THERE'S a theory going round that Peeple, the forthcoming app that has already created a Twitter storm, is actually a spoof, a piece of performance art or even a sinister joke. Let’s hope it is. Because what we know of Peeple is chilling. Dubbed “Yelp for people”, the app will allow users to assign star-ratings to individuals, in the same way you might grade a hotel or a film – and according to the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey, those ratings could extend to everyone you know including "your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door”. All you need is the phone number of your friend or foe, and you can have a go.
What’s been heartening is that Twitter, on which #peeple trended last week, appeared already to be giving the app a metaphorical zero stars, indeed, a negative rating. The very idea of it had the web fuming. Meanwhile, creator Julia Cordray defended the project, saying: “This is all about uplifting each other and helping each other and operating from positivity.” But no-one was buying it. We all know what happens on social media. Yes, you get positivity, compassion and remarkable campaigns, for instance, on behalf of refugees. But you also get darkness, trolls, abusers, stalkers and revenge porn. You get ask.fm, the social media platform for teens, which has been the site of vicious bullying (one mother campaigned for it to be closed following her daughter's suicide after she was a victim of online trolls).
Cordray declared she and co-founder Nicole McCullough were “two empathetic female entrepreneurs”, which was odd, because empathy is too often in short supply on such digital platforms – perhaps because people find it hard to feel empathetic when faced with a screen, rather than a real human face. They fail, too often, to access the universal well of compassion that says we are all sometimes fragile, and that putting out something brutally critical just because it feels good or you think it’s honest, can be destructively hurtful. What we see online too often seems to be an erosion of empathy.
To me, this story says something chilling about the way we as a society are failing to connect. “The Peeple app allows us to better choose who we hire, do business with, date, become our neighbours, roommates, landlords/tenants, and teach our children,” the company pitches. Nicole McCullough got involved, according to Caitlin Dewey, because “as a mother of two in an era when people don’t always know their neighbours, she wanted something to help her decide whom to trust with her kids”. This speaks of so much: paranoia about child abuse, erosion of trust, lack of community, social atomisation and risk aversion.
When did it become too risky to let a neighbour into our home and our lives? When did we become so uncertain of our own instincts? Have we forgotten the very personal chemistry that creates friendship? I appreciate that there is anxiety around entrusting your child to another adult – I have known it myself. I acknowledge that a woman, or a man, going out on a date might want some tips for whether to trust. But if we don’t experiment in following our instincts and instead constantly look for a gold-star stamp, then we never learn the foundations for real trust.
At the heart of the idea of Peeple seems to be a lack of confidence in our own abilities, and, more profoundly, in other people.
Then there’s the star system itself. Such ratings are a blight on our entire culture. A consumer-style points system has started to pervade everything: a star rating that might be fine and useful for a vacuum cleaner or mobile phone service provider, is now applied to books, theatre shows, cities, natural wonders, and, of course, human beings. This was inevitable, perhaps, in a world in which everything, including personal relationships, is seen through the prism of economics. We are all service providers: of friendship, support, entertainment, sex, laughter, care, love. Cordray even declares she wants "character to be our new form of currency".
Let's hope that Peeple is a prank. But even if it is, the real problem doesn’t go away. And in a way, the reaction, some of which was a vicious and aggressive trolling of Cordray herself, illustrated that. There was already a sensitive nerve there to be tweaked, a Twitter spasm waiting to be triggered. Though the app may represent everything we fear about our digital society, in the way it dehumanises, commodifies and desensitises, it is only a distillation of a culture that already exists. We get upset about Peeple because we already have Rate My Teachers, a culture of vicious trolling, a world in which people do a Google search in order to assess a stranger, a date or a new colleague. We get upset about it, not just because we fear the app itself, but because we feel, even without Peeple, we already live in a world where humans have become just another product to be rated.
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