CRITICAL INQUIRY / INTERNET INEQUALITIES
DATING AS A SERVICE
Thirty-one theses on intimacy, infrastructure and extraction.
Dating apps promise to help people find someone. Their business models depend on people continuing to search. This project investigates what happens when connection becomes a subscription, attention becomes inventory and intimacy becomes platform infrastructure.
31
Theses
4
Parts
1
Contradiction
02 / WHY THIS PROJECT
The search for another person has become a recurring-revenue product.
I began with a contradiction I could not stop seeing: the user’s ideal outcome is to no longer need the application, while the platform measures success through retention, engagement and revenue per payer. Dating apps do create relationships. For queer people, people in isolated communities and anyone whose potential partners are difficult to encounter offline, they can be essential infrastructure. That usefulness does not make their business models neutral. The same systems can rank desirability, manufacture scarcity, personalise prices, expose sensitive information and convert loneliness into recurring demand. This inquiry asks how genuine connection and commercial extraction can exist inside the same interface.
The problem is not that connection is fake. It is that the route to it has become an extraction system.
03 / THE PROJECT
A manifesto that behaves like the product it examines.
I created an interactive, evidence-led manifesto composed of thirty-one theses—one for each price Tinder was found charging for the same subscription within a single country. Every thesis is presented through the same research structure. As the visitor progresses, that surface gives way to corporate filings, court cases, regulatory decisions, research studies and transaction records. The user begins inside the product and ends inside its balance sheet.
01 — CLAIM
02 — CONTEXT
03 — ARGUMENT
04 — EVIDENCE SNAPSHOT
05 — SOURCE / FINDING
06 / EVIDENCE METHOD
Every claim carries its burden of proof.
The project draws from corporate filings, court records, regulatory decisions, peer-reviewed research, technical investigations, journalism and tactical media. Different forms of evidence are not treated as interchangeable. Company-reported figures, allegations, settlements, scholarly interpretations and confirmed regulatory findings are labelled separately. The argument concerns incentive structures rather than secret intentions. A system does not need a conspiracy in order to produce consistent outcomes.
VIEW THE SOURCE ARCHIVE
07 / FIRST THESIS
Start with the money.
The first thesis begins where the companies begin: payers, revenue and the value extracted from each remaining user.
BEGIN WITH THESIS I
REVENUE PER USER RISES WHILE THE NUMBER OF USERS FALLS.