Dream Lovers

The Gamification of Relationships

Alfie Bown

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780745344898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organising and mapping the future. What we don't seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.

Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire – re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible.

From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. This book considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.

1

Data Love

Politics is politics, but love always remains love.

– Jacques Lacan (1959)

A couple of years ago, with an almost imperceptible ripple, a story broke out in the French media reporting on the bizarre case of a young Danish proto-fascist who had become a kind of ‘alt-Right’ data miner. The misguided racist was using information harvested from one of IAC’s biggest Match Group relationship websites, OkCupid, to support a fake-science argument in favour of an apparently new form of white supremacist eugenics. The story picked up little attention, and those who commented on it – in the progressive media at least – saw the attempt as a deliberate and gratuitous misuse of data to support a dangerous political agenda, which in some ways it was.¹

Although part of a wider rise in dangerous right-wing ‘race science’, which the infamous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson can be seen as the soft edge of, there is something particularly important about data drawn from the realm of love. In this case, over 70,000 profiles had been scraped in the attempt to show a so-called ‘cognitive dysgenics’, ultimately aiming to produce a data-validated hierarchy of humans (through various methods including correlating intelligence with religion) with white people at the top. Other related arguments that have been made via dating data include proof that users are attracted to those of the same race, which is used to further support the logic of dating those just like you (upon which eugenics relies).

The importance of OkCupid as the data source in all this is not merely coincidental. Dating sites offer an unprecedented sample size of detailed information for miners, but in this case they are also seen as the means through which our species meets with a view to procreation: the place where dangerous eugenicist ideas could even be put into practice. It might be a far less extreme example, but we need only think of relationship platforms like Trump.dating or the Atlasophere (a dating site for readers of Ayn Rand, the philosopher and fiction writer idolized among the online Right and read by Donald Trump) to see how dating could play a role in eugenicist practices. It’s perhaps not so bizzare that conservative journalist Toby Young, with worrying ideas of eugenics himself, should set up a Covid dating site during the coronavirus pandemic when parts of this book were written.

That scary prospect aside, what seemed to go strangely unnoticed in the OkCupid story was a more significant and even more frightening possibility. The question which threatened yet failed to arise was whether the data itself, and therefore the structure and algorithms of a major online dating platform (and perhaps of others, since Match Group owns dozens of sites which reach 190 countries in 42 languages) were in part responsible for the way the results had seemed to come out.

The racial biases of dating sites have been commented on before, but only in terms of how they reflect or reveal existing social biases. Instead, might it be possible that there is a more complex ideological code written into the history of the connection between love and the digital world – a connection which was already biased in favour of what might even be seen as right-wing and patriarchal identarian politics? OkCupid itself has commented on the racial biases of their data, blaming the fact that ‘daters are no more open-minded than they used to be’ and thereby circumventing the possibility that their own algorithms might be at least partially responsible for not only proliferating but re-writing sectarian trends in relationship building. In fact, the logic of matching users only with those just like themselves might be something shared between the dating algorithms and this extreme right-wing rhetoric.

Far from ratifying bizarre alt-Right pseudoscience, if this were shown to be the case, it would present the claims of the ‘scientific’ far-Right as just part of a wider and more concerning digital architecture that has become structural to relationships themselves, propped up by liberal assumptions about data’s neutrality and innocence. In broader terms, the concern raised by the incident is that if relationships, desire and friendships are mutating and transforming in the age of AI, big data and social media, then there might be a problem with the politics they are mutating in the service of.

This question of what politics our technologies of love and desire are inheriting and proliferating, as is perhaps already evident, might lead us to have a fair bit of concern when viewed from a progressive or left-wing perspective, but we should also not look at this situation hopelessly. Instead, we might seek to make visible the political patterns in our emergent technologies with a view to changing them. Our very desires are being ‘gamified’ to suit particular corporate and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. To succeed against these actors, we need a combination of economic and technological reform that would allow us to seize the means of producing desire.

