![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/cf04ebcb85c614afadf440f2e04721a4c9-zuhair-phonefarm.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
Manage cookie preferences<\/p>\n
Zuhair Lakhani has always understood the allure of scarcity. When he was 15, he started sneakerbotting \u2014\u00a0coding 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. \u201cBefore even taking any reservations, \u2018I was like, \u2018The restaurant\u2019s sold out,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cWe did reservation drops every Wednesday at 4 p.m. for the next week, and at 4:10, I would just close them.\u201d Within two weeks, the wait list for reservations at his father\u2019s restaurant grew to around 6,000 people \u2014many of whom could expect an imminent call saying that a spot had magically appeared for them.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s most-future-oriented companies are currently seeking \u201cagentic\u201d<\/a> people\u2014 that is, those who don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cBecause why let Russia and China have all the fun?\u201d Lakhani asks in his launch video<\/a>, in which he peels a digital mask off a pretty young woman\u2019s face to reveal his own, sitting in front of a green-lit stack of phones, a cyberpunk set for an explicitly bleak vision. \u201cNever pay a human again,\u201d reads Doublespeed\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthe world\u2019s first AI-powered credit card,\u201d the \u201cworld\u2019s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,\u201d and a \u201cBible-based AI buddy,\u201d which together formed what the tech publication 404 Media called an \u201cAI-generated hell on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Doublespeed is just one of a growing number of start-ups devoted to fabricating genuine virality online<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u2019s bot-detection systems.<\/p>\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n The goals seem to be to titillate his peers and stoke fear in everybody else. Where other tech founders<\/a> have tried to style themselves as responsible stewards of human morality, Lakhani has shrewdly begun to use nihilism as a marketing technique. \u201cYou\u2019ve been watching slop all your life,\u201d he says in the launch video, cutting to a grid of Fox News anchors. \u201cWe didn\u2019t break the internet; it was broken to begin with. But now we\u2019re killing it entirely. Welcome to the dead internet.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s selling.<\/p>\n \u201cI have no problem leaning into the dystopian feeling of our company. That\u2019s what brought us all this attention so far,\u201d he tells me. \u201cA core belief of mine is that it\u2019s very hard to get attention as a new company nowadays. Even if you raise $50 million, no one\u2019s gonna write about you unless you\u2019re doing something crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a sunny Saturday in March, and the blast of arctic air and whirring fans greets me as soon as I open the front door. \u201cWe\u2019ve all been desensitized to it,\u201d says Hassan Syed, Lakhani\u2019s 29-year-old co-founder and software engineer. What was designed as a living room has been transformed into an open-plan office, four standing desks jammed together next to a whiteboard that ranks each of Doublespeed\u2019s employees on their \u201caura\u201d points, which they receive by fixing bugs or performing other acts of kindness for the group. \u201cOne guy shipped 50 boxes of cookies to another employee. That gave aura on both sides,\u201d explains Lakhani, who is wearing an oversize Ralph Lauren oxford and off-white jeans, his thick hair in Gen Z\u2019s iteration on the butt cut. The Doublespeed crew are quiet and polite, their apartment equally polished. \u201cWe have the Nerf gun out right now!\u201d Lakhani says, pointing to a blue-and-orange contraption stacked carefully on a shelf.<\/p>\n The real work happens in the would-be dining room, where 1,200 smartphones are plugged into a grid system of racks, USB hubs, and color-coded labels. (When I visited, the remaining 3,000 or so of Doublespeed\u2019s phones were stored in off-site locations.) While phone farms are traditionally thought of as click farms \u2014 that is, legions of phones operated either by AI or low-paid human workers who earn money by engaging with a specific post to artificially inflate traffic \u2014 the livestock on Doublespeed\u2019s farm are creating, not just passively consuming. Each phone is controlled remotely, spending a week or two in a warm-up period in which it creates a social-media account and scrolls through the app the way a human might using an AI agent created by Syed\u2019s team. \u201cSo if you come to us and you\u2019re like, \u2018I have this tennis racquet I want to sell,\u2019 we\u2019re gonna make new accounts for you on TikTok and warm them up in that tennis niche. We\u2019re gonna make it watch tennis content, comment on tennis stuff, engage with tennis stuff so the algorithms recognize that we are a tennis viewer,\u201d the idea being that when the account starts posting about tennis racquets, TikTok will see the video as more legitimate and serve it to other tennis players; it also helps the agent get data on \u201cwhat\u2019s currently working in the tennis niche.