Love In The Time Of Apps (2 page)

Pragat sold the data to a variety of purchasers, mostly advertising and marketing firms and sometimes, though no one at the company could be certain, a front for a government agency. One of the things that attracted purchasers to Pragat Corporation was the highly sophisticated and proprietary software that it used to give a specific numerical
value to each piece of personal data it collected in respect of predicting behavior and trends. On a scale from zero to 30, for example, each of the tens of millions of individuals in Pragat’s database could be rated for such things as purchasing preferences, reactions to certain types of advertising and projected behavior. The latter category was of particular interest to the FBI one of the largest of Pragat’s customers, though the interaction between the two was classified.

Despite the continuing success of his company, Pragat had a growing concern about the future of his business. He was beginning to see his company’s market share of the data mining industry erode in the face of competition from companies that seemed to form overnight, get funded immediately, and be run thereafter by men and women less than half his age. Pragat realized that to keep his company profitable and viable he needed to change his business model. His problem was that he had no idea of how to accomplish this goal, nor did the members of his new business team who met weekly to consider the issue. Pragat and his team were stumped.

The solution he was looking for came to Pragat as he was perusing a Zagat’s New York restaurant guide for a place to have a business luncheon in midtown Manhattan. He would later give the moment some gloss by calling it a “financial epiphany.” Halfway down a page containing two interesting seafood restaurants, both passing initial muster with him because they were each rated 26, Pragat stopped, looked at his ceiling and half laughing said in a low, but optimistic voice, “holy, holy, holy, shit!” A moment after his religious/scatological utterance, Pragat summoned his new business committee to his office and proposed that the company launch a web-based guide which rated people much in the same way as Zagat rated restaurants. “So, for example,” he said, “Oprah might be a 29, Madoff a two.”

One team member, who got the concept instantly, asked, “I can understand Oprah as a 29, but why would Madoff even get a two rating?”

Pragat smiled and replied, “I’m assuming that he’ll garner lots of votes from felons, particularly con artists who admire his work and also from members of the Ponzi family.”

Pragat could see from the expressions on their faces that most members of his team were skeptical. “Look,” he continued, “we have
the ability to know virtually everything there is about a person from the data we collect. And we already apply values to the data, coincidently using the same zero to 30 rating scale employed by Zagat. Why not simply change the nature of the values we use so collectively they reflect the inherent worth or merit of an individual?”

“Is that possible?” one of the members asked.

“I don’t know, but it certainly is worth a try. Let’s use our John and Jane Does to test out the idea. We pick some categories that might be used to measure the inherent worth of an individual, say morality, personality, and sense of humor. I don’t know if in the end these are even valid categories, but we can use them for now just for testing. Have our software department develop formulas to measure the Does in each of these categories on a scale from zero to 30. Then, have our software folks apply the formulas to the relevant data we have on each of our Does; you know, shopping habits, Facebook entries, and search histories. A John Doe that frequents porn sites, and says salacious things on his Facebook posts, for example, might get a four in the morality category. On the other hand, if he seems to donate a great deal to charity, he might get a boost in that category. Once we have the results of this little pilot study, we’ll send out investigators to where the various Does live, develop some phony pretext to ask their friends and neighbors about them. For a small reward, say $20.00, we’ll have them complete Zagat like questionnaires in which they rate their friends zero to 30 in our test categories.”

Six months later, Pragat and his team had the results of their preliminary investigation. While these were far from perfect, everyone realized that Pragat’s idea might well become a reality. For the next year, under a cloak of extreme secrecy, an army of survey experts, sociologists, historians, a wide range of PHD’s, ethicists, philosophers, clergymen, economists, attorneys, and a bevy of the best software engineers and mathematicians that money could buy, worked in earnest to develop a foolproof personal rating system.

The threshold issue for Pragat’s team was the personal categories to be used for the thirty point rating system. After a great deal of debate, often heated, the team decided that the ratings should be applied to the following categories:

[
S] Standing in the Community. This theoretically encompassed accomplishments, wealth, position, power, and general reputation. Standing also included certain essential individual characteristics such as morality, empathy, compassion, spirituality, and kindness.

[L] Likeability. Some people had a high standing in the community, but were not particularly liked.

[P] Personality. This category embraced a person’s interests, optimism, and ability to communicate.

[A] Appearance, factoring in age. Thus, a 60-year old could receive a 28 if he or she looked great for a person of that age.

[H] Sense of Humor. While Sense of Humor could have fallen into the Personality category, the team used to construct the survey believed that Sense of Humor was so important that it required its own category.

The numbers in each category would be tallied and divided by five with the final number being the individual’s Pragat Personal Rating or “PPR.”

In addition to the data mined from the internet, Pragat planned to establish a website that housed questionnaires. These were also modeled after Zagat’s restaurant questionnaires, but utilized the various PPR categories. Anyone who wished to complete a questionnaire was asked to identify the individual who they were reviewing by name and address and other identification criteria and to rate the individual using a zero to 30 rating scale. Respondents were also encouraged to include pithy comments like those found in Zagat’s restaurant guides.

When rumors about Pragat Corporation’s online rating system first circulated over the Internet, members of the press, media, every resident of the blogosphere, as well as most working comedians, took the company to task. Negative tweets outnumbered positive tweets by 1000 to one. Adjectives such as “ludicrous,” “ridiculous,” and “obnoxious” were probably the most commonly used words in editorial comments, followed closely by “ominous,” mostly from those fearful that the assignment of numbers to people would be a precursor to some form of a Brave New World reality or worse. For one group, those with very low ratings, these fears were not too far off the mark.

