Peeple: Character is Destiny

Peeple, a new social media website that is designed for "online reputation management and asset protection", was launched this week. It is a digital place for brave souls to create a public profile and wait for others to rate them (in all seriousness) professionally, personally, or romantically. Peeple's tagline is "Character is Destiny", where the self-as-a-product discourse is capitalized upon and a user's engagement in the digital world has the very real possibility of affecting their material lives.

I have not used Peeple and hope to never have to. However, in the post-Fordist regime of a knowledge economy, selling the self is a regrettable act of survival in cognitive capitalism. Our marketable "self" or our "character" is a complex assemblage of education, work experience, social position, references, and what-have-you. Marketing our 'self's as products to be sold to the lowest bidder is an entire affective production of our digital 'self's -- which ends up being a somewhat less-than-truthful avatar that is the most attractive to potential employers.

Rating people -- rating others -- becomes a way to not only monitor the self, but to further digitized, quantify, and to add value to one's 'assets'. Peeple is an example of a story-telling public as Papacharassi describes, however it is important to recognize which stories are being told on which platform and for what reason. Peeple does not even describe itself as an ambivalent neutral platform -- it is totally upfront about it's purposes: Online Reputation Management. Reputation management. However, sadly, if this site takes off, we will not be the ones managing our own reputation, but rather allowing others to do so -- remember, we are not rating or curating ourselves like we do on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. We are thus putting what is little left of our 'power' (our self, a marketable product) in the hands of our peers, who, in essence, are our competition for jobs. In some ways, we are giving away our power for the hope that we will receive a material return in the form a job.

With Peeple acting as a disciplinary social network, we can begin to see it as not only maintaining a particular social order or narrative, but creating one. Peeple is a form of surveillance of the individual, an attempt to cut through the embellished parts of our LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. In this respect, I can see it as a form of biopower, where people are the product. Instead of tweaking and managing our own social media profiles, Peeple allows others to do it for us and in this respect users may begin to anxiously manage their daily interactions for fear of being reported to Big Brother.