Don’t buy that one-star book! The tyranny of rating everything you read, watch or hear

The second weekend of June was quite busy on Goodreads. Five hundred users of that book cataloging virtual community joined forces to give a single star to a novel that had not even been released yet: The Snow Forest, by Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of the memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The writer had announced on Friday the 9th that her next story would be set in 1900 and would follow a group of hermits who settle in Siberia with the mission to protect nature and resist the Soviet government. No Goodreads user had been able to read it, as its official release date was February 2024. All the negative reviews that were written on the platform between June 10 and 11 revolved around expressing outrage at a story that could romanticize Russia at a time in which that country is accused of war crimes. Gilbert’s response came in the form of a video that she posted on Monday the 12th to announce that she was delaying the release of the book to a later, still undefined date.

The Goodreads page of The Snow Forest has been disabled, but the incident prompted other writers to denounce the direction that the platform is taking: “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers. It undermines what little credibility they have left,” tweeted essayist Roxane Gay. The author of Bad Feminist was alluding to “review bombing,” a technique of extortion, often economic, that has become popular in recent years (in addition to books, it also occurs on websites that list restaurants or hotels).

Gilbert’s case raises the question: is the cult of scoring every cultural product we consume getting out of hand? Stars define interest in Goodreads, which in turn influences the reviews of the critics, who try not to stray too far from the popular opinion. Songs become hits depending on the amount of times they are streamed on their release day. The most anticipated films will be those close to a score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and with viral Letterboxd comments, and Twitter now decides if a movie will flop based on the minutes of applause it gets at festivals. What are the consequences of this quantification of culture?

“All these platforms like Goodreads or Letterboxd allow more people to express their opinions about culture, which is usually a good thing because criticism doesn’t just belong to the professionals: everyone deserves their own opinion. But, all too often, these platforms reward fueling controversy and trolling instead of meaningful discussion,” explains Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker covering technology and culture on the internet and author of The Longing for Less, who will publish a new essay in 2024, Filterworld, on how our cultural tastes have become atrophied by the algorithm. “What happened with Elizabeth Gilbert is an example of this. I think artists today are under more pressure than ever from the public, because they can see what everyone is saying online and rate the success of their art in terms of likes. That dynamic can certainly be detrimental to the cultural product itself, because artists are forced to make their work as safe and acceptable as possible.”

The privilege of strangeness

Not everyone sees the way in which cultural consumption has become covered by the umbrella of efficiency as a positive thing. Challenges to achieve the greatest possible number of annual readings or viewings have become popular, with users rating everything they come across in a race against time. Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés, who has repeatedly denounced the gamification of a “superficial culture” that is far removed from the general culture, is opposed to these practices in which we basically consume by checking off lists of things we have seen, experienced, read or consumed. “There is no single experience of strangeness,” reflects the thinker, skeptical of a segmentation of taste that distances us from a possible encounter with what she calls “those strange people who reveal something about us that we didn’t know.”

Chayka also believes that the obsession with rating and ranking everything we consume results in a loss. “Quantification makes the strangest, weirdest, most radical things harder for consumers to find and harder for artists to make. It is harder to find because algorithmic recommendations tend to ignore anything that doesn’t generate immediate engagement, and it is harder to produce because the artists who don’t play along or adapt to the algorithm have a much harder time finding audiences and, therefore, making a living from their art. That doesn’t mean that it is totally impossible to find strange and interesting things, but the consumer has to search more and work to cultivate their own taste instead of being guided by algorithms,” he explains.

The position of the privilege of strangeness is shared by Jazmín Beirak, a Spanish researcher in cultural politics and author of the essay Cultura ingobernable (Ungovernable culture). “Perhaps due to laziness, tiredness or a lack of curiosity, we don’t care and are satisfied with what we’re given. The debate would go beyond the algorithm as a formula; it would have to do with the relationship we establish with culture, not so much as a field that transforms us, but rather as something that eases the fatigue that daily life can cause,” she says. To Beirak, our relationship with the algorithm is anything but innocent. “It is an object with which we have a relationship of suspicion, about which we talk humorously, or which we try to deceive or mislead,” she states about an era of technological “hyper-awareness” in which we have accepted that discovering new and strange things not only requires the desire to do so: it also takes time and lots of skill to confuse the algorithm.

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