Dating apps create new rituals rather than merely erasing romantic sociality

Evidence

Importantly, this saturation of intimate life by the speculative imagination evokes the type of sociality engendered by the technologies I examined in chapter 3. Mobile dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and the overabundance of images they feed on, do not merely satisfy the value-maximizing urges of a romantic entrepreneur, but nor do they represent an absolute lack of commitment. 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. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter 3’s algorithmic speculative machinery — reader’s whole arc of how financialized technique migrates across domains. — connects to: Digital dating apps displaced human intermediaries as primary matchmakers — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 342
• SEED: Possible angle: ‘rituals of the swipe’ as the ceremony restoring certainty inside volatility — comparable to financial trading-floor rituals.