Mattsplained - X-Rated

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's Friday, my name is Jeff Sandu, and I hope you had time to digest your breakfast, because it's time to Metzplain and College of Ops Met Amatage is happy to take us where the sun don't shine. And he promises that today will be x-rated. We're really not going to get explicit today, Matt.

Are we? Because BFM has a broadcasting license that we have to think about every now and then. Hey Jeff, OK, admit that x-part was shameless click-clating on my part. No, we're not going into the dark realm of cyber-sex today.

We're going to talk about the equally weird and rapidly spreading world of ratings. So the ratings part is correct, the x part not so much. So let me ask you a question. OK.

Do you remember when, exactly when it became normal to start rating everything that we do? For me, it would probably be when Airbnb started to come up or maybe even TripAdvisor. But you can't remember a specific type of thing. No, no, no, it wasn't really like a time.

No, it's just something that seems to have crept into our consciousness and our daily lives. So let me give you an example. I regularly meet King Jafar's royal food requirements at a pet store in Amore. And when I pay for the items, I'm asked to hit a little button that has a sad face, a resting face, and a happy face to indicate my level of satisfaction with the cashier.

Now, I don't have a problem with that. The staff there is generally happy and pretty helpful. But what has that person really done for me? I'm the one who picked up the last bit and went around the store getting the cat food and I loved everything around.

It wasn't like anyone came up and offered to do it for me, not that I expected to either, but I'm still expected to rate that person. So, yeah, so really, all the cashier is doing is just scanning the contents of your basket, right? Yeah, and providing a means for me to exchange money for the purchases I want. So, what is it that I'm rating?

I'm noting the ease with which the store is able to separate you from my money. It's a pointless transaction. It doesn't deliver value to anyone, but we go through the shirard because the employee probably has to achieve 90% smiley face ratings or they're going to be reprimanded. But it's all completely meaningless.

It has no impact on my day. It adds an additional layer of stress to the working day of someone who's trying to make ends meet on a retail salary. So we've viewed them pretty quickly from X rating to cats now. As I said, it's all about the clickbait today.

We've had sex kittens, you name it, I'm going to game it. Wait till we get to the baby's first steps portion of the show. Well, that's going to be a highlight. No, the ranking and gamification of our daily lives, it's crept up on us pretty much silently.

The most transparent example is the ratings we give to Uber and ride share drivers. And this isn't an Uber bashing exercise, by the way. But you can see how it started out. You can see how useful a rating system is.

So many of us back in the bad old days of the pre-rating world, you'd get into the back of a taxi, it might be dirty or smelly, so you might find that the vehicle wasn't in good repair. Or the exact opposite was the case. How many times would you get into a taxi and end up having an interesting conversation with a driver who was engaged and professional? It's like a lot trick to get you.

You may get a really bad one or you may get a really good one. It's just a lot of experience. He's got a lot of experience. And precisely, you know, and I'm a guy.

So my experience is probably going to be an easier one than a lot of women face when they get into a taxi. You know, what do you do if the driver is creepy or slimy or lecherous? And if they say, you know, if they do say something that's untoward, you can maybe complain. What if it's just the feeling you get?

What if it's snatched glances in the mirror? Or questions that are just a little bit too personal? Not something that you can really kind of put your finger on. So the rating system is a neat counterpoint to all of those negative and positive experiences.

It's one of the great upsides of the internet in our world today. It's that ability to make information more democratic. And it allows you to share your experience about driver with other potential riders who can choose to either avoid or accept a ride with him or her. I'm not a grab user particularly, so I can't really tell you to the same level what's on their app.

But with Uber, now you can see the scores that the drivers you hire give to you, not just the ratings that you give to them. And I find that really weird. It feels very strange to see how that you've been viewed and rated by strangers. And you look at it and you go, well, why haven't I got five?

Yeah. You know, what could I have done better as a passenger? Precisely. You take offer to drive your car instead?

Exactly. Don't take me anywhere and I'll give you the money. But you take it for granted that you're doing exactly the same thing to that driver and to other strangers day in and day out. And the ratings themselves are becoming more in depth.

You can score the driver for excellence in a number of different categories. And you can even send a written note along with your compliments. But where are we going with this man? Well, there are two things that I want to talk about today.

First, the superficiality of the system and the way the data can be skinned. Second, how rating systems might one day be extended to subtly nudge and control our behavior. Yeah. Now, I know this isn't a new idea, but there are various schemes and pilot programs that are already in operation in China that are making those scenarios a reality.

