Love In The Age of The Algorithm (A Third Excerpt)

On Libertinism, Coquetry, and The Novelty of Romantic Coupling

(My essay will appear in its entirety in the upcoming issue of Serpent Club: New Writing)

A little bit of technological determinism is in order here. While I am older and recall a time before the simulacrum of life in the digital hologram, this is certainly not the case with many of the people participating in the game. More used to interacting with social media avatars—trolling and blocking—we can now observe this virtual poison as it spreads through the flesh-and-blood, if algorithmically managed, social body. Which is why psycho-pathological tics out of the DSM-IV—like ghosting, splitting, and the kind of troll show performance that precludes any trace of vulnerability--are our new norms and imperatives.

This process arguably represents the last stage of the rationalization process described in different ways by Karl Marx and Max Weber or their followers. In the past, you met your dates, partners, and future life mates through those longstanding networks of extended family and friends that roughly correspond to the idea of Gemeinschaft (“community”) as theorized in the German sociological tradition. It was exactly the primacy of communal ties, with their attendant obligations and consequences, that precluded behaviors like ghosting. You had to deal with your friend’s sister or your brother-in-law’s nephew if you wanted to split, or else. You couldn’t just vanish.

With the shift into Gesselschaft (“society”), impersonal contractual relations—along the lines of wage labor, business transactions, and market calculations —increasingly colored all interpersonal connections, including intimate ones outside of the public sphere. In this story, internet dating and its swipe right “culture” of exchangeable shopping options are one reified end point of the capitalist modernization process and its colonization of the lifeworld.

While these ideal types are useful in deciphering long term historical and social transformations, this narrative is too simple. The marriage contract, for example, was for most of recorded history just that: an arrangement among families until the ideal of companionate marriage was adopted as a western norm during the modern period. And, as Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici argue, after the decline of the household economy, rather than a haven in a heartless world, the intimate sphere of women, children, hearth, and home is a reservoir of reproductive labor: the unpaid foundation for the paid work upon which capitalism depends. This is reductive of course—the bourgeois family can be many things at once, both good and bad—but a useful reminder, nonetheless.

Until the day before yesterday, romantic love had always existed in the interstices and among the shadows—passion arrayed against formal reproductive arrangements—as we can see in the medieval literature of courtly love with its focus on unrequited, idealized, and tacitly adulterous longing. The union of love in this sense and formal partnership arrangements that include children is a modern achievement—mostly a good one—in part attributable to romanticism, modernity’s first counterculture. The virtualization and quantification of erotic life by way of digital prostheses represent a bad break with this more recent hybrid tradition.

Yet so much of our new ethos recalls the rake and the flirt in automated and algorithmic forms. And, as our perennialist critic might object, you only have to read Samuel Richardson or Jane Austen to know that libertinism and coquetry—very much aligned with letter writing and the epistolary novel at their high points—long predate the internet. Perhaps, but what was once exceptional—hence the stuff of novels—is now pervasive in a mechanically unconscious manner, as the dominant etiquette increasingly resembles a cluster b personality disorder.

The libertine ethos was always a quantitative one anyway, from Lord Rochester to the Marquis de Sade: the higher the body count the better, with bodies-conquests understood in blatantly material-mechanical terms and often accompanied by explicit commitments to the most reductive forms of materialism and/or rationalism. (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer first recognized this kinship between a certain strand of enlightenment rationalism and Sade’s libertinism in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.)

Coquetry similarly revels in successfully conquering and cultivating suitors, admirers, fans. String them along. Crush them. Record the wins in the journal-spreadsheet. Post the wins on your IG story or incorporate them into your OF routine. The game—which encompasses both internet instilled interpersonal mores and the algorithmic dating machines whereby the Sadean utopia of bodies as numbers and nothing but numbers are realized—represents an old dream of reason come to “life.” We have arrived at something like a high-tech proof of concept!

Meanwhile—and with techno-material base and memetic superstructure in mind—is it any wonder that we today see an explosion of praise for transactional relationships on both the libertarian right and an ostensibly Marxist left? Ours is a zeitgeist both incoherent and ironic. Consider our frothing US right wingers who see “cultural Marxism” in the moralizing technocratic liberalism of the DP, while too many self-described, extremely online, American Marxists believe that the abolition of capitalist property relations are simply one utilitarian precondition for the realization of various self-interested enterprises. These enterprises are indistinguishable from libertarian visions of freedom (even as they are inconceivable outside the capitalist cash nexus—I-Phones for everyone?) So much for the pursuit of a non-alienated life! And right, left, center are all of course equally techno-utopian

As the most incisive technology critics—from Ivan Illich to Langdon Winner—have noted, social and technological determination are inextricable from each other. A big chunk of the same generational cohort that grew up in these various virtual worlds were simultaneously raised as so much human capital by helicopter parents who instilled in their offspring a neurotic fear of life and its messy contingencies; these tendencies were (and are) magnified by digital platforms that instill in their users the illusion of control (even as Facebook, Instagram, and the rest mine and manipulate them, mine and manipulate us).

We can, in other words, detect in the game playing that characterizes so much of our hypermediated dating—so much of our hypermediated interpersonal—lives a fear of life (and feeling). Hence “red flags” and the tacit hoops: tests animated by a delusional urge to immunize us against present and future failure, heartbreak, and loss.