The post-pandemic explosion of work-from-home arrangements is often credited with the rise of "mouse jigglers," devices or programs that simulate user input, allowing workers to evade surveillance by their managers. But the history of pretending to use computers is nearly as long as the history of actually using them. This talk traces the genealogy of techniques for simulating computer use, ranging from coffee mugs set on keyboards to AI agents granted root-level privileges. These techniques have evolved in parallel with new methods and motives for detecting computer use—most conspicuously, efforts to assess whether users are paying attention by conflating their attention with the activity of the machines they use. The ubiquity of simulated computer use raises questions about the units in which the attention economy is denominated.

Nick Seaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program in Science, Technology & Society. His research examines the relationship between cultural concepts and technological practices, particularly in computational settings. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022), an ethnographic study of music recommender system developers. He is currently writing a book on the meaning and measurement of attention and developing a project on the anthropology of contraptions.