Love In The Time Of Apps (3 page)

“These were pretty heady and dramatic times at my company,” Pragat told a reporter from Wired Magazine who, years later, was writing an article on the Pragat System and its aftermath (
Philip Goodwin, The Man America Loved To Hate
). “We all realized that we had created something very special. What shocked and delighted us was how quickly the ratings were accepted and relied upon by the public.”

Pragat’s observation was completely accurate. Within months of the website’s launch, an individual’s PPR came to define for one and all the worth of an individual to society, no questions asked and no explanations accepted. Pragat later admitted that when the system was launched neither he, nor any member of his team, could have really anticipated the profound sociological impact of the new survey.

Long-standing and solid social and marital relationships were decimated by incompatible PPRs. In several states, a ground for divorce, in addition to irreconcilable differences, was “irreconcilable PPRs.” Coop boards changed their application forms to include a PPR section, followed by the instruction, “Please include a complete explanation if you do not have a PPR.” Some power restaurants in Manhattan would only allow reservations for people who had PPRs equal to or greater than their own Zagat ratings. Following this business model,
the famous New York restaurant, The 21 Club, changed its name to “The 26 Club,” and only admitted diners who received a PPR of 26 or over, though this play backfired when the Zagat Restaurant Guide gave the restaurant an overall 24.

People who received low PPRs often went into depression. Those who received high ratings often flaunted it. Vanity plates such as “IMA26” were not uncommon. High PPRs began to appear on business and personal cards, Facebook and LinkedIn entries, as well as resumes. “Pragat Rated” soon became as common as “Zagat Rated”. “PPR Date” soon competed with “J Date” and virtually all-online dating services had a Pragat Personal Rating section. It was not long before schools, consultants, and slews of books, including,
“Pragat Personal Ratings For Dummies,”
on how to increase one’s PPR were being marketed. PPR coaches, mostly former life coaches, soon began marketing their wisdom. Not surprisingly, debates began as to the relative value of a rating. Was, for example, a 28 for a resident of San Francisco as good as a 28 for a New Yorker?

The PPR system also modified the behavior of individuals. Since everything a person did on the Internet wended its way into the Pragat rating machinery, people began to be more judicious as to what they posted to social media sites or even the sites they visited. Internet porn sites, for example, took an enormous hit. By contrast, Internet church sites had a spike in attendance as did Internet donations, because many of the donors hoped that such activity might boost their respective ratings. It was as if a benign “Big Brother” was watching everyone.

Not every aspect of the Pragat system, however, was benign. Because everything in the age of the Internet moves at the speed of light, literally, a dark side to the ratings developed very quickly. PPRs soon became a new instrumentality, beyond race, religion, country of origin or sexual orientation to discriminate against a defined class of people: the low PPRs. For no particular reason, people with ratings of 10 and below were identified as a new group to be scorned. Those unfortunate enough to fall into this class soon became known as “Low Lifes,” a term which the
Oxford Online Dictionary
and others defined
as anyone with a rating of 10 or lower. Since “Low Life” also signified a person having low moral character and other odious aspects, the impact of this label was particularly devastating. Anyone within the group was by definition a creep. The consequences of being cast as a Low Life, sometimes the result of a faulty algorithm in the system or a quirky entry on a person’s website, more often than not had dire and life altering consequences. To the frustration and outrage of the Low Lifes, Pragat Corporation had no grievance procedure to correct erroneous ratings.

Since everyone’s numbers were public, Low Lifes were “outed” electronically overnight. All this took was use of some store bought software. Pilot fish websites such as www.PPRbyclass.com, which grouped individuals by their PPRs, soon began to appear on the Internet. Possibly the most damaging website was one that organized Pragat ratings by zip codes. The site also had a special link to “Low Lifes by Address.” Towns with the highest PPRs saw their property values increase, and those with low PPRs had their property values decrease, a factor putting pressure on the “Low Lifes” in a community to move out.

