Ghosts in the Dating App Machine: Virality, AI, Data Colonialism

Ghosts in the Dating App Machine offers a critical examination of the shift to dating apps to illustrate key features of a broader shift to a mode of “data” colonialism based on datafication and AI orchestration. This book analyses 48 in-depth and mediated interviews, forums, blogs, and official statements made by dating apps. It situates this transition within the broader culture of data colonialism through close readings of science fiction, suggesting the world has become like Us, where doppelgangers constituted from reprehensible proclivities have emerged as digital profiles reflected back to users through the horrific play of social media mirrors to govern their encounters against their wishes. These mirrors allow media companies to conduct surreptitious experiments on users’ dispossessed desires, devise digital doppelgangers from those they disavow, and compel behaviors that are lucrative precisely because they are misaligned with humane values. Yet this horrific play of mirrors is not inevitable. By attending to the ghosts of colonialism unleashed by media companies through the approach developed in this book, it is still possible to galvanize the collective will to combat data colonialism and strive to create a world where love disentangled from colonial modes of desire is possible. This study will interest scholars attempting to understand the rapidly evolving ecology of dating apps within the areas of digital media, media sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and media and communication studies.