The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought what ultimately mattered in politics was power. The rightful ruler is whoever has the power to control other people's actions. But for Hobbes, the true source of power wasn't strength or military might. He believed that ultimate power comes from the ability to control language and define terms--especially the terms of success. The power over definitions is stronger than military or economic power. Because if you can define what good and evil mean for people, if you can control what success and failure mean for them, then you can control them from the inside.

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GAMES WAKE US UP TO a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization. And sometimes, we let some external, institutional systems—rankings, metrics, and measures—set our desires and goals. Let's give this phenomenon a name. Call it value capture. Value capture happens when:

1. Your values are rich and subtle—or developing that way.

2. You enter some social (typically institutional) setting that offers you simplified, often quantified renditions of your values.

3. The simplified versions take over.

If you want a portable version, try this: Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.

Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody's attention. He'd found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his flock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard.

In value capture, you're outsourcing your values to an institution. Instead of setting your values in the light of your own particular experiences, instead of adjusting them to your particular personality, you're letting distant bureaucratic forces set them for you.

 

Maybe this wouldn't matter if the institutional metrics got it exactly right—if they truly captured what is valuable in the world. But that almost never happens. Metrics are shaped by institutional forces. They are subject to demands for fast, efficient data collection at scale, to demands of fitting into spreadsheets and action reports. Institutional metrics are part of a system that abstracts away from personal difference and local detail and identifies some thin, measurable detail. And what's easily measurable is rarely the same as what's really valuable.

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AFTER A FEW YEARS OF soul-searching, I finally managed to shake off the grip of the philosophy rankings and remember my love for those weird old questions. But a couple of years later, it happened to me all over again. I went on Twitter.

I got on originally to talk to people, and to learn from them. There was a brief moment, years ago, when Twitter seemed genuinely magical. You could make friends you would never have found in any other place, find ideas and

conversations that would have been impossible otherwise. Twitter was, for a little while, a bonanza of surprising but meaningful connection.

But then I went minorly viral a few times and caught that delicious, feverish high of seeing my numbers soar. And every time, I'd be gripped with the need for more. I started ransacking my thoughts, imagining how each one would look on Twitter. It started to matter less for me whether the thing was true or deep or wise. I just wanted thoughts that were peppy and sharp and quick enough to blow up.

It's particularly easy, with Twitter, to see the exact contours of the value shift. The platform's scoring system—its Likes and Retweets and Follows—doesn't register empathy, or understanding, or finding out something that really transforms you down the line. It measures quick-fire popularity. Twitter's metrics don't capture the difference between somebody who chuckled for a second at your tweet and somebody who was shaken to their core. If they both just click Like, then Twitter counts them the same.

 

Twitter captures a binary information state. It does not record the difference between loving something, being mildly amused by it, or having it change your life. It flattens complex information into a single binary bit of data. And it captures that data at one narrow moment: the moment of first reading. You encounter a deep tweet. At first you don't like it; you disagree with it. But it sticks in your craw; it gnaws at you. Slowly, it changes your mind—but that takes a week. The value of that tweet comes in a slow burn. But it's pretty unlikely that you'll go back and find that tweet to Like it. The interface of social media tends to capture positive reactions in the first moment of exposure. One of the central reasons we communicate with each other is to learn, to be challenged, to have our understanding transformed, which takes time. But that kind of communication isn't valued by Twitter's scoring system.

Call this the Gap. The Gap is the distance between what's being measured and what actually matters.

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