Hinge horror hour
As someone who has never used any other dating app and never plans to, one may expect this editorial to hold some naïve priors when it comes to their use. However, after numerous discussions with several members of this newspaper’s editorial board, my own friends, and even my girlfriend, I believe I have some insights into why Hinge is not worth it.
Firstly, I have a distrust in the quantisation of human behaviour. As much as big tech wishes that were the case, we are not rational, or even cognitive creatures. I like to view the emotional temperament of an average person as a very noisy signal. Like a time-series, there will be broader trends governed by our most base, instinctual desires. In short, I don’t believe we can analyse the things we do, or feel, or even to an extent believe, in a neat mathematical way. The hubris of big tech to try and manipulate human emotion into sales, attention, or usage, shows they are at best misinformed in their belief in is some rational order to the human state of being.
Hinge is the perfect example of this. Human connection has become financialised: you are now a market, a product to be sold. My life is quantified by 6 pictures and a few verbal or written prompts, I am not a universe, living, breathing, thinking, feeling, an entire manifestation of the peak of evolution on earth in a brand-new configuration (here for limited time only!), but a product for you to consume. Relationship aren’t even the product these apps sell. The real product is the ability to parse through hundreds, if not thousands of people, and to decide if they’re worth the risk.
Markets don’t like risk. Markets like to consolidate.
That means you, the product-consumer, must also be riskless. Red-flags, green-flags, absolute no-no’s, are, as they suggest, absolute on either end. You must sanitise yourself, strip yourself of anything someone might view as weird, or quirky, or perhaps even too ugly. You put yourself into a box, but the box has to appeal to the most vapidly broad boundaries of what you would like in the case some nebulously defined algorithm finds the man of your dreams through some random number Monte-Carlo Markov process. In all, you are trapped in a panopticon of the worst kind, the panopticon of Hinge users.
Consider that London is a very financialised city, and in order to get financialised jobs, many male Imperial graduates grind out and never develop a personality. Personalities are risky and markets don’t like risk, romantic, or “real”. Become a robot, plug and play baby. Plug and swipe. The dataset of men on London Hinge is self-selecting, and a big part of their want for a relationship is not because of any noble reason, but more often than not because that is next on the checklist to be a successful man.
So, what happens next? Well, you scroll and scroll, eventually becoming a scrolling-machine: each new interaction is zero-sum, a calculation that occurs within approximately 3 seconds of looking at a new profile. You become numb from seeing so many faces, so many personalities that all blend into one, succumbing to the dopamine supercharging through your system.
Speaking from a heterosexual, female-centric perspective, the issue is that the men on the dating apps are boring. This social illness stems from patriarchal thinking: men are too afraid to commit, always at risk of just being a hookup, always being subject to the same “chopped shyt” looking for “a bad bihh” or “girls with autism”. It is true that the modern ability for women to live self-sufficiently has caused a reckoning for men and their role intra-socially, but that isn’t Hinge’s fault.
The real issue with is that Hinge isn’t designed to be deleted. No dating app is. They’re designed to turn you into a power user who pays money for roses or super-likes or whatever. Or at least scroll for longer. More time on Hinge equals more data sold, more desperation, more wanting to kill yourself because it’s looking like you’ll be single forever. This isn’t even joke or hyperbole: friends have documented the feeling of abject desperation of constant rejections and ghosting coming their way.
A generation raised on viewing connection as purely through digital modes is bound to have trouble facilitating real connection. These apps provide cheap simulacra of human connection, pretending to democratise the dating market, whilst trapping us within the same rent-seeking technology that has shredded our democracies, social cohesion, and attention spans. We have let the computer manage out the risk and excitement of every human activity, and now we are stuck in this doom loop that’s eating away at the very essence of our being.
Now, one may think that we are then advocating for purely human connection, cold approaching etc, etc, etc. Perhaps we are. But it’s not all hope for those of us who prefer to meet romantic partners out in the open.
Read the full piece on the author's Substack.
