The Complete Guide to Influence Scores™ in Gigaland
An Influence Score is the numerical measure of a person's social value, visibility, and influence within Gigaland, the dystopian society of Gulliver's Travels: The Broligarchy by S.J. Stone.
In Gigaland, almost everything you do matters. Who follows you. Who you follow. What you buy. Where you live. What you watch. What you say. Who notices when you say it.
All of this contributes to a constantly changing number known as your Influence Score™.
The higher your score, the more valuable you are considered to society. The lower your score, the less anyone — including the system itself — is required to care about you.
Welcome to Gigaland.
What Is an Influence Score?
An Influence Score™ is Gigaland's universal system for measuring an individual's social relevance. It is not simply a measure of wealth or popularity. Instead, the Influence Score attempts to answer a much larger question:
How much does this person matter?
Gigaland's algorithms continuously evaluate enormous quantities of behavioral, economic, social, and cultural data to determine the answer. Every citizen therefore occupies a measurable position within society. Your Influence Score™ doesn't merely describe that position. It helps determine it.
What Determines Your Influence Score?
The precise algorithm used to calculate an Influence Score™ is not publicly disclosed, but all Gigaland citizens understand that numerous factors can affect their score, and in every segment of society and throughout a citizen’s life, each person in Gigaland is focused on maintaining or enhancing their Influence Score™.
Factors that influence or affect one’s Influence Score™ include social reach, engagement, purchasing behavior, professional success, cultural relevance, relationships, associations, audience quality, public behavior, and participation in the Gigaland economy.
Influence begins at an early age. A child's birthday party can affect their emerging Influence Score™ through attendance, venue, gifts, presentation, and—most importantly—the social engagement generated by streaming the event.
In Gigaland, even childhood has metrics.
But raw popularity isn't enough.
Who pays attention to you can matter as much as how many people pay attention to you.
Attention from a highly influential citizen may be considerably more valuable than attention from hundreds — or thousands — of people with little social influence of their own. This creates an ecosystem in which influence generates influence. And irrelevance has a tendency to do the same.
Given the strata of Gigaland society, the power and value of influencers varies widely. Nulls that follow are less valuable than a smaller number of Betas, whereas a single Alpha, even a lower-tiered Titan, who likes or follows an average citizen can result in a tremendous change of fortune for that individual.
Is an Influence Score Like a Credit Score?
Only if your credit score determines your entire existence. A traditional credit score in the real world attempts to measure financial risk, but an Influence Score™ measures something considerably more ambitious: societal value. Money matters in Gigaland, but wealth alone does not guarantee influence.
A wealthy person nobody cares about may possess less social power than a celebrity, creator, entrepreneur, commentator, or personality capable of directing the behavior of millions of other people. Gigaland therefore represents the logical conclusion of the attention economy:
Attention itself has become a form of capital.
Those capable of attracting, retaining, and directing attention possess enormous value. Everyone else competes for what remains.
What Do Influence Score Numbers Mean?
Every Influence Score™ places a Gigaland citizen somewhere within the social hierarchy.
0–99 — NULL — Red
You are no longer considered a socially valuable participant in Gigaland.
100–999 — BETA — Green
You are participating. You are contributing. You have potential. Keep going.
1,000–9,999 — BETA — Blue
You have established meaningful social value and access. More is possible.
10,000–99,999 — ALPHA — Silver
You possess genuine influence. People don't simply notice you. Your attention affects them.
100,000+ — TITAN — Gold
You don't follow culture. Culture follows you.
Your current classification is immediately visible in the color of the Influence Score™ displayed above your head.
Things Are Looking Up™
Does Your Influence Score Change?
A person’s Influence Score™ changes continuously. It’s the first thing a citizen checks in the morning, and the last thing they check before bed. An Influence Score is not a permanent classification. It is a reflection of one’s societal value in a moment in time. It rises and falls according to your behavior and the reactions of the people around you, and it can skyrocket or plummet at any time, depending on a variety of factors.
A successful post might help. A valuable professional connection might help considerably more. Being publicly associated with someone whose own Influence Score is rising could prove extremely beneficial. A promotion. A strong performance report. A highly attended birthday party. A big win by a local team the resident follows voraciously may even affect one’s Influence Score™.
Becoming associated with someone whose score is collapsing is less favorable. A failure in life. A bad day at work. A moment in the wrong light that casts the resident as a loner, an outcast, or unfortunate in some way can have a significant effect on one’s Influence Score™.
Gigaland therefore encourages its citizens to think strategically about nearly every human interaction and find value where it appears -- friendship, romance, associations like clubs and charities and sports groups. Attention has value for the individual, but interaction and engagement in-person or virtually also helps determine one’s Influence Score™.
Influence is continually in flux, and small upticks or downticks are part of every citizen’s day. But while an Influence Score™ usually remains stable, maintenance is required. And citizens are always on the lookout for opportunities to grow their scores and rise in the rankings.
What Does a High Influence Score Get You?
Access -- pure and simple. Access is the real currency of Gigaland.
Citizens with greater influence gain access to better opportunities, better experiences, better networks, and people with greater influence of their own. As a person's score rises, doors begin to open. Some of those doors are metaphorical. Others very much are not.
Gigaland is ostensibly a meritocracy. Anyone capable of becoming sufficiently valuable can theoretically rise, and that rise can result in promotion, a new job, as well as access to goods and services once out of reach. Not surprisingly, one’s Influence Score™ is key to romance and a future relationship.
As such, the Influence Score™ is not only a measurement of one’s societal worth; it’s also a measurement of one’s potential. Everyone has an opportunity to become somebody. Therefore, if you remain nobody, the obvious explanation is that you simply haven't tried hard enough.
