“It’s all about getting the chart that goes up,” a disaffected social media marketing expert told me over drinks. “There’s a whole industry devoted to making charts that go up.” To illustrate his point, he pointed me to the Guardian newspaper’s now-defunct “partner zones” program, which afforded large institutional advertisers the opportunity to pay massive sums to the newspaper in exchange for the right to post promotional “news” stories on its website—a form of “sponsored content,” in the industry’s parlance. To create the all-important “chart that goes up,” the clients would then pay Facebook to generate traffic to their advertorials. Ostensibly this traffic came through “organically” promoted links targeting genuine potential customers who are so enchanted by the serendipitous appearance of an online advertorial that speaks to their personal desires that they make a conscious choice to click, read, like, and share—or so the story goes. However, the expert, who was a friend of mine, had noticed that a suspiciously high percentage of the paid traffic came from far-flung, low-wage countries such as Bhutan. So the new model supporting digital media was for floundering corporations to pay to place stories about how awesome they were, which publishers would then promote by buying phantom readers. “Then the advertisers can go to the boss and say, ‘Look, we got an article in the Guardian,’” my friend the marketing cynic said. Those phony measures of success supplied fodder for still more charts that went up—these ones for internal consumption, and used to justify the marketing department budget to higher-ups.