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 XXI
PART TWO — THE GRID
The record kept on a user exceeds the record the user keeps.
A personal history returned as 800 pages of platform memory.
Judith Duportail exercised her right of access under European data law and received 800 pages: 920 openings of the application, 1,700 messages, 870 matches accumulated since December 2013. The data scientist Olivier Keyes, reviewing the file, said he was horrified and not remotely surprised. Duportail later published a book-length analysis of a Match patent she reads as encoding a sense of destiny into the matching logic, a reading the company disputes.
EVIDENCE SNAPSHOT
800 pp
ARCHIVE
Length of the user archive returned by Tinder
920
OPENINGS
Recorded occasions when the application was opened
1,700
MESSAGES
Private messages retained across several years
870
MATCHES
Matches preserved within the behavioural archive
KEY FINDING
Judith Duportail exercised her right of access under European data law and received 800 pages: 920 openings of the application, 1,700 messages, 870 matches accumulated since December 2013.
IMPLICATION
The platform can remember a person’s intimate behavior more completely than the person does.
Source apparatus
SOURCE 01
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FIRST-PERSON INVESTIGATION
Duportail, J. (2017, September 26). I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets. The Guardian.
SOURCE 02
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FIRST-PERSON INVESTIGATION
Duportail, J. (2019). L'amour sous algorithme. Éditions Goutte d'Or.