Pot of Scrolled

Years ago they began to hide treasure deep in your Feeds and For You pages. They’re there too on the last pages of your web searches, at the end of Reel, the last Story there is to see.

Documentation for online discoveries of this kind are just as rare as documented discoveries of the real thing — the pots buried in the earth where the rainbows burn crystalline through the soil. Children find them most often with smaller social circles and more specific searches with stricter criteria. The difference is that those with the time to dig beneath a fir tree at the edge of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a fence with questionable legal ownership are those who tend to keep their secrets. Kids, meanwhile, do know at least how to take screenshots.

As soon as you find it, overage and burdened with some idea of what it means to have made it all that way at the cost of your precious time spent elsewhere, they get the leprechauns in touch. It’s not a coincidence the global financial headquarters for these technology conglomerates are Irish. The monsters and their legendary investors have a close relationship; their offices half for tax purposes and half for mischievous luck that rubs off on the determined.

What they didn’t expect was for the leprechauns to be racking up the airline miles. Apple intended to intervene with Screen Time reports, believing that what gets measured gets managed, but instead it just recorded the passage of time and did not disincentivise it whatsoever. It’s true that project managers and engineers with bonuses tied to dwell time didn’t want anyone to leave. It’s just that they have to strike a fine balance because leprechauns have to dress well in luxurious artisan Irish green weaves and the shillings — adjusted for inflation for fairness — they carry in their purses here, there, and everywhere thanks to aggressive international expansion all come from the same budget for performance bonuses.

That adjusted shilling, too, is reported to local tax authorities. It’s never enormous but it has caught the unsuspecting and meandered another efficient financial micromanager into a tax bracket they never expected. It’s a dividend. It’s paid out not quite relative to the ad spend you’ve produced with impression after ever deeper impression but it’s close. And it’s indexed to the euro, funnily enough, so for those overseas in developing markets the substantial opportunities innate to the organic algorithm are more persuasive than in the West where a few dollars a quarter does not help us to buy food or stability or choice.

Instead, it just sort of covers a coffee that we’ll photograph and share and the café will hope we tag them but they won’t have much in the way of a robust strategy for sharing that tagged photo.