And in those cases when we don’t receive the desired amount of adulation, we feel awful. If fame is success, then anonymity is unmitigated failure. In one extreme case, this perspective led a little-known blogger named Dennis Williams to reveal his discontent to a Washington Post reporter before committing suicide.

Meanwhile, for consumers of content, accepting the majority opinion suffocates idiosyncrasies. If you need a place to eat, you’ll just go to the most-starred restaurant and buy the exact meal that everyone else has bought.

Why should the average opinion of human beings matter anyway? The average opinion neglected Van Gogh in his time (“One star—a total lunatic”) and awarded Best Picture to “How Green Was My Valley” instead of “Citizen Kane.”

But for you righteous rabble-rousers who want to buck this whole majority thing, the structure of the Internet constrains your rebellion. The front pages of websites display the most popular items. Facebook feeds back the most-liked items. YouTube prioritizes the most-watched videos.

It’s not a matter of swallowing what the mob feeds you; it’s a matter of opening your mouth at all.

In certain cases, it can be beneficial to know whether more people prefer the color of this toaster-oven to that one. However, most websites go several leaps too far by letting you slide into thinking that the shared opinion is right. Unless you make a real effort to resist, you adopt the Internet’s publicly assigned judgments of the worth of art, objects, and even other people.

Anarchy is not the answer—please don’t smash your computers. In order to maximize the value of the Internet, however, you must learn to distrust the easy statistics of popularity.

After all, a movie with a 20-percent rating is not automatically less worthwhile than a “masterpiece” with a 90-percent rating. Especially if the 20-percent movie focuses on the adventures of a shark-boy, and perhaps even a lava-girl.

Sam Danello ’18 is a Crimson editorial writer living in Grays Hall.