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JustinFlaumenhaftFirstPaper 5 - 06 May 2022 - Main.JustinFlaumenhaft
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| | | The Indignity of Online Dating Apps | |
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< | In her opinion piece, “You Are Now Remotely Controlled,” Shoshana Zuboff begins with an anecdote from a 1997 FTC hearing on technology, privacy, and liberty. One participant stated, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” Decades later, the online dating industry has gone to great lengths to make the fear expressed in this statement a reality. | >
> | Like Facebook or Google, the business models of dating apps are based on, as Shoshana Zuboff puts it, trading in “human futures.” But the way these apps engage users, and cause them to engage with each other, is particularly dehumanizing. Users are not only the products, but the ones selling theirselves. They craft profiles to catch the attention of another person swiping through a catalogue of thousands of other humans. Moreover, the user interface is often deliberately made to feel like a game and keep you swiping. The purpose of all this is not to help you find love, but to keep you playing the game as long as it is profitable for the company. This set up encourages users to treat others without dignity: to view dating as online shopping and fellow daters as replaceable commodities. | | | | |
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< | Like Facebook or Google, the business models of dating apps are based on, as Zuboff puts it, trading in “human futures.” But the way these apps engage users and cause them to engage with others is particularly dehumanizing. Users are not only the products, but the ones selling theirselves. They are prompted to craft profiles to catch the attention of another person swiping through a catalogue of thousands of other humans. Moreover, the user interface is often deliberately made to feel like a game and keep you swiping. The purpose of all this is not to help you find love, but to keep you playing the game and boost the company’s earnings. | >
> | And yet, millions of people (including nearly 50% of young adults in the US!) opt into this dystopian marketplace. They share their most intimate secrets while the dating apps take notes behind the one-way mirrors of smartphones. Why does anyone stand for this, let alone voluntarily participate in it? Part of the answer, of course, involves “convenience.” Dating apps make meeting people as easy as food delivery apps make dining: users are provided with a streamlined catalogue of options made more or less instantly available. But an additional factor which should not be underestimated is the powerful human desire for connection. As more and more people join dating apps, and fewer meet outside these walled gardens, their magnetic pull becomes stronger. The apps prey upon primal desires for love and sex, and the widely felt fear of being alone. | | | | |
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< | This set up encourages users to treat others without dignity: to view dating as online shopping and fellow daters as replaceable commodities. Nobody enjoys this, but as dating applications monopolize dating and bring more and more users into the fold, many feel that there is no alternative. Of course, people still find enjoyment and fulfillment through dating apps. But dating apps make the process a dehumanizing one in which users are spied upon, have their secrets sold, and are treated like objects. | | | [Word count: 999] | |
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Why aren't these standard links in the text? That would make it much easier for readers, wouldn't it?
Who feels there is no alternative? Leaving aside the forced isolation of the epidemic, meeting people has never stopped being possible. Those of us who have been doing it all our lives are still doing it. Human pair-bonding has in no sense come to depend on the Parasite with the Mind of God. The forms of relationship based on commoditization haven't become dependent on the machine either.
So the analysis would benefit from a clearer definition of dating, a clearer sense of who "we" are, and perhaps even a little more sense of surprise that people are surprised to discover that entrusting their sexual and emotional lives to the surveillance system doesn't work out well for them individually or collectively. If we understand more clearly who is trying to get what, and why they turn to the machine to do it (that is, what does convenience mean in this regard) we will surely get more insight.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
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