GOOD

Claire Lobenfeld

Articles

New App Lets You Rank People By Awfulness, Makes Us Question Our Humanity

User review site Peeples lets us digitally judge ourselves and our neighbors—but will this make us better people?

Peeple's new app and user-generated rating system--because casting the first stone has never looked so hip. Image via Peeple.

Fans of the BBC sci-fi drama Black Mirror had a field day—albeit, a dark and slightly harrowing one—last month when allegations were made in an unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron that he sodomized a pig corpse in an unorthodox university ritual. For those familiar with the show, the debut episode featured the kidnapping of a princess whose ransom was that the fictitious Prime Minister would have to, err, fornicate with a live pig on national television. The pressure surmounted for the character because the ransom note, so to speak, was posted to YouTube, so there was no ability to keep it private. What Black Mirror accomplishes is a projection of a future where technological advancements essentially lead to our own emotional self-destruction. There are episodes that feature the ability to block someone in real life, chips that can be implanted in our necks that function as a DV-R for our own lives, and the ability to recreate a lost loved one through a service that culls social media to make an authentic replica. And while the Cameron incident does absolutely nothing to signify that we’re closer to a Black Mirror reality that would be at all comfortable, a new app called Peeple seems like a step in that direction.

Keep ReadingShow less