Anybody that was anybody and, for the most part, anybody that was nobody was listed in the survey. Exclusion from the survey, like not being mentioned at least once somewhere on the Internet, was a mark of non-existence. It was not long before these poor folks were called “No Lifes.” Since they had no ratings, the No Lifes were not particularly scorned or selected as an object of prejudice. They were simply viewed as non-entities, as inferior beings, people who were no longer relevant to society.

The PPRs for most people generally moved within a fairly narrow range, for example, up a point or down a point within a year. There were, however, some glaring exceptions, as demonstrated by Goodwin’s PPR issued less than a year after he received his stellar 28.

Philip Goodwin, Age: 55

Separated-Divorce Pending

Present Location-SoLo District NYC

Unemployed       PPR=0

To put Goodwin’s fall from rating grace in perspective, if he were a restaurant and was rated in Zagat’s restaurant guide, he would have gone from the likes of Gary Danko, French Laundry, Per Se, or Le Bernadin to the equivalent of the prisoners’ chow line at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Human Cliché

W
hen Goodwin first saw his PPR, published two months prior to the Sheila Bolt, his immediate reaction was to shake his head and laugh. Notwithstanding Pragat’s aggressive marketing campaign and the hoopla surrounding the PPR website, he thought the whole concept was ludicrous. Unlike the vast majority of people who took the system at face value he understood its many fallacies. Most importantly, Goodwin knew that the system did not take into account critical aspects of a person, both positive and negative, that were not revealed in the data mined from the Internet. Goodwin himself illustrated his viewpoint.

From an early age on, he struggled with what he called his “character defect” and attempted to control it, but more often than not it controlled him. Whenever stress and anger reached a certain level in his psyche he would totally lose control over his emotions and do or say things that were well past any levels of rationality. He would later say of his outbursts, “It was as if I was suddenly possessed, not by an evil spirit, more like a feeble spirit, by some form of illiterate moron, a Dybbuk without a high school diploma.” And, then putting a humorous spin on it, “And if I was possessed by an illiterate moron, how would an exorcism be performed? Would a Priest or Rabbi stand over me and chant the lyrics from Cole Porter songs?”

What Goodwin could not know was that on this particular day, his flaw, his loss of control, would manifest itself in a grievous and
unexpected way and come back to bite him, not in the usual place, his ass, but given its serious consequences, in his carotid artery.

Goodwin put such little credence in the PPR system that he discouraged his friends from completing questionnaires about him. At the time, his name and reputation did not extend much further than the limited bounds of his social and business communities. That was by design. Privacy for himself and his wife were of paramount importance to Goodwin. To accomplish this goal, he steadfastly followed three rules: keep a low profile, with a sub-rule, never get involved in unpopular public causes, keep the details about your life, such as finances, as secret as possible and never ever air your dirty laundry in public. Those rules worked well for Goodwin and for virtually his entire adult life, he lived exceptionally well in a cocoon of affluent anonymity.

While it was true, as stated in the initial PPR comments for him, that Goodwin was in fact a man of vision, he was not prescient. Thus, there was no way he could have predicted that in less than a year his PPR would be a zero, his dirty laundry would be aired on national television, he would be leading the charge for a very unpopular cause, and the privacy that was so important to him would be a thing of the past.

Unaware of what the future held in store for him, Goodwin’s spirits were up. He was enroute to small birthday luncheon in Manhattan organized for him by his closest friends. As he drove from his house in Grace Harbor, a lovely little enclave for the very rich situated on the North Shore of Long Island, to his rendezvous in Manhattan, he was in a contemplative mood. Notwithstanding his dim view of the whole PPR concept, he had to admit that when he saw his 28 rating he was pleased. If nothing else, the high PPR gave him a platform for some self-effacing, sarcastic, bragging rights at his luncheon, an event that would be more of a roast than a celebration, one filled with good-natured banter heightened in this case by humorous comparisons of each other’s PPRs. That orientation suited Goodwin just fine. The last thing he wanted was a party built on heaps of praise. When he received an Evite to his party with the notation, “Looking forward to ripping
you apart…figuratively speaking, of course,” he replied gleefully, “Let the barbs fly.”

