“Rank” means stank, and rankings reek
An ode to writers crafting prose for algorithms to read
Rankings: a semi-spiral virality
Poisoning creativity
With parasitic formality,
Which monetizes exclusivity.
“Rank” means stank, and rankings reek
Converting joy to placement’s peak.
The #1, that winning ordinal banality
Confers slick veneers of toxic objectivity.
‘Rankings’ beguile us. We are organizing, insecure things, craving certainty as to ‘the best’ — at least among options put before us to organize. Of course we ‘love’ rankings. They’re among our first instincts!
With ‘free’ media, WE are the products others buy and sell. Rankings help sell us. The proliferation of ranking systems sell ranks to other systems, forming a cascade of different uses while we humans feel some modicum of comfort looking at what we are told others are looking at — listening to what others are listening to — all as we serve someone else’s algorithm.
Confession: I still love rankings. Most of us do. Media companies know that.
Amplifying what ‘trends’ de-amplifies everything else, regardless of merit. Ultimately, rankings help certain human systems — but not individual humans.
In literature, a ‘great hero’ might be a ‘great warrior.’ In Homer’s Illiad, Achilles spent most of the poem pouting in his tent. The Greeks might send a thousand ships to Troy to avenge Helen’s adulterous flight, yet without Achilles, they’re stuck on the beaches.
Achilles is a hero who refused to obey his generals (or kings). By placing personal honor above duty, Achilles sacrifices everything except his personal glory.
Militaries cannot work that way. No matter how heroic individual soldiers might be, soldiers must obey their commanders, which means ‘rank’ must clarify who fits where within the system.
In real life, a military unit is far more effective at achieving military goals than any single heroic warrior. Imagine Achilles, confronted with a dozen men throwing rocks at him. His shield cannot cover his entire body, so they’re going to land some blows. If he chases a man with his spear, that man will run away; the others will land even more blows from the sides. Eventually, enough blows land to bring him down.
In the real world, barely trained rock throwers might bring down even the greatest warrior in Greece — if they cooperate as a unit. But if the rock throwers fail to cooperate, Achilles can pick them off one by one and kill them all.
For creative individuals, rank hath certain liabilities. Would knowing a painting was the “#1 best painting in the world” help an artist create the next work? Would knowing “rock throwing commander” gets all the credit for the rock thrower’s in bringing down a great hero drive some rock throwers to operate as individuals again?
Individuals may try to balance cost of rank against the benefits, but for ranks to work, they must compel structures despite our preferences. For the painter, being ‘the best’ might result in a hefty commission . For the soldier, some medal or other honor. But the rankings do not help create, nor will they necessarily help rock throwers fight.
Corporations are systems with certain properties of individuals (like the ability to own property), but with other properties of a ‘system.’ Actual human beings balance the cost of working ‘within the system’ against the cost of doing things alone, but in general, once one is within the corporation, efforts to do the work are intended to take primacy over self-advancement.
No corporation worth emulating was ever the work of a single individual (scams, however, may be). Only operate by establishing ‘rank’ systems, subordinating certain individuals to others, then uniting them in their labor to achieve some ends can result in profits that corporations may realize.
Outside clear systems, or during the transition from one system to another, many people seek to game rankings. For example, when Augustus Caesar sought to establish his rank as Emperor, he benefited by bolstering the claim that his ‘father’ Julius Caesar was easily the greatest of all generals — and for some reason, the History of the Gallic Wars proliferated to prove just that claim.
That sort of propaganda helped turn a Republic into an Empire.
But in regular life, the use of rankings, and efforts to skew rankings, helps focus people’s attention upon whatever someone claims to be ‘important,’ and to look away from everywhere else. In an empire, subject peoples are supposed to look to their ‘emperor’ — whose face they will see on every coin.
Rankings are about humans interacting with systems. One piece of us seeks to organize whatever we experience; another piece of us, subtly, will be influenced by the order of the ranking we perceive.
Maybe we ought to care a bit more about how that power manifests to shape our perceptions.
Metacritic ranks Nick Cave’s albums, “Carnage” as the #5 best album of 2021, and “Ghosteen” as the #1 best album of 2019. Great albums.
Most people no longer read a ‘ranking’ from some critic, or even group of critics, and buy music or other media simply because of that ranking. Many would see that, and if unfamiliar with the artist, consider pausing, listening to 10–15 seconds, and then either moving on, or sticking around.
To experience an album about heartbreak, resilience, beauty, pain, edgy, and spirituality thus might be akin to reading a book by randomly skipping to a chapter that contained a quote that someone, somewhere turned into a memorable meme.
Thus, rankings reek. A world inundated with the scents of rankings, driving most of what we read, parsed by algorithms picking and choosing what ought to interest us (because it will, ultimately, capture our gaze and help someone else monetize us) may become one in which communications by one algorithm to another displace creativity: we are subsumed as products marketed by corporate beasts — we become Achilles in our games, and forget we are merely stone throwers, useful only when in a unit that cooperates.
