Currents: A New World Where We All Keep Score

Complex though you may be, ever more companies believe they can reduce you to a number. You can be scored these days for your quality and disposition as a taxi passenger. For the wit and influence of your ideas. For the number of steps you take in a day. For how much body fat lurks beneath that seemingly lean exterior.

Companies promise rich benefits from scoring. A rated society, they say, makes it easier to lose weight, to find a suitable mate, to steer taxi drivers away from the vomit-prone, to figure out who belongs in airport lounges, to rent someone’s spare room with reasonable certainty that he won’t kill you.

But how much confidence can we have in these numbers of our lives? And how many reputation gardens can one person tend?

The other day, I was getting out of a car hailed on Uber, a taxi-summoning app, when I noticed the strangest thing. As I closed the door, the driver was lifting his finger to a dashboard-mounted iPhone in order to rate me. As a regular user, I was familiar with having to rate Uber drivers. I had no idea they rated you in turn.

Ratings are supposed to clarify situations, but they can, of course, distort. If an Uber driver makes several wrong turns, or has a noxious-smelling car, or smokes e-cigarettes, should you say something? Or, wary of a low rating, would you censor yourself?

Uber has said the two-way ratings are about “maintaining an excellent experience for both the rider and the driver.” This can be interpreted in two ways: Uber can use the ratings to avoid certain passengers, or perhaps the ratings inspire customers to refine their behavior. After all, no one wants a low score. As Washingtonian magazine recently noted about Uber ratings, “In a type-A hub such as Washington, it’s just one more competitive hurdle to cross.”

Just one more is right. That Uber rating may be merely one medal on a chest covered in them: your Etsy score, your Airbnb score, your eBay score, your TweetLevel score — not to mention your count of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. I’ve been to more than one party where a person, trying to place another socially, asks her follower count. It is the reincarnation of inquiring where someone summers.

Then there’s the scoring of your interestingness. A company called Klout measures your influence on social media — what you say as well as who reacts and forwards your ideas to their own networks. Based on your score, between 1 and 100, you can win free perks — like a $5 coupon toward the purchase of a McWrap at McDonald’s, access to Cathay Pacific’s elite lounge at San Francisco’s airport, or invitations to a party honoring a Samsung television.

A matchmaking service called Tawkify announced last year that it would use Klout scores to connect people with similar levels of influence. This approach appears to assume that loudmouths, who one might think need large ears in a mate, instead crave equally loud mouths.

E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist and co-founder of Tawkify, has admitted that “sometimes, yes, a lawyer with the Klout Score of 50 will get on the phone with a beautiful graphic designer and speak for seven straight stupid minutes about himself and the beautiful graphic designer will call us afterward and shout, ‘Never match me with a moron like that again!”’

“But,” she continued in a blog post, “we’ve found that Klout Scores are an authentic measurement of sophistication, wit, cultural savvy, and appeal — a much truer and more trustworthy measurement than the typical online dating site bull-hockey factors of height, weight, and income.”

Beyond your interestingness, there’s your activity. If black armbands used to signify revolutionary tendencies, black wristbands nowadays reveal that someone is conscientious about their running and walking. Bracelets and watches from various companies measure how many steps you take, your heart rate, how well you sleep. Where it gets interesting is when you get a score. The bands’ makers tend to encourage online sharing, so that your so-called “friends” can track your progress. This sharing has given rise to a phenomenon called the “workout stalker,” according to that great chronicler of American life, UrbanDictionary.com.

Some people, including one Twitter user named Gonzalo who calls himself a “wannabe Jedi Knight,” go so far as to tweet out the precise mass of their body fat from time to time.

What can and will be made of all these scores?

Perhaps they will remain little more than curios. But you can imagine scenarios in which employers, insurers and prospective in-laws start to employ the scores as proxies for your character. Picture the H.R. manager considering a new hire, or the mother wanting the best for her daughter: “I mean, he’s obviously a respectful taxi passenger, and people seem to listen to him on Twitter, but I’m concerned about his lack of discipline in making his 10,000 steps a day and getting rid of that weight.”

That gives me an idea for a new rating system. It could measure, on a scale from 1 to 10, a person’s power to see beyond scores.

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