Dating app swipes function as rituals that recast uncertainty as certainty.

Evidence

While at first blush they may evoke calculative and evaluative practices like those I have already reviewed, dating apps also insert aspects of the romantic self into the broader constellations of a speculative sociality. Importantly, they do so not by erasing social rituals and replacing them with “psychological self-management” (Illouz 2019, 228) but by auguring new rituals, even if these are harder to pin down. To recall Benedict Anderson’s prescient description, such rituals are the “diurnal regularities of the imagining life”—a ceremony that is “incessantly repeated … in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull” (1991, 36) of each participant. Algorithmically mediated rituals (like those characterizing the use of dating apps) have the capacity to produce certainty in intimate life because they change the very “terms in which uncertainty is understood” (Appadurai 2016, 86) among participating users. In so doing, they offer a retrospective stability to the inherently volatile conditions of online dating, costaging a repeated certainty alongside uncertainty—and hence recasting this uncertainty through the very agreement to participate in the ritual process. Scrolls and swipes are how we survive the wounds opened by the rite of passage into speculative communities. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 234

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how algorithmic ritual produces certainty by changing the terms in which uncertainty is understood — a mechanism central to homo speculans.
• XREF: Echoes Zerubavel and the ritual-of-swipes argument; connects to the reader’s interest in how uncertainty-training produces new community forms.