We have become used to making judgements about everything today. Everyone has to have an opinion always about everything – and is rarely given the grace to change their mind later, as we all typically do. This contributes to people being reduced to caricatures rather than to the complex beings they are (or should be).
But even worse than that, we are asked to “provide feedback” on more and more things and interactions than ever before. I understand that this can be helpful when it concerns products we purchase, but even then, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what rating and review is genuine and reliable, and what is paid for, spiteful, fraudulent, not truthful, or otherwise manipulated.
Some of this has to do with the rise of the so-called “Web 2.0” and how it has destroyed our self-expression through corporatization – I have written previously about how Social Media has destroyed our Creativity. By now, many are wondering whether the internet itself is dead, given the proliferation of bots, artificial intelligence, and automatically generated content.
We certainly have to live with a high degree of manipulation also through autocratic state actors dedicated to undermining democracy by poisoning public discourse.
Nevertheless, we are doing a lot of this poisoning ourselves already, and one of the ways to do it is by constant rating of every interaction. But it needs to be said: Rating Everything, especially normal human interactions, is insane and is destroying society.
How can we rate people?
How can we rate an interaction?
Why would we even do this?
I find it tough enough to grade student papers sometimes. Why introduce this into our daily lives?
This is destroying us. It makes us more transactional. It makes us more judgemental.
Even rating a movie can be a borderline activity. I have written a great many movie reviews before, and would probably have to rewrite all of them by now, and do the same again in a few years. Judgements change. The more you know, the more difficult it becomes – or rather, the more difficult it should become! – to make facile and quick remarks rather than to reflect in a spirit of recognizing the complexity of human expressions and interactions. How you see a movie depends on your mood. It depends on what else you have watched. I have always (well, almost always) preferred a mode of appreciative analysis rather than simple up- or down-voting of movies. Even a “bad” movie can be entertaining, and even the “best” movie can be a chore to watch. For instance, I never, never, never ever again want to watch Eraserhead – but it is a great movie. Also, David Lynch’s Dune had problems, but I somehow prefer it over the Villeneuve version (though it is objectively made in a much more consistent way), and ironically, the best version seems to me right now the Jodorowsky documentary on how the Jodorowsky Dune failed. The miniseries has also been underestimated. (You can read about this in my Tale of Four Dunes). It all depends.
Is a person a “2” or a “10” (out of 10)? Is a person ugly or beautiful? How would I evaluate my interaction with my service provider on a scale of 1 through 5?
Stop this nonsense. Stop poisoning society with this constant objectification and with reducing everything to something that can be measured and tracked. Please. We are ruining society. We are ruining people.
Now, how would you rate this interaction, should you even have read this? Thumbs up, thumbs down? Seriously, it is getting to be ridiculous.
Erratic Attempts 