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Whuffie has all the problems of money, and then a bunch more that are unique to it. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, we see how Whuffie – despite its claims to being ‘‘meritocratic’’ – ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top. Once you have a lot of Whuffie – once a lot of people hold you to be reputable – other people bend over backwards to give you opportunities to do things that make you even more reputable, putting you in a position where you can speechify, lead, drive the golden spike, and generally take credit for everything that goes well, while blaming all the screw-ups on lesser mortals... ...It’s bad enough when the meritocratic delusion takes root in a money-driven economy, but reputation’s one percenters are even more toxic. They can go spectacularly bankrupt, financially ruining their investors, and promptly raise another fortune to gamble on. Reputation is a terrible currency. Currencies need to serve as units of account – so you can price every­thing from vintage Star Wars figures to anti-fungal cream and calculate their total worth. They need to serve as media for exchange, so that someone who has Ken­ner Star Wars figures and needs anti-fungal cream can convert one to the other. They need to serve as stores of value – so you can convert your action figures to something more stable that you can use in your dot­age, in case Star Wars ceases to be cool in another 50 years. Reputation is pretty much useless for any of these things. Instead, they’re literally popularity contests: ‘‘more people like me than you, so I win and you lose.’’ In theory, this kind of jerky behavior will cost you reputation – but in reality, many people are delighted to treat such jerks as ‘‘strong, de­cisive people who tell it like it is.’’... ...One notorious example is Peeple, the vaporware app launched in Sep­tember 2015, which (it was announced) would let you rate other human beings on a scale of one to five. If you wanted to highlight the dystopian nature of Whuffie, you need go no further than this vision for Peeple. If it ever took off, it’d be a lever that the likes of Gamergate could use to destroy your’s employment and personal life, possibly permanently, just by mass-one-starring you... ...But Peeple is a modest effort compared to ‘‘Citizen Scores,’’ the for-now-voluntary service run by the Chinese government in partnership with Tencent (a huge social media and games company) and Alibaba (China’s answer to Amazon). Your citizen score is visible to everyone the government wants – buying socially approved items, undertaking approved leisure activities, adhering to rules and regulations, and socializing with other high-score individuals. Of course, not doing these things makes your score go down. Just being friends with low-scoring individuals drags your own score down, creating a powerful incentive to conform. Mandatory Citizen Scores are being phased in over the next decade, and with other ‘‘soft’’ tools of control developed by China, it promises to be more powerful than any overt coercion... ...Citizen Scores are a near-perfect expression of reputation economics: like most other forms of currency, they are issued by a central bank that uses them to try and influence social outcomes. In this case, those outcomes are perfect obedience to the state.