Alex Pragat and his team, however, were undeterred by the system’s critics. They fully believed in the new survey, its legitimacy as well
as the accuracy and reliability of the ratings Pragat would offer. Above all, they expected that the website housing its personal rating survey,
www.ppr.com
, would have so many visitors that it would be monetized in a way that would make it extremely profitable. Judging from the number of travelers to the site the first day of its launch and thereafter, those expectations were quite realistic.

In its final iteration the look and feel of the ratings as they appeared on the website paralleled those of Zagat, as illustrated by what turned out to be the most notable of Pragat’s ratings.

Philip Goodwin, Age: 54

Married to Sheila Goodwin

No Children

Grace Harbor, New York

CEO: Threads, Inc. New York City

PPR: 28.

Given the initial hostility of the media and the skepticism of the public, Pragat realized that unless he turned public opinion around, his venture would be a commercial failure. For almost a year prior to its launch, Pragat Corporation pitched the reliability, accuracy, and science underlying the ratings. Scientists, sociologists, survey experts, former governmental officials and, most importantly, celebrities, all on the payroll of Pragat, appeared on television shows, in advertisements, and infomercials and without reservation sang the praises of the Pragat ratings. The thrust of the Pragat campaign was that its “judgment,” about a person was more reliable than members of the general public. Tag lines like, “Because you don’t know as much about your friends, neighbors, and colleagues as we do” or “What do you really know about your friends and neighbors?” or, somewhat ominously “Everyone has secrets, except from Pragat,” became ubiquitous.

Thousands of focus groups told Pragat what he was hoping for: the campaign was completely effective. Thus, on the eve of the launch of Pragat’s website, the mindset of the American public was that the ratings would truly be reflective of a person’s inherent worth. As the Pragat team would soon learn, the statement by one reporter and a slogan later trademarked by the company, “You are what you rate” would be a truism. One reason for this was that a number was so easy to use. Just as a 28 rating from Zagat’s Restaurant Guide instantly told a diner everything he or she wanted to know about a restaurant, a 28, or a 20, or a 10 immediately defined the person to whom it was applied. A 29 evoked the salt of the Earth, a four the scum of the Earth.

Pragat’s pre-launch party for investors, the press, and A-list celebrities, friends, and relatives was held in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Midway into the evening, Pragat stood on a small stage, tapped on a champagne glass to gain his guests’ attention, and said: “Thank you for all coming. This effort took years to bring to market and I want to thank all members of my team, our investors, and friends who assured the public of the reliability and accuracy of our ratings.” With a bit of flourish, Pragat held up a cell phone, pushed a speed dial button, and said in a voice loud enough for all in the room to hear, “Now.” A fraction of a second later, the most anticipated, debated,
maligned, divisive, and in some quarters, feared, website in history was launched. Traffic was so heavy immediately after the launch that the site had to shut down temporarily. The delay only heightened the frenzy of those anxious to see their long awaited personal ratings.

As people linked into the PPR website and searched for their names, many experienced a mix of high anticipation and dread not unlike that of a student receiving a college acceptance/rejection letter or a young lawyer receiving the results of the bar exam. To those who thought that their ratings were of paramount importance to their futures and many did, the experience was more akin to that of receiving the results of a biopsy. Of course, the next best thing to receiving a high PPR was having people you knew receive low PPRs. If there were a graph that measured national Schadenfreude, it definitely would have spiked at that moment.

The reaction to the site by Pragat’s guests might have been a microcosm for what was happening throughout the country. Fingers that minutes before were wrapped around the slender stems of champagne glasses were now directing Messrs. Blackberry, iPhone, or Android towards the Pragat site and the prompts to personal ratings. Once the ratings were revealed, some of Pragat’s guests laughed and gave high-fives; others cursed or walked out of the party without saying goodbye. Pragat’s former wife slapped him in the face. He savored the pain.

Because the ratings were housed only online, they were not static. New information about people was fed continuously into the PPR system. Thus, if someone did something horrible, his or her PPR would drop. If a person did something wonderful, his or her number would rise. Mimicking the stock market reports, the site had a daily “most active” list, populated more often than not by celebrities. Within months of its launch, a ticker tape showing PPRs began to appear on the screens of television news programs directly below the stock market ticker tape. “Young starlet du jour gets married again +2. Young starlet du jour divorces in ten days -3. Young starlet du jour marries and divorces twelve times in one year in effort to break Guinness Book of Records +6.”

Major declines often made headlines, sometimes in the national press, but more often in regional or local papers if a non-celebrity
type was involved in a scandal. In one case, for example, a local New Jersey paper ran the headline: “Rabbi Greenburg arrested for soliciting prostitute, PPR drops by 10 points.” The Rabbi was later dismissed by his congregation, not because of his indiscretion, but because his PPR had fallen to a 14. “We simply can’t have a Rabbi with a reputation equivalent to that of a Denny’s,” one congregant stated.

The PPR survey also paralleled the published Zagat Restaurant Guide since it contained, numerous lists including: “Twenty Five Top Rated People in America,” as well as “Top Twenty Five by Ethnicity” and “Top Rated People by Locale,” for example the Top Twenty Five New Yorkers. The dark side of this, for those at the bottom of the rating totem pole, was that they could also be grouped together. Websites carrying the title “Worst People in America” and others of a similar ilk were soon appearing on the Internet.