Back in 2008, when Twitter was just two years old, Joe Fernandes set up a company called Klout. This startup gave every Twitter user who cared to check, a ‘Klout Score’. This percentile reflected how far your network spread out on Twitter, what kind of user you were, who were the other people you interacted with and what your tweeting style was.
The idea was to use the Klout score to grow your network and interact with influencers in the areas that interested you. In time, other social networks also fed into the Klout score but it was hard work maintaining that score, presuming you reached a respectable score in the first place. You had to constantly be online and active on the social networks. Much prompting and pushing went on to get you to find post-worthy content. Pretty soon you’d find yourself drawn into the game, keeping an eye on every decimal point of your Klout score. Why is it 67.8 today? Just the other day it was 69.2, nicely poised for a 70 score. Inevitably, you would game the system, deliberately posting and forcing interactions in the hope of a little increase in the score.
The Klout score was not supposed to be without its rewards. The company had a go at roping in brands to include the Klout score in customer profiles. Customers with a score above whatever cut-off they decided on — say 65 and up — would be given privileges and perks that the rest didn’t get since they never bothered with working hard at ‘sharing’ on their social networks.
Klout encouraged users to broadcast their scores at every interaction with the site or app. Klout doesn’t have that much clout these days, but the chase for numbers never stopped. Brands shower privileges and opportunities on those who have a colossal number of followers, never mind whether they have been bought or earned by gaming the system or are even not real people, but bots.
This scenario is chillingly close to the most recent episode of the Black Mirror , a British anthology series available on Netflix that revolves around a group of people’s personal lives and how technology manipulates their behaviour. In the most recent episode, Nosedive, a young woman goes about her day, jogging in the morning, stopping to say hello to people, going to work, etc. What’s different is that an augmented reality overlay and her phone and other gadgets and screens constantly reflect ratings given to and by people she interacts with. Each meeting and interchange leads to a rating on a five-point scale. Each person must go about daily life like an Uber driver, giving and getting ratings. Here, the average rating is like Klout on steroids. All the services you get depend on that score, whether it’s surgery for cancer or parking space or a home purchase. Worse, others’ willingness to interact depends on whether they deem you fit, based on your rating, which hovers over your head or shows up on screens even before you open your mouth to say a word. If your rating is below 3. 5 or so, you’re toast.
The falseness of interactions is shown in this episode as people manipulate each other or get sugary sweet to get a good rating. A single failure to do the expected thing and be cheerful and pleasant even when treated shabbily can lead to ratings falling like dominoes.
This episode, more of which I won’t spoil for those who’d like to check it out, is not as fictional as we would like to believe. The only differences are how augmented reality is used, the gadgets themselves, and the way the rating rules above all. Apart from that, we’re doing very well at being slaves to numbers and tailoring our behaviour online in the hope of getting more likes, mentions and comments. Not long ago, an app called Peeple was developed much along the lines of rating everyone in your life on all sorts of things. Thankfully, there was an outcry against the idea. But even without an app like Peeple, we’re getting there fast, headed straight to that future that’s nearly here.