Digital primitivism. Tinder and the neoliberal cosmology on finding romantic love
Abstract
Based on the case study of the online dating application Tinder, we inquire about how the ideology of Big Data updates certain archaic references of the divinatory arts. Today, the resurgence of systems that interpret the influence of the stars in our neoliberal cosmology speaks to us, on the one hand, of the survival of an ancestral fascination with the night sky and the need to explain our origin and destiny; but above all it speaks of a greed-fuelled system of exploitation that capitalises on these needs in order to obtain an output that responds to the characteristics of the present time. In the computational universe of digital capitalism algorithms function as oracles: they have the ability to determine the future of networked users according to their patterns of consumption. Algorithms are no longer simply instructions to be executed, but have become scenic entities that select, evaluate and transform urban infrastructures and our ways of life.
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