In a 22nd century crime-free world, self-regulated by an omnipotent social media structure, a remorseless policeman, re-purposed to chase down and kill individuals who have not met minimum popularity requirements, tries to survive and rebel after himself failing the social media diktat.

I like the idea of an enforcer of social status in the age of internet.

But….

I, for one, am not able to suspend disbelief that a dystopic world can survive by terminating all the people fail to score enough “likes”.? Who will be left to do the shit work that every social/economic order needs to function?

Top dogs always need underdogs to serve them, to help them maintain their status.? Winners in the Darwinian wars for status need losers to exploit for their selfish ends.

So it seems to me that the stakes ought to be the loss of privilege and status.? Losers get consigned to the humiliating jobs of serving the winners.? They lose their wealth, their wives lose the creature comforts and lifestyle they have come to expect; their children lose the opportunities for education and advancement that come with a privileged life.

fwiw.

I suggest the inciting incident should be toward the front of the logline, not buried at the end.

I have a question:? what is the “official” justification in this story world of yours for? needing to kill off non-likeables?? What motivates the powers-that-be in your story world to resort to this culling of losers??? What “threat” do the losers in this story world pose to the established order that the ruling order uses to justify this termination policy?

Stalin and Mao didn’t just purge — murder– tens of millions of innocent people; they also manufactured an official reason why they had to do it, (Their victims were counter-revolutionaries, covert capitalists, enemies of the people, traitors, etc.)

In every story world, there needs to be a “rational reason” for the irrational and unjust rules of the dominant order.? Like in the movie, I just loglined, “Equals” where human emotion is treated as pathological disease and love is punishable by death.? Why? Because emotion is the source of evil, of social strife and war. Hence, from birth all humans are subject to doses of drugs that “cure” humans of their emotions so there can be a collective utopia of peace, social cohesion and productivity.

How does failing to live up to minimum “likeability” standards pose a threat to the crime-free world of the story world?? (I can see them being banned from the internet, their cell phones confiscated — but killed?)

As I said, I find the premise interesting, but I haven’t (yet) been able to suspend disbelief and buy into the story world.