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 XXIV
PART THREE — REFUSALS
Refusal is not innocence.
Doing better on one mechanism does not make a platform clean.
Jack'd, acquired by Perry Street in 2019, paid $240,000 to approximately 7,000 users in a settlement with the New York Attorney General over a security flaw that left private photographs accessible. Scruff and Jack'd disabled their ethnicity filters in June 2020, following Grindr, and critics noted at the time that removing a filter is the minimum available action rather than an intervention in the sorting itself. The independent alternative is better on the specific mechanisms named here and is not thereby clean.
EVIDENCE SNAPSHOT
$240K
SETTLEMENT
Settlement concerning exposure of users’ private photographs
~7K
USERS
Approximate number of users affected by the flaw
Jun 2020
FILTERS
Ethnicity filters disabled across both applications
Partial
ASSESSMENT
An improvement on one mechanism, not absolution
KEY FINDING
Jack'd, acquired by Perry Street in 2019, paid $240,000 to approximately 7,000 users in a settlement with the New York Attorney General over a security flaw that left private photographs accessible.
IMPLICATION
Ethical refusal must be evaluated mechanism by mechanism, not treated as innocence.
Source apparatus
SOURCE 01
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REGULATORY SETTLEMENT / CRITICISM
Office of the New York State Attorney General. (2019). Settlement with Online Buddies, Inc. (Jack'd).
SOURCE 02
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REGULATORY SETTLEMENT / CRITICISM
Henderson, T. (2020, June 3). Gay dating apps removing ethnicity filters is a meaningless gesture. Pride.