Slate Takes A Look at Amazon’s “celebrity reviewers.” As in any numbers game (tax returns, elections) opacity abets manipulation. Amazon’s rankings establish a formal, public competition for power—or its online equivalent, recognition—wherein each competitor follows his own private sense of fair play. Or not.
Like celebrity bloggers and Wikipedia “Gnomes,” then, the Top Amazon Reviewer heralds the arrival of a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee. This feels like a loss. But perhaps it means that in the coming age, every writer will be a salesman: up past dark, sifting through the data stream for evidence that somewhere, some honest soul is buying.
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