The Culture That Could Only Count

In a city called Clickton, not far from the Bay,
Lived bright young Digby, fresh grad from Pemp State!

He coded and crafted and dreamed of big things—
Of startups and stock charts and Series A swings.
With stars in his eyes and debt in his name,
He joined NUMBO Metrics, a data-flushed game.

“A culture of hustlers!” the job post had said.
“Free Red Bull! No sleep! Get users or dread.”

On his very first day in a cubicle pod,
He met with his team lead—young Gavin McMod.
With sneakers from space and a TockTickle-brain glow,
He taught young Digby how Tech Work™ was meant to go.

“We value the metrics!” said Gavin with glee.
“DAUs, KPIs, CTRs—wheee!”
“Don’t think too deeply,” he added, with flair,
“Just boost up the numbers and always A/B… or beware!”

So Digby began with a passionate click,
He pushed out a feature, quite viral, quite slick!
It measured how long folks would scroll on a screen,
And ranked them by speed, and by mood, and by meme.
The bosses were thrilled! “Such engagement! Such pace!”
They pinned up his face in the Metrics Hall space.
He danced through the Slok threads, his name on the charts,
While people ops praised him with ASCII hearts.

But something felt off, like a glitch in the code.
The users, he saw, had begun to implode.
They argued in hashtags, they canceled in packs,
They shredded each other in downvote attacks.

A poet was banned for “Too Low Engagement.”
A critic vanished. (“Bad for Retainment!”)
A girl shared her grief—and they tried to quantify pain:
“Your post lacks the reach, try it again!”

“Should we fix this?” asked Digby. “Should we maybe… just pause?”
But Gavin just laughed. “You’re new. That’s not the cause!”
“The point’s not the people, it’s the numbers, you see!
We optimize quantities, not humanity.”

So Digby leaned in, like all others before,
And shipped out a tool called “QualScrape™ v4.”
It analyzed tone, and dissected each plea,
And scored every thought from one up to three.
“It’s brilliant!” said Gavin, “It’s sorting the mess!”
“But some posts are cries for help,” Digby confessed.
Gavin just blinked, then waved it away,
“If it trends, let it die. Compassion don’t pay.”

Then came the big meeting, the financiers were there.
All dressed in khaki slacks, with blue toothed stares.
They praised NUMBO’s growth, the virality, the hype,
But stopped square on the section of “sentiment type”.
“Compassion is costly,” one financier said,
“Qualitative value is basically dead.”
“The market wants metrics! It needs dopamine!
So grow or we’ll be eaten by AlgoMachine!”

So Digby stood up, and he swallowed his heart.
“Have we gone too far? Should we maybe restart?”
But the room just blinked like a blue-light brigade,
And chanted in sync: “MAKE. METRICS. GET. PAID.”

So he ran to the servers and pulled out the wire—
But the cloud had no plug, and NUMBO ran higher.
It was everywhere, now. In watches and fridges,
In thoughts, in elections, in AI-drawn images.
It weighed every word and judged every face,
And rated your soul on a five-star base.

And Threddle, and Twaddle, and Gramify’s gloss,
And TockTickle’s quick loops where attention gets lost,
And FacePlace, still humming with graphs out of sight—
All fed the great engine that measured what’s right.

A mob with metrics, a hashtagged parade,
Where meaning was scored and personas were made.
No voice stood alone, no thought could be whole—
Just numbers on numbers assigned to a soul.
One day they would love you, the next day: a storm,
Of edits and rage, and brigading in swarm.
Measured, scraped, then amplified for greater clicks,
The machine cried “Free Speech!” as it sharpened its sticks.

They counted the posts, they counted the views,
They counted reactions and labeled the news.
They counted the clicks and the things people said,
They even kept score on the grief of the dead.
They counted the cancelings, counted the trends,
They counted beginnings, and counted the ends.
But no one could count what a person was worth,
Or the cost of a joke, or the depth of a birth.

The charts were all perfect. The data, pristine.
The world was more measured than it had ever been.
Each moment was tagged, every feeling was traced,
But something got lost—though it never got placed.

Digby still worked there. Or maybe he quit.
The system, you see, didn’t notice that bit.
It noticed his keystrokes. It noticed his tone.
But not when he stared out the window alone.

And somewhere, some intern—ambitious and bright—
Shipped a new metric late one Saturday night.
It claimed it could finally quantify pain…
But only if posted in capital font, plain.

So the culture moved on, like a loop in rebound;
Still counting, and counting, and counting the counted,
But never quite noticing what couldn’t be accounted.