Bug knocked my Lenses off the nightstand again this morning. Third time this week. I’m starting to think she’s doing it on purpose — like she’s got some feline objection to the concept of wearable surveillance. Can’t say I blame her.

I made coffee before I checked the news, which turned out to be a mistake, because I should’ve had something in my stomach first.

The PROMPT Act passed.

I need to write that again because my hand didn’t believe it the first time.

The PROMPT Act passed.

They’d been talking about it for months — the Production-Related Optimization of Minute-Paced Tariffs, because apparently dystopia needs an acronym. The Senate had been sitting on it since November and everyone figured it would die in committee like the last three versions. The unions were already calling it dead. The talking heads on FeedPulse were doing that thing where they pretend something is controversial when really they’re just filling airtime between ads for AI-managed investment portfolios that none of us can afford.

But no. 63-37. Signed before lunch.

Here’s what it means, in case future-me has somehow forgotten, or in case someone finds this notebook in the rubble of whatever comes next:

Starting June 1st, employers in the United States can opt into “streaming wage” compensation. By September, it’s mandatory for any company receiving federal productivity subsidies — which is, effectively, everyone. Your pay is no longer hourly. It’s not salary. It’s per-second, calculated in real-time by your employer’s Yield Assessment system. You wear your Lenses. The Lenses track your eye movement, screen focus, keystroke cadence, biometric stress indicators. An algorithm decides, moment to moment, whether what you’re doing constitutes “productive labor.” If yes: money streams into your account. If no: it stops.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You blink too long? That’s 0.3 seconds of non-productivity. You look out the window because a bird landed on the ledge and for one stupid second you remembered what it felt like to be a kid watching birds? That’s a “focus deviation.” You go to the bathroom? “Micro-interrupt — unpaid.” They were generous enough to allow two ten-minute “biological maintenance windows” per eight-hour shift, which is corporate-speak for “you get twenty minutes to be a human being.”

I sat at my kitchen table — well, my kitchen/dining room/living room/office table, because this is a studio and everything is everything — and I read the whole bill summary on my phone while Bug sat on my lap and purred like the world wasn’t doing what it was doing. I love that about her. Bug doesn’t have a Yield Score. Bug has never once been productive in her life and she sleeps eighteen hours a day and I genuinely believe she’s the freest creature in this city.

The thing is — and I want to be honest here because that’s the point of keeping this — my first reaction wasn’t outrage. It should’ve been. I know it should’ve been. But I’ve been at TrueNorth for three years now, clicking through flagged posts eight hours a day, and they already track my keystrokes. They already know how many reviews I process per hour. They already send me a little notification if my “engagement velocity” drops below threshold for more than four minutes.

The PROMPT Act doesn’t change what’s happening. It just makes it the law. It takes the thing they were doing quietly and says: this is fine, actually. This is how it should be. This is fair.

And honestly? I think that’s what scares me. Not the surveillance — I’m already surveilled. Not the per-second wage — I was already living paycheck to paycheck and at least now I’ll see the money appear instead of waiting two weeks. What scares me is the word “fair.” Because they’re going to use that word a lot. They’re going to say: What’s more fair than paying people exactly for what they produce? And it’s going to sound reasonable to a lot of people who’ve never had to think about what it means to have a machine decide if you’re producing.

Grandma had this book — a ratty paperback, Vonnegut, Player Piano — and there’s a part where someone says that the machines were designed to free people but instead they freed people from the need to exist. I think about that a lot. I don’t think we’re there yet. But I can see it from here.

Anyway. I went to work. Clicked through 847 posts. Mostly AI-generated rage-bait flagged by other AI for potential policy violations, reviewed by me — a human being — so the company can say a human being reviewed it. I am the rubber stamp with a pulse. Today I denied fourteen appeals from accounts that were probably real people and approved six that were probably bots and I’m not confident about any of those numbers.

Dev — she sits two pods over, Devika, I’ve mentioned her before — she caught me reading the bill text on my break and said, “You look like you just found out your dog died.” I told her I don’t have a dog, I have a cat who commits daily property crimes. She said, “Same energy.” Then she said, quieter: “You know they’ve been testing streaming wage at the Cintas fulfillment center in Kentucky since January, right? Unofficial. Off-books.” I didn’t know that. She said the workers there call it “the drip.”

The drip. Because your money drips in.

I’m going to bed. Bug is on the pillow. My balance is $847.32 and in three months it’s going to be a live number on a screen that goes up when I’m good and stops when I’m not and I’m trying very hard to find the bright side of this because that’s what I do, that’s who I am, and here’s the best I’ve got:

At least now we’ll know exactly what they think we’re worth. Down to the penny, down to the second.

There’s something clarifying about that, isn’t there? When they stop pretending?
— M.