“That’s it, I’m done!” Lucy said, throwing her book onto the bed.
Her friend Clarissa looked up from a copy of the same book, which they were studying in preparation for the end-of-year law exam.
“Done? This book is over 800 pages long. You can’t have finished studying it already!”
“No,” said Lucy. “I’ve finished studying, period. I’m not doing this anymore.”
Clarissa had known Lucy all her life and knew her propensity for making bad decisions. “You can’t do that. Your parents paid for the entire three-year program. If you quit, they’ll lose all their money.”
“So I’ll pay them back. Look.” Lucy showed Clarissa her cell phone. “This is what I’m going to do with my life.”
On the screen was the Look At Meapp, on which people uploaded videos of themselves doing crazy, stupid and dangerous things in return for money.
“I already have a concept for my channel,” continued Lucy. “I’m going to call it ‘Look at Lou-Lou’ and I’m going to do eating challenges because they’re really popular and, hey, I love to eat.”
Clarissa laughed. “That’s it? That’s your grand plan? Don’t be stupid, Lucy. It’s almost impossible to make money on an app like that. And even if you do, it’s probably a total scam. You remember what Brian said.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. Their friend Brian had told them he’d seen a famous Look At Me-er called Zelda working in a fast food restaurant in Manhattan. She’d told him her name was Veronica, but he insisted it was her. Lucy accessed Zelda’s channel now, which said how much money her videos made from subscribers. She showed it to Clarissa. “Zelda made more than $2 million last year. Either it really wasn’t her or she was trying something new for her channel. Whatever, I’m doing this and I’m going to make it a success.”
It turned out that people loved watching an attractive young woman like Lucy eating enormous quantities of food. By the end of six months, she’d made her first $10,000, and about three years later, she hit the million-dollar mark.
Look At Me congratulated her by sending her a copy of the terms and conditions she’d signed when she’d become a Look At Me-er. As an ex-law student, she knew she should have read the sixteen-page document, but life was too short for all that bureaucracy. And, as she told Clarissa, who was now working at a law firm, she was living proof that Look At Me was not a scam.
“I hate to say I told you so,” she told Clarissa, when her friend arrived at the party she was having to celebrate her million-dollar success.
“Wow, you can afford all this!” said Clarissa, looking around the Manhattan apartment Lucy had just bought.
“Thanks to Look At Me,” said Lucy, though that wasn’t entirely true. It was more expensive than she could afford, but if her channel continued to grow, she would soon have more money than she knew what to do with.
To thank her subscribers, Lucy made a video of herself eating $10,000 worth of caviar, but when she tried to upload it, she got an error message. And when she visited her channel, she was shocked to see a video of herself eating ten packets of nuclear noodles while standing on her head. What was going on? She’d never made that video. It was her and yet it wasn’t her.
In a panic, Lucy called Look At Me, but they just kept telling her to read the terms and conditions, which she tried to do but couldn’t completely understand. She thought about asking Clarissa for help, but she didn’t want to admit that Look At Me really was a scam: every day there was a new video of her, but the money was no longer going into her bank account.
It was one evening while she was taking a walk to clear her head that she saw the restaurant where Brian had said he’d seen Zelda. The girl serving fries definitely looked like Zelda.
“Zelda,” she told the girl. “I think I know why you’re working here. Look At Me has done the same thing to me. We have to expose them.”
“Look,” she said, “everyone knows you can fake everything these days, news, photos, videos... Look At Me make their users do all the work, come up with the concept, grow their subscribers, and then when they’ve made a million dollars, they cut them off and replicate their videos. And there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s all in their terms and conditions. I tried to expose them and they sued me for millions. And now I’ll be working here for the rest of my life. Just take whatever money you made and forget about it.”