Any time I’m unsure of which jacket to buy, or which movie to watch, or which country to visit, I do this one simple trick: take a look at the rankings.
One need not look very far to come across a ranked list of products and services on any given day. In December, though, they’re practically unavoidable. That’s when the standard U.S. ambient nudge toward consumerism becomes more of a mule-kick to the sternum. Best-of-the-year lists pour out of trusted media outlets in every conceivable category, each tributary flowing into the broader deluge of gift guides. Processing so many best-in-class recommendations, on top of all the ranked lists one might lean on for the usual decision-making—Best Vegan Restaurants in Massapequa—can be overwhelming. After a while, it all sort of blends together into optimization-slurry. Instead of bringing harmony to our lives, it amplifies the dull thrum of anxiety that accompanies a ceaseless search for a five-star existence.
On the surface, all this rating and ranking is super helpful. It separates the signal from the noise. Purchase-decisions based on which option is most acclaimed, either by experts or in the aggregate, stand a far better chance of success than just going by whatever falls most squarely within one’s price range. Given the abundance of options in a global, digital marketplace, services like Yelp and Wirecutter bring order to what otherwise feels like entropy.
But not every product, experience and idea is meant to be ranked.
The difference between being a sports-lover and a cinephile comes down to quantitative vs. qualitative analysis. Individual athletes and their teams have rigid stats to compare; movies have box office receipts, critical reputation, and awards. The best movie ever is impossible to determine—IMDB says The Shawshank Redemption, the American Film Institute says Citizen Kane, I say Boogie Nights—but the vast majority of people agree the best professional basketball player in history is either Michael Jordan or Lebron James. Sports fans develop personal favorites based on style and general preference, just like movie fans, but the distribution of MVP accolades and draft positions each season come down to a matter of stats.
What ranking culture effectively does is blur the lines between quantitative (objective) and qualitative (subjective) analysis. It brings an aura of competition and the illusion of empirical truth to even the most anodyne aspects of modern life.
We rank countries in order of which are the happiest. We rank the most successful people beneath the "> Logan’s Run-esque age-threshold of 30. We rank stadiums, car brands, dog breeds, and vacation destinations. If it exists at all, it can exist along a tiered spectrum of bestness.
Some of these rankings are superlatives and others are meant to guide consumers in their consumption. Elsewhere, there’s an entire clickbait ecosystem built around rankings for the sake of rankings. Loving the new adaptation of Wicked? Surely, you’d be into the definitive ranking of the film’s songs. Did you clap your fins for HBO’s The Penguin? Here’s how each episode rates, from worst to best. Lists like Rolling Stone’s 200 greatest singers draw folks in by provoking a gut response. They force readers to consider their own personal rankings and rage about the glaring snubs—even if provoking that rage appears to be the point. And ultimately, they commodify art in a way that makes movies about as memorable as their collectible popcorn buckets.
But top-down cultural gatekeeping is only one part of what’s out there. Ordinary citizens do plenty of their own rankings as well.
Since their mid-aughts inception, Yelp and Google Reviews have been allowing diners, shoppers, and pet owners to help determine the visibility and, in many cases, survival of businesses large and small. Stores and restaurants politely ask satisfied customers to leave reviews, hoping to semi-organically improve their SEO, while others are so desperate for those reviews, they offer tiny bribes in the form of gifts. (Google officially discourages this practice.) But a system in which a business’s success hinges on the volume and star-rating of formal digital surveys feels down-right dystopian. In fact, there’s "> an episode of Black Mirror, the definitive techno-dystopia series, built around applying this premise to social interactions.
Our current social media is, unsurprisingly, already on its way. On TikTok, one of the major trends this year is blind ranking. Users download a template that allows them to view options in a category of their choosing, which flicker by onscreen like a spinning roulette wheel. The user then assigns a ranking to whichever random option appears each time the flickering stops, until they’ve filled out their personal top 10. TikTokers this year have ranked everything from food and dip combinations to pet peeves to people they would save from a burning building, and especially beauty products.
The abundance of enticing options for everything, arranged in order of supposed viability, doesn’t create FOMO so much as it invites FOCI—the fear of choosing incorrectly. Anyone springing for the sixth-most recommended tourist attraction on Trip Advisor might have to block out the voice in the back of their head wondering how much better #1 could be.
But any restaurant, gift idea, or theme park ride occupying the top spot on a ranked list creates expectations that are hard to live up to. How close to perfection must the food, service and ambiance be at the restaurant with the most five-star reviews in your city, in order to match whatever you’re imagining? And what does it mean when it misses the mark? An unsatisfied customer who abided by the rankings is only left to wonder: Is the consensus wrong, or am I?
Maybe consensus isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe there’s something to the idea of cultivating a coterie of trusted mavens whose curation speaks to us personally, rather than relying on rankings. Maybe looking anywhere for guidance on consumer choices ultimately diminishes our sense of adventure and discovery.But what would I know—I didn’t even make this PR company’s list of best tech columnists in America.
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