\u201d<\/p>\n Every single aspect of a phone farm is engineered to trick algorithms into thinking you are not, in fact, operating a phone farm. Zachary Thompson, who runs the 250-phone farm Autoviral, tells me, \u201cOn any platform, you want to be cognizant of something called a trust score, which is basically how trustworthy your phone is.\u201d According to him, several factors can weigh against your trustworthiness on an app \u2014\u00a0a TikTok account on a new or wiped phone that wasn\u2019t purchased in the U.S., for instance, may be less likely to be served to American users, and he believes new accounts are less trustworthy than old ones, though Lakhani claims it \u201cfully depends on the warm-up process.\u201d TikTok, for its part, says it doesn\u2019t give users a simple trust score and that it relies on a \u201cvariety of signals\u201d to try to detect spamming and other \u201cinauthentic behavior.\u201d It also denies that newer accounts are necessarily seen as \u201cless trustworthy.\u201d<\/p>\n Most clients pay Doublespeed around $450 per month, which Lakhani says is much less than paying an army of humans to post. \u201cThey\u2019re paying college kids like $1,500 a month to do 30 videos,\u201d he says, \u201cplus a manager on top of that.\u201d Lakhani stresses that \u201cslop will not work,\u201d only \u201ctasteful, realistic\u201d content that looks like a human made it. Last year, he posted a tutorial<\/a> on how to re-create viral videos with Sora; clients are now encouraged to replicate static-image carousels using Claude or use AI video generators like Kling, Seedance, or Veo 3. One tutorial<\/a> Doublespeed dropped in its Discord last fall suggests creating image carousels with Pinterest-y photos of young women on vacation overlaid with skin-care advice. Doublespeed\u2019s posts are not always labeled as ads, and it\u2019s unclear whether the Federal Trade Commission under President Trump will take any action against undisclosed AI advertisements. (In December, citing conflicts with Trump\u2019s pro-AI executive order, the FTC set aside a 2024 settlement<\/a> that sought to prevent an AI company from helping people create fake online reviews). Some clients make their own content, and more recently, with human managers overseeing the process, Doublespeed has been using its own AI agents to create clients\u2019 content for them; Lakhani\u2019s ultimate goal is to have AI do it all in an instant.<\/p>\n Lakhani wouldn\u2019t provide me with a full list of his clients, but chatter on Discord between Doublespeed employees and apparent clients indicates they range from a Christian prayer app to a foam roller targeting women over 50. Eliza Wu, co-founder of the map-sharing app Corner<\/a>, has been using Doublespeed since the fall and compares the service to SEO marketing in the days when Google actually mattered<\/a>. Now that many young people are using TikTok as a search engine, companies have found ways to rig results. Around 30 percent of Corner\u2019s marketing budget goes to Doublespeed, which operates accounts with names like \u201cwhere to go out in paris<\/a>\u201d that then post carousels of hot spots in the five cities that Corner covers. Corner uses AI to create the posts, though not, as of now, AI influencers \u2014\u00a0 but Wu says it might experiment with this in the future \u201cbecause things are moving very rapidly.\u201d The TikToks, some of which have even made their way onto my own feed, have been the app\u2019s primary growth driver since it launched. \u201cThese things sound scarier than they are,\u201d says Wu. UGC creators are already flooding platforms with advertisements, often without disclosure. Chaotic Good Projects, a music-marketing company, was recently accused of creating a \u201cpsyop\u201d<\/a> by using similar tactics to promote certain musicians, such as Geese, whose rise felt organic and special. \u201cThe reality is everyone\u2019s doing this, just manually,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Phone farms have long existed in less wealthy parts of the world, especially in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and only recently have they become popular passive-income schemes for young U.S.-based entrepreneurs. Americans\u2019 ideas of phone farms (\u201ctroll farms\u201d) tend to involve political-influence campaigns like those practiced by Russia\u2019s Internet Research Agency<\/a> or the \u201cpig-butchering\u201d<\/a> scams to catfish money from lonely and unsuspecting people. Thompson\u2019s co-founder Ayo Mosuro has one idea why the U.S. was slower to embrace botting: \u201cPlatforms favor us,\u201d he says. \u201cBack in the day, I don\u2019t think you had to rely on phone botting or pushing yourself on the algorithm as much as you do now.