So we're at a point where the science fiction is actually being overtaken by the observable fact when it comes to this kind of system. But let's start with the less scary scenario. Yes, that often seems to be the place people want to start. I'm getting this reputation as the scary killer robot man.

A lot of our listeners are probably using apps to buy their lunch or their dinner and have food delivered to their home or their office. Have you noticed that the next time you log on to the app, it always prompts you to rate the restaurant that you've just ordered from? Now, I know Malaysians love their food. They love their food far more than I ever could as an Englishman.

I was brought up on food that could only be eaten if it was covered in pastry or gravy because you might actually work out what was in there. Malaysians are very particular about food, especially the quality. So how is it that even the most mediocre and run-of-the-mill restaurants will have an average of four-point-something stars on most of these apps? It's the same with the ride-sharing apps.

Five stars has become the new normal. We aren't rewarding people for excellence rather just for maintaining the basic minimum. Are we expressing a need or desire for higher standards then? I think the opposite is actually the case, which is quite a depressing phenomenon.

Regular listeners to the show will know that I'm a bit of a music head. So ratings have always been something that's been important to me. When I was a kid and I was reading the music magazines, I'd read reviews of the albums that subsequently I would want to buy. I didn't have Spotify, I didn't have the internet to go out and check the music first.

My taste wasn't top 40, so I wouldn't hear the kind of music I liked on the radio. So I had to trust the ratings in those magazines. And after a while, you began to get a feeling for what certain writers and reviewers preferred and what their two, three, four, five-star ratings actually meant. So for left-field music, those reviews could make the difference between success and failure for an album.

If a record received two stars out of five, back then it was probably average or slightly below. If you got three stars, that was a solid release. Four stars, and you might find yourself being featured in the best of the year lists at the end of the year in December. Five-star ratings were so rare that it wasn't unusual for magazines to hold an editorial meeting before an album was given a five-star rating.

Wow. Because it was considered, you know, that's the- That's the whole ingredient there. You can't get five. You know, if you were the Beatles, you would maybe get a five.

If you were Bruce Springsteen, you'd get a four. Bob Dylan, maybe a five- Or a five-year-two. Yeah, exactly. And movie lovers of my generation will tell you the same kind of story.

They relied on the magazines because that gave them an idea of what the films were going to be. They didn't have anywhere they could go and watch the trailers. The ratings were essential, but the way we look at ratings now has turned that system pretty much upside down. But isn't this better than a no-reading scenario?

Well, if we go back to the food example, by the law of averages, most food is going to be average. So if every single restaurant on the app is rated between four and five stars, how does that signal whether or not it's any good? The same with the ride share apps, the drivers are under pressure to maintain really, really high averages. So that- and if they don't, they can be suspended from the service.

The way the system is designed is for drivers to perform at their best. But five stars and getting close to five stars, it should be like you said the Holy Grail. It shouldn't be something that you can get to. I get drivers asking me to read in five stars.

Exactly. I need the five or I'm not going to get this bonus this month or they're going to suspend me or whatever. I'm not sure how school reports work in Malaysia, but back when I was at school, we received a grade for excellence and a grade for effort. So in physical education classes, my grade for effort was always much much higher than my grade for achievement.

And rightly so. I wish I had that system in high school in my high school. Exactly. No, but the system we seem to be opting for isn't granular enough for it to be meaningful.

It doesn't leave any room for nuance. And nuance is something that's essential to our daily lives. We don't live in a black and white world. So nuance and context are essential tools that allow us to navigate those lives without those tools.

We're living in this gray world where, you know, nothing quite meets our expectations, but we're still rating it as five. I rate you a three out of five so far. So hopefully at the end of the show, I thought it was going to be a two like average below. This is a three.

So if I'm giving you a three, hopefully we'll reach five at the end of the show. We're doing a Matt's Blaining episode about ratings. We'll be right back BFM 89.9. Bloggers for Malaysia BFM 89.9.

And we're back. My name is Jeff Sandu together with College Pubs Matt Amitec. Now, before the break, Matt was putting forward a case for a more recent rating system. One that would give more meaning to the interactions we are increasingly scoring online.

In this half of the show, we're going to move on to a rather more frightening possibility of those ratings following us around and governing our lives. So Matt, before the break, you mentioned that these personal rating systems do actually exist. They're not just there as a plot of an episode in Black Mirror. No, that's right.

