Three months since I last wrote in here. I kept meaning to, but — you know how it is. You tell yourself you’ll journal every day, and then the days just kind of slide into each other like wet playing cards and suddenly it’s June and the thing you were dreading is here.

TrueNorth opted in on Day One. Of course they did.

June 1st. Yesterday. My first full day on the drip.

I want to describe what it feels like, because I think someday someone’s going to ask, and I want to have the words ready. Here goes:

You know that feeling when you’re taking a test and you can hear the clock ticking? That anxious awareness of time passing, the way every second feels like it has weight? Now imagine that clock is your bank account. Imagine every tick is either a fraction of a cent appearing or not appearing, and the difference between those two states is whether an algorithm thinks your eyeballs are pointed at the right thing.

That’s streaming wage.

I woke up at 6:14 AM. Bug was asleep on the bathroom mat, which is her new spot since the weather turned. I made coffee — French press, four minutes steep, and yes I know that makes me a weirdo, Dev has told me several times — and I sat down at my workstation at 6:58. Lenses on. System synced. And at exactly 7:00:00, the number in the top-right corner of my display started moving.

$0.0000.

$0.0022.

$0.0044.

That’s roughly $7.92 an hour, by the way, which is what I was making before except now I get to watch it happen in real-time like some kind of financial nature documentary. Here we observe the North American wage earner in his natural habitat, accumulating currency at the rate of 0.22 cents per second. Notice how he does not blink.

I’m not being dramatic about the blinking. The Lenses have a “focus continuity” metric. Long blinks — anything over 400 milliseconds — register as “micro-disengagements.” They don’t zero you out for a blink, but they do flag it, and if you accumulate too many flags in an hour your Yield Score takes a hit. Your Yield Score affects your rate. Your rate affects your rent. Your rent affects whether you live inside.

So yeah. I’m thinking about blinking now. I’m a 34-year-old man who is thinking about how he blinks.

The actual work hasn’t changed. I still click through flagged posts. AI catches something, I look at it, I decide if it stays or goes. Same as before. But now there’s this… awareness. Every time I pause to actually think about a post — to consider context, to wonder if the person who wrote it was having a bad day or expressing a genuine opinion or being sarcastic — I can feel the number slowing down. The algorithm interprets thinking as hesitation. Hesitation is inefficiency. Inefficiency costs money. My money.

So you learn not to think. You learn to react. Flag, approve, deny, next. Flag, approve, deny, next. I processed 923 posts yesterday, which is about 10% more than my usual. My Yield Score was 7.4 out of 10. I have no idea what a 10 looks like. I suspect it looks like a person who has stopped being a person.

Dev handled it better than me. She always does. She showed up with her Lenses already on — she wears these custom frames, matte black, almost stylish if you don’t think too hard about what they’re doing — and she just… worked. Calm. Methodical. At lunch (unpaid — your stream pauses the moment you disconnect, and lunch isn’t a “biological maintenance window,” it’s a “voluntary productivity intermission”) she told me her Yield Score was 8.1.

“How?” I asked, genuinely baffled, because I’d seen her take a full seven-minute bathroom break.

She smiled. That Dev smile that means she knows something you don’t. “Keystroke cadence,” she said. “The Yield algorithm weighs consistent input patterns. If you type at a steady rhythm — doesn’t even matter what you’re typing — it reads as high engagement.”

“What were you typing?”

“A villanelle about the futility of quantified existence.”

I stared at her.

“It’s not very good,” she added. “The meter’s off in the third stanza. But the algorithm gave me an 8.1, so I guess it’s a matter of audience.”

I laughed. Actually laughed, which is the first time I’d done that all day, and I swear the number in my display twitched upward for a second. Probably my imagination. Probably.

The neighbors — the couple through the wall, I can never remember if they’re the Hendersons or the Andersons — they were arguing again when I got home. But it was different this time. Usually it’s about dishes or whose turn it is to call the building’s maintenance bot. Last night it was about numbers. I heard the woman say, “Your score is dragging mine down, Kevin, do you understand that?” And Kevin said something I couldn’t make out and then she said, very clearly: “They calculate by household.”

By household.

I fed Bug. She ate like she always does — with the absolute certainty of a creature who has never once worried about where her next meal is coming from. I envied her so much in that moment that it actually hurt. Then she walked over to my desk, looked at my Lenses where I’d set them down, and batted them onto the floor.

Good girl.

I checked my balance before bed. $63.18 for the day. That’s about the same as before, honestly. Maybe a dollar less. The company line is that streaming wage is “revenue-neutral for productive workers” and they might even be right, mathematically. But it doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like I spent eight hours with someone’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing a little tighter every time I slowed down.

Mom called. Sunday call, even though it was Tuesday — she’s been losing track of days since they moved her floor to a new labeling rotation. She asked how the “new pay thing” was going. I said it was fine. She said, “Marcus, don’t lie to your mother, I’m old but I’m not stupid.” I said it was weird but manageable. She said that’s what dad used to say about the factory before the robots came. Then she changed the subject to Bug and asked if I was feeding her the good food or “that algorithmic kibble.”

I didn’t tell her that her Senior Productivity Residence is funded by the same system that’s now paying me by the second. I didn’t tell her that the “light data-labeling” she does for four hours every day is her streaming wage. She knows, probably. She’s sharper than she lets on.

Grandma’s copy of Player Piano is on my nightstand. I keep it there like some people keep a Bible. There’s a note in the margin on page 47 — Grandma’s handwriting, small and precise — but the ink’s faded and I’ve never been able to make out more than a few words. Something about “the real machine.” I should get a magnifying glass. Or better eyes.

Day one down. Who knows how many to go.

Bug’s on the pillow again. My balance is $847.32 + $63.18 = $910.50, minus the idle capital fee they’ll skim in three days if I don’t spend some of it.

The drip continues.

— M.