The Culture That Could Only Count - Robert Simoes

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Robert Simoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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