I'm basing a lot of the following information on the cover story of this month's Wired Magazine, which looks at a couple of systems that are currently in operation in China. And again, like this wasn't Uber bashing before the break, this is not China bashing. It's simply that the technology is more advanced and more integrated in China. So they're able to do these experiments where other countries haven't been able to yet.

It's also an example of how governments in more open and democratic parts of the world could also choose to utilize this kind of technology to subtly influence our behavior. Because up until now, what activists tend to call the tools of oppression have been very overt and very obvious. As many examples? Sure.

In the pre-internet age, having large numbers of police and soldiers on the street and having an active secret police, which relies on civilian agents and the general population informing on one another, that was straight out of the dictatorship 101 handbook. In the early part of the internet age, we moved to this more digital method of surveillance. So your phone calls can be overheard, your emails and messages tracked and traced, and your social behavior tracked across the internet. Of course, this has led to something of a consumer backlash.

When people like me come onto radio stations like this and talk about privacy and the need to protect the rights of the individuals against encroaching corporations, yada, yada, yada. The rating system pushes all of that surveillance and tracking into the background, and it makes compliance appear to be voluntary, as though it's all part of some great game to achieve the best you. Let's talk about the examples from China that you mentioned. Okay, some of our listeners are going to be well aware of one of these systems, because it's linked to the Alipay system, which is already very popular in Malaysia.

For those of you who don't know what Alipay is, think of it a bit like a combination of PayPal, Facebook and Google in Malaysia. It's a little bit more basic than you get in China. In China, it's pretty much an operating system that exists on its own. It's an app that sits on top of Android and iOS, but it's almost like downloading your own ecosystem within the operating ecosystem, because it even has its own native apps for services like Google.

So you can live your entire life inside the app on your phone. You never have to come out to the Android or the iOS. China is already the world's largest market for online transactions. So services like Alipay have made it possible to leave the house in a lot of major Chinese cities without a wallet, because you can make every single purchase with your phone.

And the rapid growth of its middle class has left a massive credit sized hole in the financial services sector. So whereas even in Malaysia and more developed countries, the credit score is pretty much ubiquitous. China's financial institutions lacked the same level of interconnectivity that would allow citizens to be assessed in the same way that somebody is in the United States. So services like Alipay's Zima or Sesame Credit have been launched in part to address this credit scoring gap, bringing together the many strands of its users online and offline habits, and giving them the benefits of those credit scores that people enjoy in other countries.

How does this work? As I said, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are actually better acquainted with Sesame Credit than I am. So as I said, you can read the wide article You Are A Number by Mara Vistendal. And please feel free to message if I have the details wrong.

But basically, when you launch the Sesame Credit mini app, when you first launch it, you're awarded a starting score of around 550. The scores range from 350 up to 950. And as with any social app in the media age, it's run by algorithms that the company closely protects. What is clear is that your purchasing history forms a big part of your credit rating because Alipay is so widely used in daily life.

It can quickly build a picture of the kind of consumer you are, whether you regularly buy luxury goods or if your existence is more hand to mouth or like most people you exist somewhere in the middle. It also checks things like whether you pay your bills on time. And according to the wide article, it also links to a court database of offenders with outstanding fines. So it was, yes, exactly, yes.

So it was reported that on the day that Sesame Credit was linked to the default Sesame Database, more than 1 million of its customers saw their Sesame scores tumble. Wow. But what's in it for consumers? What attracts people to the app?

Because it's gamified. You're encouraged to try and increase your score because all manner of perks are unlocked as you proceed. And they're quite useful perks. For example, it can be a lot of the things we take for granted.

So for example, when we check into a hotel, we hand over our credit card, a floating charge is placed on the card, and that guarantees that you're not going to do a runner without paying the bill. Sesame Credit operates in much the same way. It operates like a guarantee. So when you achieve certain levels on the Sesame Credit app, you can rent cars or bikes or hotel rooms without needing to pay a deposit.

Yeah, exactly. So it's a mark of trust that's respected by traders and vendors. It states in very simple terms that you are the right kind of person. So why should we fear this kind of technology then?

Because it states in very simple terms that you are the right kind of person. Because we aren't all the right kind of person. Sometimes that's the person's fault. Some very often it isn't.

And in the case of Sesame Credit, it's also been speculated that the service ranks you according to the company you keep. Your friends. So you can look at this in a couple of ways. If you surround yourself with trustworthy people and you are entrusted by those people, then it makes sense that your friends can give your credit rating a boost.

