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I’d meet the mom of my son’s classmate and as we shook hands a band on her wrist would flash: 4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. A disembodied voice would read out the reviews left by all the previous people she’d met and interacted with. For instance…

Pamela
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️- Such a great friend
She’s my daughter’s godmother and has a wonderful habit of taking my kids out to play every month so I can have a weekend off. If I could give her more stars I would!

@LagosTroublemaker
⭐️- Can’t take a joke
She blocked me on Twitter because I made a harmless joke about Igbo people. Poor sense of humor.

Of course, each person would be oblivious of her own rating. I wouldn’t know what my rating was, and neither would you. I don’t know how possible that would be, but since we’re here imagining things, we might as well continue with the fantasy.

You do agree that the reviews would make our interactions easier and help us identify (and avoid!) unpleasant people. When you walked into a room, you’d instantly gravitate towards the 4-stars and 5-stars. Or maybe not. Because if someone only has 5-star ratings, that would mean that they’d never annoyed another person before. Would that be a marker for spinelessness and being a doormat for others to walk on? So maybe we’d gravitate instead to the 3-stars, those people who seem to have perfected the balancing act of pleasing some, and pissing off others.

Knowing this system, how would it influence our own behaviour? Would we try to game the system by being super nice and pleasant, knowing that people would be more attracted to us if our ratings were high? Would introverts do their utmost to get low ratings in every human interaction so they’d be left in peace? Would the average of our parents’ ratings be our default rating, or would everyone be born with zero stars? Would every generation decide for itself what a perfect rating is? So for instance, Victorian society with its emphasis on propriety would highly value 5-star ratings. Present-day Warri, on the other hand, would place a premium on 2 to 3-star ratings. Warri no dey carry last!

And if we had the perfect rating (5 star or 3 star, depending on society’s perspective), would we then suspect every friendly overture? Would our friendships be more transactional? Is she really trying to be my friend because she likes me or because she likes my 5-star rating? Would the ratings themselves become grounds for discrimination? Who would want to work in the same team with someone with one-star ratings?