The Internet has become heavily invested with the craft of persuasion—and the need for ‘clicks’ is its inviting pitfall. We all recognize the format: companies advertising on a webpage that you have just entered get more people to see their ads while the host of the website that financially depends on such advertisements gets money. It clearly pays off to herd people towards content, thus generating ‘clicks.’ It’s not unlike the unhealthy cycle of junk food: long-term damage ignored for the sake of instant gratification.
An industry is even developing behind the scenes with specialized businesses that artificially inflate the engagement metrics of content on social media, manipulating the algorithms. We are dealing with so-called ‘click farms’: micro, clandestine businesses usually located in developing Asian countries; rooms filled with low-wage workers hired to click on links and surf the target website for a period of time, prior to clicking yet another link. These companies are aimed at boosting ‘likes’ and website traffic and this is a considerably cheaper way to increase attention, compared to investing in actual campaigns.
Over a period of four years, British photographer Jack Latham tried to find access to a click farm and it was on a trip to Hong Kong that he finally got to see one, via insiders he got acquainted with on hacker forums. What he encountered was a simple room—nothing special—filled with the batteries of smartphones, all lined up, all connected to computers supported by a chaos of wires and cables. Basically, one shelf to hold all the mobiles in position. Each phone has a different account with the ability to change its IP address 20 times a day.
Latham then decided to take it one step further by committing himself to managing his own click farm, which he derailed towards the realm of the arts. Beggar’s Honey contains (deliberately obscured) content that people requested Latham to like on social media as he was running his self-supporting appropriation. In a recent interview with Huck magazine, he sums up the kind of content he was asked to boost: “There was something about immigrants, other things like how to spot a fake Rolex, there’s lots of nudity, military propaganda and videos of armies, conspiracy videos about the Twin Towers and a conspiracy video about the vaccine.” That, and a recurring theme of… peacocks?
In a way, the design of Beggar’s Honey reminds of what in the 1999 movie The Matrix is put forward as the dilemma of the red pill and the blue pill: is it better to free your mind or to continue living in blissful ignorance? Translated to this book: each two spreads make a fold out, a four-page poster size image printed on the backside, allowing a sneak peek behind the curtain regarding the issue at stake. One can either follow the main path by flipping the pages as with any book (blue pill) or, alternatively, one can dive into the harsh and sobering world that lies behind it (red pill).
Unfolding the pages is revealing, disclosing how the mechanisms behind artificially-enhanced social media feeds are as unsexy as our own human corpus when seen from the inside. It’s nothing but the unaesthetic appeal of a hardware store. This ‘operation table’ view is in stark contrast with the content on the main pages: blurred out yet colorful images seized by the artist; not easily identifiable but clearly triggering the repressed awareness of our social media impulses.
The blur on these images effectively simulates the undigested hazard of images that perpetually storm towards us resembling what our dreams might be doing: cleaning up brain waste—deleting the ‘cache’ of our minds, so to speak. As so often in photography, uncanniness does the trick. Even though the content remains vague and indefinable, we instantly recognize its essence which stirs a peculiar blend of discomfort and excitement.
In the concise academic essay included in Beggar’s Honey, visual anthropologist Professor Shawn Sobers tackles the issue of click farms, suggesting that the peculiar aspect of “why anyone would want to pay to bring attention to such seemingly random, innocuous images” has to do something about them being pleasurable without being too conspicuous. We, the consumers of social media content, thus take an unsettling position when clicking and liking, when paying with our attention; we knowingly prefer to stay ignorant about our communal addiction for more ‘free’ eye candy.
In this project, Latham tackles an important issue that is not easily visualized. We are obviously addicted to sweets, including the virtual kinds, but behind this naive fix also lies the issue of hidden slavery. The adult click-farmers, who are mainly young, receive a micro-cent payment for delivering 1000 TikTok views, or 11 cents (USD) for that same amount of likes on Instagram. You do the math. Not unlike how bees produce honey, this is a business of large-scale figures and unequal rewards.
Popularity and human weakness—getting pulled in by what attracts so many others—is what feeds this beast. Latham has once again, as he did before in other projects, found a way to photographically address what usually remains unseen. In this book, the artistic detour of creative interference effectively results in a disclosure, igniting our self-consciousness. This much is clear: We’re all part of this larger mechanism and no company ever wishes to make us think of the consequences of our actions in these matters; how do we actually feel about that?
Beggar’s Honey is not a pretty picture book yet it is a leading example of how an artist can arrive at ‘concerned photography’ by getting to grips with current affairs in a more creative manner. A critical scope on reality is not always easily captured with a camera but publications like this, when executed in such an astute manner, can certainly help to uncover our blind spots.
Beggar’s Honey
by Jack Latham
Publisher: Here Press