Thirty-one theses on dating capitalism
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PART THREE — REFUSALS
I
Revenue up, payers down
II
Success ends subscriptions
III
Manufactured scarcity
IV
One owner, many brands
Hidden ranking, patented swipe
VI
Volume produces refusal
VII
The app is the destination
VIII
Demographic pricing
IX
Fabricated interest
X
Safety became an upgrade
XI
Intentionality drives growth
XII
Queer platforms consolidated
XIII
Contraction intensifies extraction
XIV
Free users are inventory
XV
Global risk, concentrated revenue
XVI
Health data as telemetry
XVII
Data as national security
XVIII
Membership reveals identity
XIX
Identification without breach
XX
Profiles sold as commodities
XXI
The platform remembers more
XXII
Community versus its workers
XXIII
Extraction is optional
XXIV
Refusal is not innocence
XXV
The grid is optional
XXVI
Filtering is not sorting
XXVII
The applications work
XXVIII
Lifeline and trap
XXIX
Loneliness is the market
XXX
Companionship without reciprocity
XXXI
Named, not stopped
THESIS XXIII
PART THREE — REFUSALS
The extractive configuration is optional, and some firms have declined it.
Another company faced the same risks and made a different decision.
Perry Street Software, which operates Scruff and Jack'd and reaches a reported thirty million members, removed third-party programmatic advertising from its products in 2018 and stripped other companies' software development kits out of its applications at what its chief executive describes as tremendous cost in time and money. The company does not sell user data and does not use third-party ad networks. Eric Silverberg's stated reasoning is jurisdictional rather than ethical in the abstract: the community is sensitive to data sharing because there are countries that criminalise same-sex acts. The same conclusion was available to every company in Part Two.
EVIDENCE SNAPSHOT
2018
PROGRAMMATIC ADS
Year third-party programmatic advertising was removed
Removed
THIRD-PARTY SDKs
External software-development kits were also removed
~30M
MEMBERS
Reported membership across Scruff and Jack’d
None
DATA SALES
Company states that it does not sell user data
KEY FINDING
Perry Street Software, which operates Scruff and Jack'd and reaches a reported thirty million members, removed third-party programmatic advertising from its products in 2018 and stripped other companies' software development kits out of its applications at what its chief executive describes as tremendous cost in time and money.
IMPLICATION
Third-party advertising and data-sharing infrastructure are commercial choices, not necessities.
Source apparatus
SOURCE 01
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COMPANY PRIVACY STATEMENT
Perry Street Software. (2025, August 12). Privacy policy.