I just watched the episode in the title, and I feel compelled to discuss it because it was amazing and dealt with subject matter both highly relevant and of deep interest to me.

Those don’t always line up.

The episode takes place in a world where everyone has these augmented reality implants in their eyes that let theme see people’s ratings. Ratings are an overall score out of five, and anyone and everyone can rate you at any time for any social interaction.

So of course, society is now all about one’s rating. It’s more or less a digital value of your social status, or rather, how popular you are.

Superficially, this encourages people to be really nice to one another. In fact, once I figured out the premise near the beginning of the episode, I thought, “Well this doesn’t seem too bad. At least people are being nice, whether they mean it or not. That’s something. ”

That’s before I knew that the whole society was rigged around that score. Stores have minimal rating requirements and high scoring people get special discounts and can buy products nobody else can. The protagonist’s workplace has a minimum score of 2.5 and if you fall below it, you can’t even enter the building.

That made the true nature of the program evident : it was a brilliant use of modern rating systems (which are EVERYWHERE online) as a way to explore social injustice in a very potent and fascinating way.

Because one can hardly conceive of a system that would fit better into people’s intellectually (and spiritually lazy tendency to believe the world is just and those who are not benefiting from it deserve whatever happens to them.

After all, if someone has a low rating, it’s because people have down voted them, and that means they must have been unpleasant, rude, unethical, or otherwise bad. If they weren’t a bad person, why did people rate them so poorly? Even if a few people gave the person a low rating for unjust reasons, surely they are outweighed by everyone else voting honestly. I mean, why would they lie?

It’s even “fair”, in the sense that a low rated person can always start being super nice to everyone and raise their rating. In theory. In practice, of course, the rating means that people have already judged you before you open your mouth and will interpret everything you can and do based on that judgment.

But again, the rating does not actually reflect whether someone is a good person, only whether people like them. As someone who was at the very bottom of the totem pole all through school, I can vividly attest to the fact that people can dislike you for all kinds of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with who you are as a person and everything to do with surface appearances and other superficial things, like your level of conformity, your trendiness, your wardrobe choices, whether or not they like the sort of person they think you are, whether or not they like people with glasses, and so forth and so on ad. infinitum ad. nauseum. 

I am sure that in the society depicted in the episode in question, there is a great deal more bullying than now because the bullies would be empowered by the idea that you deserve to get abused because you have a low rating. ^[1]

It’s a brilliant conceit for a science fiction anthology show, and it was brilliantly executed. I won’t bother to explain the plot, but it’s good. It examined the issue thoroughly without ever once seeming slow and pedantic. ^[2] The production was gorgeous. It didn’t feel like television at all. It was more like a one hour movie. And the actress who played the lead, Bryce Dallas Howard ^[3], really got into her role and nailed the character’s tragic arc from popular to very much not so.

Interestingly, one of the episode’s writers is Rashida Jones, aka Angie Tribeca. I looked up the writers partially because of a feeling that I should probably take an interest in that sort of thing if I am to be a TV writer some day (and I am), but mostly because I had a very strong intuition that a woman wrote it or co-wrote it, and I was right.

The basis of my intuition on this matter was that the entire concept of popularity seems, in this era at least, to mean a lot more to the ladies than it does to the gents. It’s not that men don’t care, of course. It’s just that the patriarchal cultural programming we all receive tells women that being liked is the most important thing in the world, and tells men that they are not allowed to care about that.

Men are supposed to all be rugged individuals who don’t give a fuck what others think, and most of them try to be exactly like that because they want to be popular with the chicks,

I do think the basic conceit would not work exactly the way it was depicted in the show. People can like or dislike one another for a lot of reasons, plus people would feel bad about rating people really low,  and so, in the fine grain, most people would probably be between 3 and 4. Middle of the bell curve.

But a certain amount of simplification is always needed for effective storytelling, especially when dealing with the kind of complex ideas that makes for good science fiction.

And my gosh was that good science fiction.

In fact, I wish I had wrote it myself. It’s exactly the sort of smart, modern, intelligent television I would love to write.

Six months to go!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.