Star-Crossed Systems: The Philosophy of Rating Humanity
There’s something faintly dystopian about being rated as a person. Consumer rating systems—those five-star verdicts on your conduct as a passenger, diner, or tenant—promise to distill accountability into a single tidy metric. But peel back the veneer, and what emerges is less a utopia of transparency and more a grim carnival of mutual suspicion. The stars don’t align; they collide, flattening nuanced human interactions into a transactional scoreboard. The Illusion of Accountability Take ridesharing platforms as an example....