Fake Gamers, Real Workers is an interactive digital essay exploring the history of faux automation. It examines the ways in which technological opacity or abstraction has been exploited by capitalists and hucksters to elevate human labour into a speculative asset, before harvesting this surplus value to consolidate their power and devalue the labour upon which they are built (and often still require to operate).

The essay is punctuated by a series of popups that resemble the human verification challenges presented by various CAPTCHA systems. These popups interrupt the expected flow of the essay and present the viewer/reader with images and audio files that respond to and enhance the written text.

The essay ends with a final CAPTCHA that, unlike the rest in the essay, may not be solved. Instead the audience is placed in a purgatorial space, endlessly clicking, reflecting on the labour that they have been asked to perform and its unseen or unknown consequences, both within the essay and over their digital lifetime.