Scored by Lauren McLaughlin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My ACT score was in the 20's.
Nobody cares about that anymore.
My GPA has always been "above average"
No one wants to hear about it.
My life has been carefully controlled by grades, scores, ratings and rank since before I was even aware of it, all under the premise that if I scored well enough, the finances that I didn't have wouldn't matter. That without these scores, I was doomed to only achieve the levels my money would allow. The rich children would have better opportunities, but the well-scored could always level the field through merit-based scholarship.
Recently, I've begun to monitor my Klout score. Klout is an algorithim calculations based website that monitors your social media influence. Higher scores reflect the amount of people on the web that value what you talk about and share. Companies use these scores to pinpoint the best people to help market their products. For instance, a high klout score with an emphasis on Cars, may get you a free week-long test drive from a car company.
On the surface these things sound AWESOME. No more is it about "who you know", or "what you have", but it's about YOU. Who you are. What you do. Fair and impartial, technology does the work that humans have failed at.
That said, let me just start this review by admitting that the most chilling thing that hit me almost immediately, was that Imani, our main character's "score" in this book is 64...
My Klout "score" is 64.
We're ALREADY scoring and charting and tagging ourselves into a fresh new caste system. One where everyone is "better" because no one is.
Oh my gosh where do I even begin.