THE LEFT AND RIGHT IN LOVE

Sometimes the content of a given technology in the sphere of love might appear be liberal-leaning, as with the long-running dating site and app Guardian Soulmates (closed in 2020), or even left-wing, as with the semi-humorous Red Yenta, the 2019 dating app for socialists. Far from being liberal or leftist equivalents of sites like Trump.dating, however, the logic of the interfaces and algorithms of these examples remains precisely the same as their counterparts. Wrapped in new or even radical packaging, for the most part these apps retain the structure of the traditional dating app. Here, the two components of the ‘digital object’ identified by media philosopher Yuk Hui are useful:

There are two dominant forms of digitization: the first follows the system of mapping or mimesis (for example, the production of digital images, digital video, etc., which are visually and repetitively distributed throughout the physical world), whereas the second takes place by means of attaching tags to objects and coding them into the digital milieu (by means of this digital extension, the object then obtains an identity with a unique code and/or set of references). The second movement of objectification of data comes a bit later. I call the first process the objectification of data and the second process the dataification of objects.²

At the level of the ‘objectification of data’, the process by which we (as data) become represented as a digital object (in this case our dating profile), Guardian Soulmates functions very differently to Trump.dating. They objectify their users differently, at least superficially, with the digital objects showcased on one site almost the opposite to those showcased on the other. However, at the level of the ‘datafication of objects’, the way in which those objects come to relate to each other as pieces of data within sets and metasets, the process is more or less identical.

Guardian Soulmates and Trump.dating are not as different as they seem. This can also be seen at the level of ownership. Spark Networks owns both successful religious dating sites Christian Mingle (for the Christian community) and JDate (for the Jewish community), while also owning – and using similar algorithmic patterns to run – the site EliteSingles, a platform for wealthy daters. The difference between religious and wealth as a status appears only on the level of the digital object, its objectification, while it is ignored at the level of datafication. The politics of these sites, then, are not only found on their surfaces but in their shared methods of connecting (their algorithms) and framing (their interfaces) the experiences of desire which they construct.

These discussions pose a challenge to dominant assumptions about love itself, both in general discourse and in philosophical discussion. Love, we tend to believe, is apolitical. As well as in a great many other places, this conception is embodied perfectly by Bernardo Bertolucci’s iconic 2003 movie The Dreamers, a romance set in the midst of the French 1968 riots. While Molotov cocktails are going off hourly on the streets, the characters, ensconced in their bourgeois Parisian apartment, are given vast distance from their context to experiment with sex and love. Rarely are love and politics discussed together, and a playful data-pull (in the spirit of this book) from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years as work on politics has exponentially increased. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background, or so it appears at least if judgement is based on the academy.

By contrast, basing the judgement on popular culture seems to produce the reverse result: dating apps, relationship simulators and relationship-oriented reality television has exponentially grown in recent years, along with intensifying preoccupation with politics. However, while things like Trump.dating attempt to connect love with politics, the majority of popular depictions of both love and politics keep the two apart ( Love Island at 9pm on one channel, Prime Minister’s Question Time on another). 2020 and 2021 have seen a rapid spate of hugely popular TV shows about relationships and love (dozens of international editions of Married at First Sight, Too Hot To Handle, Celebs go Dating, First Dates, etc.). In all of these politics is completely stripped away, as if like in Berlotucci’s The Dreamers, we turn to love precisely to get away from political turmoil.

Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, originally written in 2009, offers some philosophical support to the assumption of love’s apolitical status. Making a case for a separation of the two, Badiou explicitly says, ‘I don’t think that you can mix up love and politics.’ Given the above, we might suggest that love and politics, gradually partitioned since the 1960s, have taken a turn towards reconnection. Nevertheless, a distinction that Badiou makes between an ‘enemy’ and a ‘rival’ provides a useful insight to the situation. In a long discussion, he describes the fundamental distinction between love and politics by comparing the ‘enemy’ of politics with the ‘rival’ in the sphere of love.³ Badiou writes:

The enemy forms part of the essence of politics. Genuine politics identifies its real enemy. However, the rival [in love] remains absolutely external, he isn’t part of the definition of love.⁴

Here, it seems, 2009 could not quite account for 2019, where the political enemy of the Democrat or liberal implied by Trump.dating is coded as a structural presence in the potential relationship between lovers. The rival has become the enemy: not external to the relationship but foundational of the possibility of love. For Badiou:

