A person’s social status is a consensus of those nearby on that person’s relative social value and power. Which factors count how much in this status vary across societies and subcultures. (They probably vary more at high status levels.) Most people spend a lot of effort in private thought and in conversations trying to infer the status of they and their associates, and trying to raise the status of their allies and to lower that of their rivals.

Typically a great many considerations go into estimating status. Such as the status of your ancestors and current associates, and your job, income, residence, health, beauty, charisma, intelligence, strength, gender, race, and age. Most anything that is impressive or admirable helps, such as achievements in sports and the arts, looking sharp, and seeming knowledgeable. Most anything that is disliked or disapproved hurts, such as often (but not always) applies for violence, rudeness, unreliability, and filth.

Today we generate shared status estimates via expensive gossip and non-verbal communication, but someday (in 20 years?) tech may help us more in this task. Tech will be able to see many related clues like who talks to who with what tone of voice, who looks how at who, who invites who to what social events, who lives where and has what jobs, etc. Given some detailed surveys on who says who has what status, we may build accurate statistical models that predict from all that tech-accessible data who would say who has what status in what contexts.

Or new social practices might create more directly relevant data. Imagine a future app where you can browse people to see numerical current estimates of their status (perhaps relative to a subculture). You can click up or down on any estimate to indicate that you consider it too low or too high. Some perhaps-complex mechanism then takes prior estimates, background tech data, and these up/down edits to generate changes in these status estimates, and also changes in estimates of edit source reliability. All else equal, people who contribute more reliable/informative status edits are probably estimated to have higher status.

I don’t know how exactly such an algorithm could or should work. But I’m confident that there are many variations that could work well enough to attract much participation and use. Many people would be tempted to use these status estimates similarly to how they now use the status estimates that they generate via gossip and subtle social clues. They might even use them in even more places than they use status today, if these new estimates were considered more reliable and verifiable.

I’m also confident that governments, firms, and other organizations would be eager to influence these systems, as they’d see some variations as being more favorable to their interests. Yes, that creates a risk that they may push for bad variations, though don’t forget that our informal systems today also have many flaws. For example, many people use false rumors and other underhanded status tricks to hurt rivals and help allies, tricks that may be harder to get away with in a more transparent system.

Yes, this may look like a dystopia in many ways. But it is probably coming whether you like it or not, and this change may offer great opportunities to improve our status systems. For example, today we have many anti-discrimination policies that seem to be crude and awkward attempts to fix perceived problems with our current status systems. A more fine-grained, data-driven, and transparent status system might allow more effective and better targeted fixes. So it seems worth thinking now a bit more about how such systems could and should work, before some big government or tech firm imposes a system that quickly gets entrenched and hard to change.

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