How - Dov Seidman [101]
To then extend that reputation—for others to contribute to it with high praise or support—they must in turn put their reputations on the line. If I call a manager in our New York office and ask her opinion of someone I am considering entrusting with an important project, her evaluation also reflects on my estimation of her. If she accords that individual high praise but the person does not measure up, that New York manager’s reputation is going to take a hit in my book. I will have less confidence in her ability to evaluate talent. Her reputation is dependent on the strength of the trust circles she perpetuates. It may not be a critical hit, but it will be a hit nonetheless.
Acting in consonance with your reputation creates trust. The people you deal with begin their relationship with you aware of your reputation. If the interaction they have with you reinforces, extends, or at least is consistent with your reputation, they can more easily extend trust. Thus, reputation, combined with experiences that support it, propels trust. If, however, you fail to meet the expectations set by your reputation, you introduce dissonance into a relationship. The inconsistency between what is expected and what you deliver creates distraction. Dissonance and distraction, as we know, bring friction into play. Potential partners, confronted with conflicting messages, will raise their defenses and slow down the process of dealing with you in order to gain more time to evaluate the situation and make a wise choice.
Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst, young master’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, an Italian nonprofit organization dedicated to interactive design, recently developed a dream project they called RentAThing. A small, handheld device resembling an iPod, RentAThing “is a tool for negotiation that provides additional information about the reputation of the parties involved and enables smoother transactions.” RentAThing represents one visionary step down the road to literally “trading on your reputation.”3 When two people want to transact a piece of business—Chiu and Hilhorst use the example of renting a rake—the person who owns the rake would consult his RentAThing to evaluate the other person’s reputation for renting garden tools. Armed with this information, the owner could price the transaction according to relative risk; a lower reputational score would mean a higher rental price, and vice versa. The renter’s rake score could be combined with other reputational scores—say, for returning library books on time or responding to phone messages in a timely fashion—in order to achieve a higher overall trust level, resulting in a lower rental price.
Chiu and Hilhorst look forward to a day, in the not-too-distant future, when wireless connectivity will allow machines and individuals to instantly share reputation scores, no different than a credit score, allowing the information in the RentAThing to apply to a variety of transactions. “Instead of silos of reputation, with various services, companies, and individuals developing isolated reputations,” they write, “RentAThing provides a centralized means of managing and developing a single reputation.”
In his 2003 novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow posits a “post-scarcity” world in which everything is free, available based on a person’s reputational score, which Doctorow calls “whuffie.” Whuffie is accrued or depleted according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions, and serves as actual currency in a world without money. Everyone knows everyone else’s whuffie instantly (through a chip implanted in the head—isn’t that always the case?), and everyone has the ability to increase or deplete someone’s whuffie instantly. Conduct a great symphony? The audience loves you and you accrue whuffie from them all. Shove