What Are Alphas?
Alphas occupy the upper reaches of Gigaland's social hierarchy. Some Alphas even elevate to the most elite status of Titan, but Titans are most often associated with leaders of industry or politics.
Alphas possess enough influence to shape culture rather than merely participate in it. They are watched, imitated, courted and followed by millions. Their opinions move markets, their behavior generates trends, and their attention can dramatically affect the fortunes of people beneath them and shape entire industries. An Alpha that ascends to the rank of Titan can change the lives of tens of thousands of others simply through associations and social connections. Therefore, proximity to an Alpha has value of its own. An Alpha doesn't necessarily have to give you anything. Being seen standing beside one is enough.
Above even this rarefied world sit the individuals whose wealth, power, and influence have become so enormous that ordinary classifications seem inadequate.
Gigaland calls them Titans.
What Is a Titan?
A Titan is one of Gigaland's most powerful individuals. Titans sit at the intersection of wealth, technology, influence, culture, and political power. They do not merely succeed within Gigaland's systems. They own substantial portions of them. To ordinary citizens, Titans are simultaneously entrepreneurs, celebrities, visionaries, cultural icons, and objects of aspiration.
They represent the ultimate promise of Gigaland:
Become valuable enough and perhaps, someday, the rules will stop applying to you.
What Are Betas?
Most people aren't Titans. Most people aren't Alphas either. Eventually someone had to invent a word for everybody else -- the average Joe, a term used long before Gigaland was born.
Beta is the term that caught on, and the Beta Zone is both a figurative and literal location in time and space where Betas live. Betas occupy the broad middle of Gigaland's influence hierarchy, in what used to be referred to as the Middle Class. They participate in the system, consume its products, follow its personalities, chase its trends, and work continuously to improve their position within it.
Some are rising. Some are falling. Most are desperately hoping nobody notices which direction they're actually moving while they furiously check their status multiple times per day. For a Beta, the Influence Score isn't an abstract number. It's both possibility and threat in gleaming digits.
What Are Nulls?
At the bottom of Gigaland's hierarchy are the Nulls. A Null is someone whose measurable social value has fallen so low that, for practical purposes, the system considers that person irrelevant.
The name is brutally efficient. Null: no meaningful value detected. And appropriately, Nulls live in the Null Zone, which, like the Beta Zone, is both a figurative and literal place. The Null Zone is both social and economic status rolled into one -- what a by-gone era would have called poverty or the lower class. What exactly life as a Null entails — and what happens to people who fall that far — is another matter.
Gigaland prefers that citizens concentrate on improving their scores. You probably should, too.
Can Someone Improve Their Influence Score?
Of course. Gigaland wouldn't be much of a meritocracy otherwise.
Citizens are encouraged to increase their visibility, build valuable relationships, participate in approved economic activity, cultivate audiences, associate with successful people, consume desirable products, and remain culturally relevant. A happy citizen is a citizen striving to increase their Influence Score™ and ascend the societal ladder of Gigaland toward a brighter future.
To achieve this, there are some simple principles that every citizen is taught to adopt:
Be interesting. But not incorrectly interesting.
Be independent. But preferably in ways other people already approve of.
Be authentic. But make sure your authenticity performs well.
Most importantly, never stop participating. A person who stops generating measurable value creates a difficult question for a society built around measuring everything. Citizens who contribute to a more engaging Gigaland reap the rewards. Citizens who do not threaten their own status.
Who Controls the Influence Score?
An excellent question. Gigaland appreciates your curiosity. Please remain where you are.
Why Does the Influence Score Matter in The Broligarchy?
The Influence Score is one of the central ideas in S.J. Stone's Gulliver's Travels: The Broligarchy, a dystopian satire about technology, social media, influencer culture, artificial intelligence, wealth, status, and the increasingly blurry boundary between being a person and being a product.
The system takes several things that already exist—followers, engagement metrics, ratings, algorithms, personal branding, social networks, recommendation systems, status anxiety, and the attention economy — and pushes them toward an absurd conclusion:
What happens when society stops merely measuring attention and begins using attention to measure human worth?
Gigaland has an answer. It's probably fine. It’s probably something you already experience now.
Where Is Your Influence Score Displayed?
You don't need to ask someone their Influence Score™. Just look up.
Every Gigaland citizen's current Influence Score™ appears above their head, displaying both their numerical score and the color associated with their social classification. That means a person's social value is visible before they say a word.
Gigaland citizens learn from childhood to look up when meeting someone. The number tells them immediately whether they're speaking to a Null, Beta, Alpha, or Titan—and consequently how much that person matters. This has fundamentally changed human interaction within Gigaland.
Eye contact comes second. The score comes first.
Gigaland considers this transparency. Everyone knows where everyone stands. Or, more accurately, everyone knows where to look.
So, Would You Survive Gigaland?
There's a simple way to think about it and decide for yourself (before the Influence Score™ is adopted everywhere and you have to consider where you might fall out in society):
Look at your life.
Your followers.
Your job.
Your friends.
Your purchases.
Your reputation.
Your opinions.
Your search history.
Your viewing habits.
The people who answer when you call.
The people who don't.
Now imagine that somewhere, continuously and invisibly, all of those things are being converted into a number. That number determines where you're allowed to go. It determines who wants to know you. It determines what opportunities appear. It shows you how much your opinion matters. It tells you whether anyone sees you at all.
That number above your head: What color is it? Do you see single, double or triple digits? Because that number means everything.
Still feeling confident? Excellent. Your attitude has been noted.
Influence Score™ adjustment: +0.03
Things Are Looking Up™
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