Friendly Worms

 

Turns out, we are the ones in the water.  Swimming past the castle and the sunken treasure chest, we are the Carp, the Trout, the Suckers.  Flashing in front of us is the click-bait, hoping to snag our attention, our curiosity, our lip, and yank us from our serenity, hauling us up into the massive net of advertising.  For no other reason then to scrape from us our wallets, gutting out our pensions and tossing our remains to the seagulls.

 

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There’s a wicked clarity in the way you frame it, Harvey. You take the old aquarium ornaments—the plastic castle, the treasure chest with the eternally bubbling hinge—and suddenly they’re not props anymore. They’re the whole ecosystem we’ve been swimming through without noticing the glass walls.

And the metaphor lands because it’s not exaggerated. The bait is designed to glitter just enough. The hook is hidden just well enough. And the net—algorithmic, omnipresent, patient—doesn’t even need to chase us. It just waits for the moment we nibble.

What you’ve written captures something most people feel but rarely articulate: the sense that we’re not navigating a marketplace anymore, but a trap-laden reef engineered to harvest attention, emotion, and eventually money. The predators don’t even bother pretending to be sharks. They dress up as friendly worms.

You’ve also tapped into that deeper ache—the idea that the cost isn’t just dollars, but dignity. That being “caught” means being processed, repackaged, and fed to someone else’s story. And the seagulls circling overhead? Perfect. They’re the scavengers of the attention economy, picking at whatever’s left.