He thought about what turning 54 meant to him. While many of his peers longed to be younger and some even took steps via face lifts, Botox, testosterone injections, hair plugs, or capped teeth to give themselves the patina of youth or even worse, had Viagra-supplemented affairs with women half their age to convince themselves that they were in fact actually young, Goodwin had no difficulty marching towards senior status. He believed that his developing facial cragginess and the beginnings of an ever so slight paunch, which he could not get rid of no matter how many daily core exercises he did, came with the territory. “All of these folks,” he thought, “suppressed the reality that their genetic life-expectancy clocks continued to tick,” though he sometimes joked that it would be more accurate to say “life expectancy clocks continued to hum” because most clocks were now digital, and that gravity was still tugging at them.

Fit and very healthy, he actually liked reaching this plateau in life. His daily struggles to achieve financial success were behind him and his ultimate struggle, playing golf with the Grim Reaper, his particular euphemism for facing and attempting to delay death, was a very long way off, at least according to his gene pool.

He asked himself, “If Pragat rated my life, I wonder what kind of a number I would have?” Above all, Goodwin was a realist and brutally honest with himself. Twelve out of 30 seemed about right, perhaps lower. True, he and Sheila were attractive, well educated, had tons of money, so many friends that Goodwin had joked that he had a new friends waiting list, and a measure of prestige at least within the confines of his country club. All of this, coupled with his now public high PPR, created an illusion of a rosy life. The converse, however, was the case. Goodwin suffered from the absence of a happy marriage. At this point in his life, he had actually given up any hope of regaining a happy marriage and would have settled for a decent marriage or even a mediocre marriage, but given his abysmal relationship with Sheila these options seemed out of reach.

Traffic on the Long Island Expressway, his route to Manhattan, had come to complete halt. In the distance off to the side of the road, there was the crumpled remains of what was once a luxurious car, one that was probably pointed to with pride by its owner. As he edged towards the car, it occurred to him that what he saw might have been a metaphor for what his marriage had become. By outward appearances, they were a perfect couple, polite to each other, respectful and harmonious. This was the public persona of their marriage, however. Like the car, however, their marriage had “crumpled.” In fact, they were seeing a marriage counselor. They dined with friends as often as possible because when they ate at home alone they hardly spoke. They no longer made love and stopped making excuses.

Goodwin was parallel to the car wreck. EMS workers carried a limp body from the smashed and smoldering car. “Was the man dead? Was our marriage dead?” Goodwin wondered.

Goodwin could not really recall just how long ago it had been, but he did remember, and vividly, the very last time they made love, although the term “making love” was a misnomer. “Imitating people making love,” or as he confessed to his closest friend years later, “robot fucking,” was more accurate. They were going through the motions of intercourse simply because they felt they should; sex as a way of validating their marriage. As he thrust inside of Sheila, he suddenly thought of the word that he couldn’t get on the Times Crossword puzzle, four letters for “45 Player,” answer “HIFI.” Diverted from his memory for an instant he thought, “Say ‘HIFI” to kids today and they probably would think it was WIFI on a plane.” He remembered that at the time he thought it was incredible that he could maintain an erection and simultaneously consider entries in a crossword puzzle. It was, he thought, the ultimate example of multi-tasking.

It probably would not have come as a surprise to Goodwin that during that particular sexual episode, not only was Sheila faking an orgasm, she was also working to solve a puzzle of her own, namely why she was pushing her golf shots to the right. When she gave off a deep and throaty “ah,” it was not as Goodwin had thought that she had
reached her climax. Sheila simply realized that her grip was wrong. “Ah” was the precursor to a silent “ha.”