Dating-app desires exceed rational risk calculation and uncertainty control

Evidence

This, then, is quite different from Giddens’s self-reflexivity project but also from Illouz’s critique of unloving as a practice of managing uncertainty. My argument is that the desires circulating in dating apps are not merely enacted through economic agents’ instrumental choices, be they rational or irrational, positive or negative—for both these binaries assume a prevailing economic rationality that sits firmly in the ambit of the homo economicus. Accordingly, both framings assume that modern subjects’ overall orienting wish is to control contemporary intimacy’s uncertainty. Yet the use of modern speculative technologies does not perform mere calculations of risk (of possible disappointment, betrayal of trust, or of unfulfilled love itself)—risk becomes more marginal to our experience of the present. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 233

Categorization

• XREF: Illouz’s ‘cold intimacies’ and Giddens on reflexive self-identity are the frameworks being modified; connects to broader sociological debates on intimacy and late capitalism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that risk is marginal to present experience — rather than central — is a genuine paradigm shift in understanding financialized intimacy that resists summary.