you are what you tweet
dear friends, in my free time, i made a new website with my cousin james where you can review a human being like he or she is a restaurant. human beings have pages that list their social media presences where anyone can write a review and give him/her a rating out of 5 stars. the site is a reaction to the intersection of personal branding, social media, and “beautiful design” (e.g., about.me/flavors.me). it’s like how normal people used blogger but livejournal was filled with a bunch of emo freaks, or how facebook was sterile but myspace was a visual nightmare of personality. with http://chattel.me, i’ve attempted to build the nightmare emo freak site of personal platform pages.
what’s the internet for if not to make human relationships torture and to get desensitized to violent sexual imagery? commentators talk about disruption of industry, say, the way that napster disrupted the music industry. with this site i’m hoping for no less than the disruption of the practice of interpersonal relationships. we all know that stalking someone or talking behind someone’s back is bad, yet most of us have an insatiable appetite for it. chattel.me will make it impossible to look your friends in the eye.
fair’s fair, and i’ve added a page for myself here: http://www.chattel.me/humen/walter-chen-new-york-ny. i’ve already scoured my mental rolodex for who would merely think of me as “meh…” to no avail, and i’ve hit refresh a few times. i imagine that the site’s primary engagement mechanism will be neurosis and narcissism and it’s working fairly well on me.
chattel.me is a play on the word “chatter” and a reference to the place where property and the person meet. making a living on the internet seems to mean packaging the self as a product (obviously) but that seems to happen even to people simply living on the internet. accordingly, the treatment and critique of persons needs to go deeper than the superficiality of representation which is basically just advertisement.
right now the site is in “single-player mode”, which means that it lacks critical mass so i simply invite you to check out chattel.me, add a page for your self, share it with your friends, and find out what they think about your worth as a human.
