Arrrrrrr!

[garote]

A few years ago I read about a company that started up in San Francisco, whose mission was to create a rating system for every single person on Earth. People could go to their website and search for a name - including their own - and find a collection of reviews submitted by other people amounting to a quality score.

I don’t know how much investment money this startup managed to absorb before public outcry caught up with it, but it was clear to anyone on the outside that what they were creating was a gigantic trap door leading directly to social totalitarianism. Supposedly if a person logged in and found that their rating was low they could adjust it by paying the corporation an ongoing fee, and the implications spiraled out from there. Think about the implications for corporate-sponsored disinformation and propaganda, automated to the degree that it effortlessly reaches down into the individual daily conduct of individual lives: Vote for us and your rating will go up. Buy this and your rating will go up. Complain about a problem and watch it go down. And so on.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that the people on the inside of that company reassured each other they weren’t doing anything wrong, by saying that the product they were creating was merely a convenient way for people to "express themselves", and was natural and inevitable, and all they were doing was trying to be first to market. Perhaps they believed this system was arising within Facebook or Google and wanted to position themselves to be acquired for some huge amount of money.

And really that’s what it boiled down to. It was a cash grab, like every other internet startup. They believed they could insert themselves as intermediaries between people and their own social standing, and calculating the collective value of that position, they saw the potential to make so much money that it stopped mattering whether their goal was ethical. The amount of money was so large it overruled everything.

I bet they all worked very hard to sell this idea as “the future”, to any investor who would listen, and simultaneously tried their best to hide what they were doing from the public and the media until they had a prototype, and a way to cram it down enough people’s throats, perhaps as a free service with ginned-up data scraped from other companies. Then they'd come up with some measurable sign of acceptance - like say, a bunch of numbers crunched out of their website traffic logs - and with that, shout victory as loud as possible until some big company bought them. Even if they couldn’t sell totalitarianism to the entire world they could probably sell their company. Then they could all retire to a private island, and the monster they made would be somebody else's problem.

How ironic that under the system they invented, their own cynical conduct would drive their personal ratings so far down into the negative that they could not participate in public life at all, and they would need that private island just to avoid the protestors. On the other hand, they could use their buckets of money to erase their own ratings and clean up around the margins. Either way, the company founders would be the perfect demonstration of why the company should have never existed.

This seems really plausible to me. I’ve known for many years that information in aggregate has its own value, and that large companies such as Google and Facebook are primarily occupied with finding ways to exploit this aggregate information for financial gain. It helps me to keep my eye on the ball. Every time I look at a Facebook feed, I remember that money is changing hands as this information is presented to me, and then more money is changing hands as I interact with it, leaving my fingerprints behind. I have no power to monetize these things I’m doing, but Facebook’s position as the intermediary gives them that power. And people all over the Earth use this apparently free system and declare, “So what; it only adds value where there was none before.” At least, until some piece of information being stored and presented by Facebook interferes with a person's ability to conduct their own affairs, and they realize they can’t do a damn thing about it. Information you post is supposedly controlled by you -- but information posted by others about you is not.

So it really is no surprise to me that a bunch of startup-culture douchebags tried to take this activity to the next level. Probably independent groups of them tried it many times, and only one was unlucky enough to make the news.

The reason this is coming to my mind today, is that for the first time in my life I find myself participating in a technology startup company whose product I would never personally consume, but whose market potential is measured in tens of billions of dollars. It is compelling me and everyone around me to work very hard, and our attitude is partially fueled by a belief that our product is inevitable and the only question is whether we will occupy the market first.

There are other companies working towards the same goal, with the same visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads, buttressed by a - frankly less important - belief that this product is beneficial to society in myriad ways. Sometimes I read about them in trade publications. Several of them have made grand preemptive announcements, attempting to garner more financial support for their work, or scare away competition. But our company is not particularly worried by any of them because we have a very good team -- and some very key patents.

At a time in my life when I have been seriously considering the prospect of entirely abandoning the career I have worked in for almost 30 years, in order to broaden my horizons and renew my interest in work and life itself, this job has chucked a golden lasso around me, tethering me to this work, offering me not just the prospect of the reasonably secure retirement I have been inching towards all this time, but the prospect of instant retirement. Work a few more years, sell the company, sell my stake, and ... done. Not "private island" done, but, for the average person with a modest lifestyle, done.

And you know, if I sat down and asked myself, “what would it take to keep me in this career for another damn year,” this scenario would probably - but only just barely - be the one thing that convinced me to stay. And here I am anyway, without even asking the question.

Thankfully I am not in the same situation as the employees of that defunct “social review” startup. The product I am helping to deliver does not have a downside that I can see. But I still find myself worrying, during quiet moments, over the fact that it’s a product that I would never personally use. Essentially I am worried that I’m being a hypocrite for the sake of money. And that makes me worry that at some point, perhaps years ago, I stepped through the technology looking glass and lost sight of the real world, and I can’t trust my own sense of right or wrong - or useful, or harmful - anymore.

This creeping sense that I lack perspective has been exactly the thing compelling me to change my career - or take some other kind of drastic measure, whose details I can’t decide - and rearrange my destiny. The weight and quantity of unknowns I sense around me feels like a confinement; like blindness. I want to explore, and give myself over to this exploration with the same hours-every-day discipline that I’ve fed into my career for so much of my life. And I’m actually within reach of that, in my own shoestring way, with no need of permanent retirement. I have the means to make this change any time, and not worry overmuch about it, and not look back.

I feel like a sailor, grizzled and sore from years before the mast, ready to disembark at the very next port and walk off into the country with some reading glasses, some gardening tools, and some tidy little savings for a new start, and as I gaze out over the railing into the same old churning sea for what I’m guessing is nearly the last time, a fucking bona-fide neon-lit mermaid has jumped up from the depths, with seaweed hair and shells on her boobs and everything, and shoved a god damn treasure map into my unresisting hands, bearing a wiggly dotted line and a gigantic X with skulls and gold coins drawn all around it, and suddenly everyone on board is singing “yo ho, yo ho,” and the first mate turns to me and winks and says “what be our next course, cap’n? AAAAAAARRRRRR.”

It’s a bit much, and I can’t quite get my head around it, and meanwhile the ship is plowing back out into the deep ocean yet again as everyone dances madly around on deck doing yet another stupid hornpipe, and it’s hardtack and hemorrhoids and who knows how many more days at sea and some of us won’t make it ashore at all in the end. Here we go.

I guess I could always jump ship.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

It was a popular topic several years ago, "reputation websites". Or rather, blackmailing websites. Now with GDPR, and with general change in public mood, nobody is an idiot enough to be there. Ok, maybe "ratemyprofessor" still stands. One just has to interpret properly the reviews there.

[garote]

Right: I.e. every review you see on the site is posted by someone with a hidden motive, and could be a complete fabrication.