But let's say some unfortunate life event before you and you suddenly become the wrong kind of person, not only does your own credit score drop, you could potentially damage the scores of the people who know you. And I'm not sure that we should be embracing this kind of nobody loves a loser world. There would be a lot of pressure on your friends to drop you or face possible financial penalties for remaining loyal. It's the need of the friend just because the system thinks your friend is there.

Your friend's business is having financial difficulties or maybe they've just been through a divorce or any number of things. Or they've got medical bills that they can't cover. All of these things could affect somebody's credit rating and put pressure on other people to call them a loser and throw them away. It's letting the system to dictate my life subtly.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, not knowing. But technically that's how they are. Because there's a pressure on you just in the same way there is with an Uber driver.

Because I want that book. Yeah, yeah. Then you mentioned another system in China. Well, this one seems to be in development, but it has been trialed in some regions in China.

And it's quite similar to the idea of Sesame Credit and other programs. It's called the Social Credit System. And again, on the face of it, it seems like quite a good idea. The idea is you earn points for good behavior.

If you pay your taxes on time, you get points. If you help an old lady across the road, you get points. If you never break the speed limit, you get points. It's a way of rewarding the positive interactions that we have with people every day.

So if you're somebody who's loved by your co-workers, they can reward you the points. So that's the carrot. What's the stick? Well, last year we talked a lot about the potential for technology to create this kind of tiered world, people who have and people who don't have, which would undermine the principles of the freedom of information that the internet rather was founded on.

Now, you may have thought that was a pipe dream or unrealistic, but we are seeing advances in areas, things like biohacking and enhancement, which will actually allow people to become almost genetically more than other humans. This is still the theoretical world, but beyond that, we've seen the passing of a bill in the United States, which allows internet service providers to offer a different level of internet service to different consumers. And to charge websites and social media companies a levy to be put on the fast lane of the internet highway and not be relegated to a cluttered, slower lane. So it would be very easy to use a social credit system to limit people's access to society and services.

Want to book a flight? Well, your credit history doesn't allow it. If you've got a history of anti-government or anti-corporate statements, your credit rating might plunge to the point where you no longer qualify for high-speed internet access, tertiary education, overseas travel, decent housing or anything beyond media work. There's a lot of very large sticks inherent in this system.

Isn't that all a little bit just too theoretical and fanciful? Well, that's where we pull the circle back to the superficiality of rating anyone for anything. Let's go back to the rideshare driver. Is he or she being nice to you because you're an interesting, charming and incredible person?

Or are they just curry and favour because he or she is scared that you'll give them a bad rating and their consequences could be, you know, being brought from reward programs or they could even be suspended or terminated from the service? Do you want to have that level of fear built into every interaction that you have with every single person? Imagine if your kids could give you ratings. Or imagine that you could give your kids ratings and those ratings would hang around forever.

Imagine if every person you met had the power to affect your social credit rating. So as I mentioned earlier, the ratings are essentially meaningless in terms of quality assurance, but they have huge power to influence and suppress our behaviour. And if you don't think it could happen outside of a country like China, think what make America great again, social credit system would look like, you know, points for informing on illegal immigrants or points awarded to those living in more affluent and probably mostly white areas. It's still a little unlikely door, right?

But less so than you think. And back in 2012, Facebook secured a patent that could use your online behaviour and that of your friends to determine a credit worthiness score. Wow. And it has been using that service.

In 2016, it stopped third-party financial services from accessing that data, but the patent and the service still remain. So would it be too far a leap to think about Facebook entering the world of ePayment and finance? Personally, I don't think so. I don't think it's too far away here.

No. So, you know, it sounds a little unlikely, but that same kind of social credit system could come out of the way that we use social media sites. And of course, as Jeff has been saying, waiting me, it's not fair to dish it out if you can't take it yourself. So please take the time to head over to our brand new Matt's Blaine Facebook page and rate me and today's show.

Jeff, what do I get? I give you a four and a half out of five. I'm pretty happy with that because I'm still old school rating, so anything above three in a third? Three.

Mm-hmm. I'm good with it. Because five is outstanding as you know. Five in a year.

And you know, this show is just never going to be happening. Because above average and I'm happy. Matt, I would take it from college, but Matt's Blaine about ratings in the online world and how it's dictating our lives. So, I'll tell you, Geeksforks, after this, we'll be right back.

89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm89.9, the Business Station.