Selfcoin - The Danger of an Unethical Human Price-Rating System

Abstract

The social media era generated a global movement towards new ways of acting in the society for human beings. We both can decide what to publish about us on the internet and share it with others. On the other side, there are million of data we leave on the internet we didn’t want to. The creation of a parallel identity on the internet is strictly connected to the commercialization of our personal data, which have an increasing economic value. The rise of influencers as advertising option for companies is the best exemplification of a trend that will overcome traditional advertising systems and revolution the way a business should connect to its customers. Humans and their social behaviors are used as an instrument to commercial purposes. Consequently, in a predominantly capitalist society as ours, the more economic value for the society an individual online activity has, the more he gets social prestige. Some Netflix fiction and a single experiment in China already tested the possibility to give social media ranking the power to build a real institutional hierarchy. In this hypothetical world, while interacting in the real life people can give each other a public vote. This vote contributes to the total score of the person, then publicly ranked. This online reputation is an official source used by the State and society to determine basic level of services and social hierarchies. As cryptocurrencies are evidencing the possibility to create currencies without banks or States, in this paper we discuss the potential danger of a real application of the institution of a social media ranking system connected to an extreme capitalistic view. We conjecture the possibility for every single individual to create a personal currency (Selfcoin) whose value is given by the appreciation of the market, which is made of the other individuals support. The society can invest on every single person as its personal self currency would be a mean of social prestige, where prestige is only determined by financial value. In this view, each of us lives his life just with the scope to see his economic value increase, on pain to be excluded. Despite any ethic and moral value. We finally ask the entire community of cryptocurrency owners to avoid the possibility for such an event to occur, as it would complete the commercialization of human beings in a poisonous spiral of extreme capitalism.