The 1st episode of Season 7 of Black Mirror, titled "Common People," tells the following story:

Welder Mike and teacher Amanda are a loving couple who are trying to conceive. Unfortunately, Amanda is diagnosed with a tumor in her brain that cannot be surgically removed.

Tech company Rivermind offers a solution: to replace the damaged part with synthetic brain tissue, with the surgery being free of charge. However, Amanda's subsequent life will depend on the company's servers, requiring a monthly subscription fee of $300. Desperate, Mike signs the agreement.

However, the subscription fees keep increasing, and Amanda involuntarily experiences ad interruptions while awake. To secretly raise money, Mike starts live streaming on the "Dum Dummies" platform—a website where viewers pay to instruct the host to complete various humiliating tasks.

After this is exposed by a colleague, Mike loses his job, and the couple is left in dire straits.

A year later, Mike can no longer afford the high-tier service maintaining his wife's life. Amanda sleeps for 16 hours a day, occasionally waking up only to deliver advertisements. With his last savings, Mike purchases a 30-minute high-tier service slot to allow Amanda to leave a final message in a brief moment of calm.

When the time expires, Mike ends Amanda's life himself. The scene ends with a close-up shot of the laptop screen still live streaming, Mike holding a utility knife, walking into darkness.

People are forced to trade their self-respect for the right to continue living, making this the episode's most chilling and oppressive moment. Therefore, when pump.fun launched a new feature called "Pump.fun Go" earlier this month, many couldn't help but draw parallels to this episode.

The story of Black Mirror is not so distant from our lives and has, in fact, entered our lives.

$2600 is the price to have a tattoo on the forehead

The new feature "Pump Fun Go" on pump.fun allows anyone to post paid reward tasks on pump.fun.

This indeed caught the attention of the mainstream media, but unfortunately, once again it was portrayed in a negative light to the public.

$Bountywork, this coin once reached a market capitalization of nearly $2.5 million. The developer behind it, @ayushquantt, focused on continuously posting new tasks on pump.fun to create buzz for this coin.

He certainly succeeded—incentivizing people with a 40 SOL reward (about $2,600) to tattoo $bountywork on their foreheads.

A man from India actually went ahead and got the tattoo:

While submitting the video of his tattooing process, he wrote in a note:

“To tattoo a permanent design on my forehead, this will accompany me throughout my life. This was not an easy decision, and the tattooing process itself was very painful. There was bleeding during the tattooing, and I had to endure discomfort to complete it.”

However, his submission was rejected by the rewarder because of a typo in the description—the rewarder mistakenly slipped and misspelled the ticker as $boutywork. And this Indian man just happened to strictly follow the requirements in the description for the tattoo.

So, on the second day, he went to get another tattoo of the letter n:

This time he successfully received the bounty. $2,600, the price to leave a tattoo on his forehead, he said, this money changed his life.

But he earned far more than just the $2,600. After his initial reward submission was rejected, someone sent him a coin called $boutywork, using the wrong tattoo as the new coin's name.

Because this incident generated enough traffic, the total trading volume of this coin exceeded $5 million, and the creator of the new coin (transaction fees) gave it all to him, so he earned a total of about $48,000.

And this is not the highest single reward one can get by completing a tattoo on pump.fun. Another reward task posted by @Perporseful also required leaving a tattoo on the forehead, with the content being "bounty.fun." On the day the task was posted, someone completed this task and ultimately received a reward of 200 SOL (about $14,000).

When submitting his own tattoo proof to pass the bounty review, his note was very simple:

“We need money.”

The Price of Freedom, Easily Amplifying the Dark

The hype around the forehead tattoo incident in India has faded, and $Bountywork has essentially returned to zero. However, $Bountywork's dev continues to release new bounties attempting to replicate this "success," such as having people wear clothing with $Bountywork printed on it and eat 3 bugs in front of the camera.

Although the bounty is only 2.5 SOL (about $178), which is not generous, when faced with "We need money," it was never a problem:

To continue generating traffic for $Bountywork, @ayushquantt has spent $4500 on various bounties. In addition to the bug-eating challenge mentioned above, there are also tasks like wearing $Bountywork clothing and drinking a bottle of hot sauce, with a bounty of 1.4 SOL (about $100):

However, he has also posted some relatively normal or even heartwarming bounty tasks, such as gifting a $50 gift card to someone in need in the name of $Bountywork, with a bounty of 1.5 SOL (about $107):

It is difficult to evaluate such behavior and even the good or bad of this new feature, pump.fun. Clearly, gifting a $50 gift card to someone in need hardly makes a ripple at the traffic level, but the likelihood of gaining attention by eating bugs in front of the camera or drinking a bottle of hot sauce is much higher.

I don't think this means "in an era where traffic is money, we have all become slaves to traffic." Freedom often manifests a certain nakedness, while you and I are just "protected" too well. We would not be willing to leave a tattoo on our forehead for $2600 just because we can still endure holding a few thousand dollars' salary, venting our dissatisfaction with work and overtime in group chats and short video scrolls.

The Black Mirror TV series mentioned at the beginning of the article has actually already entered real life. During the live-streaming "Wilderness Era," chatting via voice networks was once a popular platform. On December 31, 2018, a live streamer using the pseudonym "Da Fei," under the persuasion of the chat room owner Wang and the cheers of the audience, once again drank a large amount of alcohol and died suddenly while out after drinking. "Da Fei" had been live-streaming drinking every day for the 3 months leading up to the incident, and had long been earning tips through live streaming of drinking alcohol and soy sauce.

In one of "Da Fei's" previous live streams, he once said he couldn't go on after drinking and started convulsing. At that time, the audience in the chat room was still cheering, saying, "Pour the vomit back on his head, and add another 300 bucks."

Some were even cheering, "Da Fei is finally going to lose his life." Little did they know, this prophecy would come true in the end.

Even in 2023-2024, when live-streaming regulation has become increasingly mature, we can still find many death cases caused by excessive drinking in PK competitions, or overeating in food live streams.

"Obsessed with becoming famous," "Why go through all this trouble for money," these are the final legacy left by these live streamers for the internet, some gossip for casual conversation, and then gradually disappearing in the daily flood of internet updates. Regulation can indeed curb the excessive commodification of individuals by money, but it cannot stop those willing to tattoo their faces for a few thousand dollars on pump.fun.

Because they really need the money.

The Light in the Darkness

Although the bounties on pump.fun are much like Black Mirror and the dark web, they also contain some interesting and heartwarming elements.

In New York, an assembly of people resisting work, advocating that "work is a scam," offers a bounty of $15,865. This is the kind of activity that gets me, a cattle horse, excited:

Previously, the $neet community had spontaneously organized 2 "do not work gatherings" offline in the United States. If this bounty is completed, it will be the 3rd gathering.

Show kindness to 10 strangers, making someone else's day better. The bounty issuer did not specify the method; whether treating them to a meal, giving them flowers, books, or buying them coffee. Tell them to be happy today, and the best 5 videos will each receive a $1,000 bounty:

Organize a charity food donation in your local community, provide food to at least 20 people in need, bounty of $1,161:

Even helping an old lady cross the street, bounty of $145:

In this vast world, there are all sorts of wonders. We cannot escape the darkness, only wish for a little more light.

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