\u201d There is a sense among many in the space that these days, the only way to get a message out on social media is to co-opt the methods used by the three earliest adopters of social-media manipulation: dark-money political campaigns, gambling, and, of course, porn.<\/p>\n From the earliest days, Lakhani has been trying to make Doublespeed feel, as he says, \u201cdystopian.\u201d \u201cWe don\u2019t run UGC campaigns, we run propaganda campaigns,\u201d he tweeted<\/a> recently. His mentors at a16z advised against this, he says (in 2023, the company famously published<\/a> a 5,000-word \u201cmanifesto\u201d by its founder Marc Andreessen arguing that technology has made the world wonderful and that AI will only make it better). \u201cThey were like, \u2018Are you sure about this?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cWhatever. They didn\u2019t understand the vision.\u201d (a16z did not respond to requests for comment.) When Doublespeed launched in October, the internet reacted predictably, flooding X with criticisms that its practices seem to violate all the major social platforms\u2019 terms of service and with more existential concerns about the internet\u2019s slopification. Even music\u2019s leading techno-optimist, Grimes, quote-tweeted a post about the announcement with a blithe \u201cI see<\/a>.\u201d Lakhani received death threats, but, he says, they \u201chonestly kinda made me happy that my plan worked.\u201d<\/p>\n Not all of the attention went as intended. Within months, Doublespeed was reportedly hacked, first in December, when a hacker claimed to take control<\/a> of more than 1,000 of the company\u2019s smartphones, then again in April, when another attempted to use the phone farm<\/a> to spread a meme that read, \u201ca16z is the antichrist, sponsored by doublespeed.ai<\/a>,\u201d though the memes were never posted. Lakhani denies its phones were breached and says Doublespeed\u2019s clients and their data remained secure and unaffected. Since then, he has only fueled the fire with his tweets, calling human creators \u201cUNSUSTAINABLE\u201d in their unreasonable demands and flakiness. AI, meanwhile, \u201cnever misses a post and always listens to brand guidelines,\u201d he wrote<\/a>. It\u2019s difficult to take him exactly at his word; his other posts range from deathly earnest<\/a> (\u201cYou NEED to start LIVING with conviction\u201d) to the sort of insouciant trolling common among tech folks hoping to grab the attention of the wealthy and powerful. \u201cEvery minute spent watching a show or a movie is a minute that could\u2019ve been spent vibe coding,\u201d he wrote last spring<\/a>, and one month later<\/a>, he wrote \u201cIt\u2019s 6:04 on a Friday. You are out getting drinks with friends after a long week. I am at the ER automating 50 tiktoks for the weekend. We are not the same.\u201d (He was actually in the ER; he\u2019d fainted and would soon be diagnosed with a heart condition, though the post was obviously tongue-in-cheek.)<\/p>\n Lakhani took a similar approach to Doublespeed\u2019s branding in our conversations. At several points, Lakhani hints at ways I could generate interest in this article. \u201cIf you guys make it dystopian, it\u2019ll really work out as a good story, I think,\u201d he says during our first video call. \u201cIf you need any juicy content ideas, we can definitely help manufacture those as well,\u201d he tells me at the phone farm. Later, he sends me an email with ideas for headlines using words that have \u201cproven to be good hooks in the past,\u201d which include \u201cThe 21-Year-Old Making Millions Selling Fake People,\u201d \u201cPropaganda As a Service: The Tech Frat House Running Your Feed,\u201d and \u201cThe USC Dropout Selling Your Attention for Millions.\u201d<\/p>\n These, admittedly, are not terrible headlines, if only they were true. Lakhani would not share revenue figures for Doublespeed aside from claiming that, for some stretch of the past year, the company passed a $1 million yearly run rate, a metric that estimates future revenue based on data from a short time period but does not necessarily correlate to annual revenue. Nor does Doublespeed\u2019s headquarters resemble anything like a frat house; the four-bedroom apartment in L.A. was absolutely spotless when I visited; personal items around the house included smoothie ingredients, a chessboard, and the Quran. Neither the founders nor the employees I met say they have any interest in partying or dating; their preferred vice is DoorDashing cookies. \u201cWe used to go ham on Beverly Hills cookies. It was like $6 per cookie,\u201d Lakhani says, though at the time of my visit, they were more into Levain; they\u2019ve since moved on to MeloMelo coconut jelly.<\/p>\n Their politics are somewhat confounding; Lakhani claimed<\/a> that the first people to reach out to him about working with Doublespeed were politicians. Though he has said <\/a>that Doublespeed doesn\u2019t support \u201cpolitical efforts,\u201d when we speak he hedges that this isn\u2019t necessarily a promise. What the company firmly refuses are clients looking to promote gambling sites or OnlyFans accounts, which it gets requests for about three times per day. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely lucrative,\u201d Lakhani says. \u201cIt\u2019s maybe tempting at times, but we want to do the right thing here as well. We understand how powerful what we\u2019ve built is and the responsibility that comes with that.\u201d Though part of the company\u2019s reticence to work with OnlyFans clients is due to its founders morals, TikTok also does not allow users to promote OnlyFans or link to adult websites, so any content Doublespeed makes for a client would be against the platform\u2019s rules (though, again, technically all of Doublespeed\u2019s content breaks TikTok and other platform\u2019s rules, and Lakhani says many users are able to get around the adult-website ban). Like many tech founders their age<\/a>, the pair is immensely skeptical of the two industries that dominate young male users\u2019 feeds via their own bot farms and UGC content creators. \u201cWe\u2019re in an epidemic where every single college-age boy I know is addicted to gambling and prediction markets, and it definitely puts a big fear in me,\u201d Lakhani says.<\/p>\n In between asking support questions or wondering when the waiting list will send an approval, people in the discussions on the Doublespeed Discord sometimes veer into similarly philosophical directions. \u201cI want to use this service just to contribute to the enshittification of social media. Would love to see this service become mainstream and create so much slop that people push back from social media use entirely,\u201d wrote one member in October. \u201cLet\u2019s go kill the internet, to be honest best time to replace woman,\u201d replied another. One member had loftier goals: \u201cWe also have a really funny opportunity to band together and use this to actually spread helpful, rational, non-sensational, non-dividing, educational information and flood the internet with useful media to suppress the brain rot and save our society\u2019s mental health and culture if we band together and commit to this cause. And the best part is because of pure volume it will be just as profitable. Instead of killing the internet we can save the internet.\u201d Said another: \u201cNah it\u2019s already dead. Kill it with fire.\u201d<\/p>\n Toward the end of my visit, the topic turns to the unsettling vibe in tech more generally. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt more uncertain about the future,\u201d says Syed when discussing the recent layoffs at Block and other major companies. Rahim, an employee who built the physical phone farm and also lives in the house, guesses it\u2019s only a matter of time before AGI or robots shake everything up all over again. I offer that I personally can\u2019t wait for robots because I\u2019d love to never scrub the bathtub or do laundry ever again. \u201cBut then there\u2019s the human purpose aspect of it,\u201d interjects Lakhani, looking pensive. \u201cIf all your work is done for you, what do you have to live for?\u201d I ask him what his answer is to this question. \u201cI\u2019m not sure. I think this will become an existential thing, because if a robot\u2019s doing all your work, you can\u2019t even show you care about your family. Cooking for someone is an act of love. If a robot\u2019s doing all your tasks, you don\u2019t have any reason to show that anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n For all his talk of making the human internet irrelevant, it\u2019s clear that Lakhani considers himself just as much of a visionary as the influencers his company seeks to replace. He loves working with music labels \u201cbecause we get to be creative instead of just pushing a product\u201d and hopes to do more with fashion brands. Much of what drives him and other founders is their ambition to become a tastemaker<\/a>, for others to take seriously their vision of how the world should look or, at the very least, what people should buy.<\/p>\n I asked Lakhani what happens when the day comes when all social-media profiles must be human verified, which several platforms are currently pushing for. \u201cYou\u2019ll license your likeness,\u201d he says. \u201cThe farms will still exist; they\u2019ll just operate human accounts, but it\u2019ll still be AI-made content.\u201d A world in which everyone is theoretically a stock-photo model that can be animated to say and do whatever a brand wants is a grim one, but it is also sort of the current one. Lakhani bears it with a shrug and a sense that dystopias are merely opportunities to be exploited. \u201cGet used to it,\u201d he says when I ask about his response to critics. \u201cThis is what\u2019s already happening. It\u2019s more like, \u2018You fell for it? Haha.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/b2f3cc579908db75276e1ee7a7a952db08-old-originalfarm.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n