The word ‘communism’ encompasses this idea that collectivity is capable of integrating all extrapolitical differences. People shouldn’t be prevented from participating in a political process of a communist type simply because they are this or that, or were born here or come from elsewhere, or speak such and such a language, or were fashioned by such and such a culture, in the same way that identities in themselves aren’t hurdles to the creation of love. Only political difference with the enemy is ‘irreconcilable’, as Marx said. And that has no equivalent in the process of love.⁵

Badiou’s comment strangely anticipates a data-driven approach to love that dominates the field today, and connects this with a critique of contemporary identity politics. Data here is on the side of identity. For Badiou, the politics of the Right might be irrevocably connected to identity politics, but the possibility of a communist political agenda would involve solidarity across identity categories. What we can add to Badiou is that the implication of Trump.dating and the wider digital reconnection of politics with love is that the ‘extrapolitical’ is the only thing excluded by love (the only potential match ruled out by the first part of the site’s logic is the political enemy). Nevertheless, this political enemy is the very pre-condition for the possibility of desire between two Trump supporting site users, making the logic a kind of triangular (and possibly homosocial) bond (to borrow the terms of Luce Irigiray) in which the third part of the triangle that makes desire possible between the two lovers is the imaginary political enemy.

HOT RICH MEN

In the same year that Badiou wrote his book, Eva Illouz published her significant contribution to the debate in Why Love Hurts. Illouz, one of many feminist writers to emerge out of – and often in tension with – psychoanalytic theories of love and relationships makes Badiou’s argument seem as much symptomatic of patriarchal power structures in the discourses of love as it is critical of them. Illouz recalls a point highlighted by feminists since at least de Beauvoir that there is a deep link between economic (and thereby political) power and sexual power and ignoring the connection can lead to a failure to understand how patriarchy and capitalism work together to oppress.

The most arresting claim made by feminists is that a struggle for power lies at the core of love and sexuality, and that men have had and continue to have the upper hand in that struggle because there is a convergence between economic and sexual power. Such sexual male power consists in the capacity to define the objects of love and to set up the rules that govern courtship and the expression of romantic sentiments. Ultimately, male power resides in the fact that gender identities and hierarchy are played out and reproduced in the expression and experience of romantic sentiments, and that, conversely, sentiments sustain broader economic and political power differentials.⁶

This argument was earlier made by Shulmaith Firestone, who wrote in her 1970 The Dialectic of Sex that ‘a book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure’ because love ‘is the pivot of women’s oppression’. For Firestone, the ‘omission of love from culture itself’ (still prominent today, as the trend of separating love from politics discussed above shows) is a vital clue to its political importance. Arguing that examining the realm of love is tantamount to ‘threat[ening] the very structure of culture’,⁷ Firestone counters Denis de Rougement’s famous argument (made again with a twist in 2015 by Srecko Horvat) that there is a difference between selfish and narcissistic love and a more romantic equal kind of love. Firestone argues rather that:

[Love] becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power. … The destructive effects of love occur only in a context of inequality. But because inequality has remained a constant – however its degree may have varied – the corruption ‘romantic’ love became characteristic of love between the sexes.⁸

In this formulation, there are not different forms of love nor necessarily always a distinction between love and desire, love and lust, love and infatuation, or any of the other divisions made both in general discourses around love and in theoretical discussions. Instead, love is operated on by power structures and transformed (‘corrupted’) by them. Here it’s useful to think in the terms of longue durée (the long term) and histoire événementielle (evental history/the short-term changes driven primarily by events), terms set out by the Annales school of historians. For Firestone, the ‘degree’ of patriarchal power operating on the realm of love might have changed in the short term, but in longue durée terms has remained constant across large temporary and spatial distances. In many ways technological innovations of recent years belong in the realm of histoire événementielle: while they affect and change the ways in which we love, they also may leave intact longer and more entrenched power structures.

Building on this suggestion, Illouz’s own argument counters the approach that love is always a reflection of power on the basis that such theoretical positions rely on the idea that power comes first and love follows, making love a kind of embodiment of patriarchal and capitalist power structures. While it might often be just that, for Illouz, love is ‘no less primary than power’ and so:

reducing women’s love (and desire to love) to patriarchy, feminist theory often fails to understand the reasons why love holds such a powerful sway on modern women as well as on men and fails to grasp the egalitarian st...