrace storytelling as a tool for teaching facts. Imagine science lessons that incorporate myth-like narratives to engage students while instilling critical thinking skills.

4. Foster Shared Narratives in Media

The media landscape could focus on producing content that builds shared cultural narratives. Documentaries, films, and books that highlight human ingenuity, perseverance, and connection could become modern myths, inspiring collective pride and purpose.

In the rush to dismantle the myths of the past, we forgot one crucial detail: myths are not just made-up stories; they’re the threads that weave societies together. Without them, we risk unraveling into a patchwork of isolated individuals and divisive ideologies. The answer isn’t a return to falsehoods but a reimagining of how we tell our collective story.