The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return of a Racist Mode of Algorithmic Thought on Dating Apps

ABSTRACT

As algorithmic media amplify long-standing social oppression, they also seek to colonize every last bit of sociality where that oppression could be resisted. Swipe apps constitute prototypical examples of this dynamic. By employing protocols that foster absentminded engagement, they allow unconscious racial preferences to be expressed without troubling users’ perceptions of themselves as nonracist. These preferences are then measured by recommender systems that treat “attractiveness” as a zero-sum game, allocate affective flows according to the winners and losers of those games, and ultimately amplify the salience of race as a factor of success for finding intimacy. In thus priming users to disassociate their behaviors from troubling networked effects, swipe apps recursively couple their unconscious biases with biased outcomes in a pernicious feedback loop. To resist this ideological severing of the personal from the networked, this article analyzes interviews from 50 online daters through a lens formulated as the “uncanny user unconscious.” This lens allows for the affective registration of abhorrent modes of distributed thoughts disavowed by the very users they are created from and coupled with. It may thus afford those seeking more ethical protocols of engagement some purchase on the all too familiar biases some algorithms both amplify and repress.

Notes

¹ Revealed preferences are “revealed” by liking and messaging patterns of users rather than by what they say they want on profiles or indicate what they want through search criteria.

² Grindr was successful in the gay community 3 years prior to this.

³ OkCupid’s match percentage can still be used as its recommender system, but it is no longer its default system, and the ease of swiping on its app has habituated users to using it in the absentminded way I detailed earlier. I mention it here to show how different it is from swipe app recommender systems and to highlight the fact that the transition to swiping is likely to amplify racially biased outcomes in the date-o-sphere.

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Notes on contributors

Gregory Narr

Gregory Narr is a Ph.D. candidate working on his dissertation on dating apps, entitled Dating Apps, or, Ghosts in the Viral Affect Machine, where he investigates the transition from dating websites to dating apps as an effect of today’s increasingly affective mode of capitalism.