Swipe, Scroll, Disappear
On Dating, Desire and the Capitalist Business of Loneliness
Digital loneliness is one of the phenomena shaping the 2020s of the new millennium. Compounded by the psychological and traumatic consequences of the recent pandemic, an unrestrained individualism has taken root in contemporary society, most often spilling over into consumerism. We work from home without our colleagues; we watch Netflix on the sofa, rejecting the ritual of going to the cinema; we spend hours talking to ChatGPT instead of meeting up with friends; we do most of our shopping online; and, instead of travelling, we settle for reels or TikTok videos that tell us, in a matter of seconds and without any real depth, about remote and exotic places we long for only virtually.
Even sex and feelings have become a luxury.
“Ich hab kein Date, kein Stress, keine Bewertung […] Bevor ich auf Tinder geh, bleib ich lieber alleine,” sing Kapa Tulp, an indie band from Leipzig.
Online dating platforms exploded worldwide from the second half of 2023 onwards, not coincidentally coinciding with the lifting of the restrictions imposed because of the coronavirus. The years of lockdown, however, had a profound impact on people’s habits, particularly those of younger generations, who lost the opportunity to learn how to develop their own emotional education, to borrow Gustave Flaubert’s expression.
Tinder’s revenue exceeded two billion dollars in the third quarter of 2023. With 60 million active users worldwide, Tinder is the best-known platform of its kind. Its average user is male, under 35, and lives in the United States.
What about Germany?
Many comments online describe German dating-app users as disappointing. Looking only for sex, with no real intention of pursuing a relationship, emotionally unstable to the same degree as their intentions. Why waste time on Tinder or Bumble, one might ask, in the homeland of swingers and Joyclub, a platform particularly popular among the new libertines? Unlike Tinder, Joyclub has a predominantly female audience and a higher average age of 44.
One might almost think that while millennials do not know what the game of seduction and falling in love means, to the point of relying on digital alternatives to courtship without really knowing what they are looking for, members of Generation Y are disillusioned in an entirely different way. They have experienced the analogue alternative, often tasted the hypocrisy that is sometimes associated with an equally fictitious sense of freedom, and freed themselves from it by taking refuge in the declared absence of affection and in the pleasures of the flesh.
It is also interesting to consider that, for an online dating platform — Tinder & co., for instance — its own romantic success may actually be more harmful than beneficial. Why? It is very simple: if my users meet one another, fall in love and are happy, I lose my customers, who will no longer need my services. So it is better to offer the illusion of being able to achieve happiness without actually providing it, with half-functioning algorithms and paid features designed to help users escape mediocrity.
The blame is then placed on the users themselves, defined a priori by sociological conventions as immature and deliberately self-castrating.
An American study has shown that the percentage of young people who have become disinterested in sex in recent years has practically doubled. According to the American Psychological Association, Generation Z is the most stressed generation in history.
And stress, as we know, is helpful neither in bed nor on a romantic date.
Unless, of course, one turns to more or less legal chemical remedies: Viagra, Cialis, and dozens of other potentially aphrodisiac pills that can be purchased without seeing a doctor, anonymously, using PayPal securely, so that impersonality can be taken to its absolute extreme.
Modern human beings neither want to appear nor to be, to quote Erich Fromm.
They want to become ghosts and disappear.
But disappearing is more difficult nowadays than one might think. Digital traces are almost impossible to erase. Artificial intelligence and algorithms must be able to capture them in order to study individual profiles and place them into the appropriate category of potential consumer.
Dating apps are, consequently, yet another consumerist and capitalist offshoot of the contemporary experience of living.
A Tinder swipe is no different from the mindless scrolling of TikTok videos, or from the advertisements on Instagram tailored to desires that sometimes have not even been expressed.
The power of cookies.
In his essay Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships [Pluto Press, 2022], author Alfie Bown analyses the possible scenarios arising from this radicalisation, imagining potential futures that are nevertheless very different from the fascinating android played by Demi Moore in Blade Runner [directed by Ridley Scott, 1982], an android so imperfect that one could genuinely fall in love with it.
Today, such a vision of the future seems almost naïve.
The sexualisation of society from an anti-feminist and capitalist perspective passes through these enormous digital containers which, just as supermarkets and later online stores did with the small shops of the last century, slowly replace relationships with plastic feelings: artificial and unfulfilling [see, for example, Apps promised to revolutionize dating. But for women they’re mostly terrible, an article by Nancy Jo Sales published in the British newspaper The Guardian in 2021].
Of course, as the old proverb wisely reminds us, not all evil comes to harm.
Women, who were once reduced to being wives, mothers and housewives, can once again assume a primary role, provided they learn that the power of choice — of the swipe — is and remains a tool in their hands. The alpha male, the favourite son of the patriarchy of the last century, cannot simply take what he wants if there is no match on the other side.
The other side of the coin, however, is that this frustration leads to an even deeper division between the genders.
The stronger sex, then, is the one that hates the most.
The story of Adam and Eve, in the end. A story as old as the world.
When the serpent needed no algorithms to unleash hell.