Thirty-one theses on dating capitalism
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PART TWO — THE GRID
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 XX
PART TWO — THE GRID
Profiles circulate as commodities on a resale market.
One million people. One hundred and thirty-six euros.
Working with Tactical Tech, the Barcelona-based artist Joana Moll purchased approximately one million dating profiles from the broker USDate for €136. The package contained close to five million photographs alongside usernames, email addresses, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, stated interests, occupation, and physical and personality descriptions, drawn from platforms including Match, Tinder, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid. One hundred and thirty-six euros for one million people who had, in each case, been trying to be seen by exactly one.
EVIDENCE SNAPSHOT
~1M
PROFILES
Dating profiles purchased from a commercial data broker
~5M
PHOTOGRAPHS
Photographs included in the acquired data package
€136
PRICE
Total price paid for the complete dataset
€0.000136
PER PROFILE
Approximate commercial value assigned to one profile
KEY FINDING
Working with Tactical Tech, the Barcelona-based artist Joana Moll purchased approximately one million dating profiles from the broker USDate for €136.
IMPLICATION
Information created for intimate visibility can be resold for fractions of a cent.
Source apparatus
SOURCE 01
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TACTICAL ARTWORK / INVESTIGATION
Moll, J., & Tactical Tech. (2018). The dating brokers: An autopsy of online love.
SOURCE 02
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TACTICAL ARTWORK / INVESTIGATION
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs.