The Pathos of Pageviews

“We are, absolutely, a page-view-driven site even though we don’t want to be,” said Mr. Magnin of Thought Catalog. “Every writer wants to do well, and ‘do well’ means get more Twitter followers.”

Imagine the day that the highly emotional new new internet completes its project to convert share metrics into the only acceptable form of currency. Go ahead, just revel in it. Renting this apartment requires forty thousand Twitter followers, with fewer than twenty-five percent of them being bots. The price for this dinner is a thousand Instagram followers and thirty-seven likes per photo. You can enter the Jeff Koons retrospective after sending Yos to six friends, three men and three women.

Money, which by 2023 becomes mostly used by tech companies to purchase other tech companies with different share metrics, wasn’t all that great anyway.