"It's a grocery store how purple should my prose be?" is a review I left on a grocery store in google reviews.

About a decade or so ago, through a series of sites, such as Yelp and later Facebook, businesses and locations became reviewable to the public. Sometimes, this is useful, especially as it can highlight unique and local businesses. But in their fury to turn every aspect of life into something that can be quantified, sites like google, and people who use their Android phones, are now barraged to answer questions about every conceivable interaction, quantifying it with a five star scale.

So one day, after shopping in the Costanera Jumbo, and while trying to ride the subway back home, a notification popped up on my phone, asking me to review the grocery store. I didn't care, I was busy, but through some perverse need to participate in the process, I sarcastically responded with a three star review and the above quote.

One reason that I dislike these things so much is it took one of the most paradigm changing parts of the internet, the ability of people to have another channel to discuss the world around them, to transform the world by putting faces and experiences to something that might seem commonplace; and turned it into the most banal, mechanized and pointless exercises in merchandising things that don't need to be merchandised. What is the purpose of having an army of people constantly evaluating and rating every single real life interaction?

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