Zuhair Lakhani has always understood the allure of scarcity. When he was 15, he started sneakerbotting — coding programs that could purchase hard-to-find shoes at lightning speed and then resell them for an upcharge. His father owned phone-accessory stores in Greater New York, but like any brick-and-mortar retailer, was struggling in the age of Amazon. When the pandemic hit, the stores closed for good and the family moved to Dallas, where his father opened a restaurant. So Lakhani, then in his junior year of remote high school, turned to the golden rule of sneakerbotting: If something is really hard to get, people will want it really bad. “Before even taking any reservations, ‘I was like, ‘The restaurant’s sold out,’” he says. “We did reservation drops every Wednesday at 4 p.m. for the next week, and at 4:10, I would just close them.” Within two weeks, the wait list for reservations at his father’s restaurant grew to around 6,000 people —many of whom could expect an imminent call saying that a spot had magically appeared for them.

Lakhani, handsome, hungry, and with a quiet intensity he masks in lowercase X jokes about slop bowls and mogging, is the sort of 21-year-old who is uniquely equipped for the economy of the moment. The world’s most-future-oriented companies are currently seeking “agentic” people— that is, those who don’t ask permission to change things before breaking them. Only a highly agentic human, for instance, could come up with an idea for a start-up nobody asked for.

In October, Lakhani announced Doublespeed and claimed it was the only venture-capital-backed bot farm in America when he received an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. “Because why let Russia and China have all the fun?” Lakhani asks in his launch video, in which he peels a digital mask off a pretty young woman’s face to reveal his own, sitting in front of a green-lit stack of phones, a cyberpunk set for an explicitly bleak vision. “Never pay a human again,” reads Doublespeed’s website, which advertises the ability to create AI personas on TikTok like a 62-year-old mother in Phoenix or a Gen-Z skater in Atlanta who will then post about your product. The investment was part of a16z’s three-month Speedrun accelerator program, in which young founders with start-up ideas can receive investments up to $1 million from the firm. Peers included “the world’s first AI-powered credit card,” the “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” and a “Bible-based AI buddy,” which together formed what the tech publication 404 Media called an “AI-generated hell on earth.”

Doublespeed is just one of a growing number of start-ups devoted to fabricating genuine virality online, some of which pay Discord users to create clips of podcasts, make fan edits of movie stars, and post glowing praise of whatever pop star has hired them. Lakhani’s pitch is one step beyond this: He wants not only to manufacture the trends but also to replace the real people involved with an army of AI influencers free of the human need for nuisances like payment or sleep. Clients of Doublespeed can invent a hot girl dancing to the song they’re trying to promote or a man in a lab coat extolling the science behind a skin-care brand. Each account is connected to its own physical phone in order to circumvent TikTok’s bot-detection systems.

The goals seem to be to titillate his peers and stoke fear in everybody else. Where other tech founders have tried to style themselves as responsible stewards of human morality, Lakhani has shrewdly begun to use nihilism as a marketing technique. “You’ve been watching slop all your life,” he says in the launch video, cutting to a grid of Fox News anchors. “We didn’t break the internet; it was broken to begin with. But now we’re killing it entirely. Welcome to the dead internet.”

Doublespeed is not yet meaningfully contributing to the enshittification of social media (earlier this year, it claimed to be managing a fleet of around 4,500 phones), nor has it reached its ultimate goal of completely agentic AI social-media accounts that can ideate, create, and publish content without human intervention. But Lakhani apparently hopes to make as much money as possible while people still believe he might succeed. The waiting list for Doublespeed grew to 6,000 companies in the first two months of its launch, though it bears repeating that Lakhani has built his career on manufacturing shortages of whatever he’s selling.

“I have no problem leaning into the dystopian feeling of our company. That’s what brought us all this attention so far,” he tells me. “A core belief of mine is that it’s very hard to get attention as a new company nowadays. Even if you raise $50 million, no one’s gonna write about you unless you’re doing something crazy.”

Phone farms are cold, and they are loud. Lakhani and three team members have been living inside one for the past seven months in a bright-white Spanish-style duplex in the middle of L.A. It’s a sunny Saturday in March, and the blast of arctic air and whirring fans greets me as soon as I open the front door. “We’ve all been desensitized to it,” says Hassan Syed, Lakhani’s 29-year-old co-founder and software engineer. What was........

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