The Uncanny Swipe Drive

The Return of a Racist Mode of Algorithmic Thought on Dating Apps

Bibliographic Data

ID4943634
AuthorsGregory Narr (0000-0003-2180-5492, City University of New York, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume22
Issue3
Pages219-236
Publication date2021-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Gender and Sexuality (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1524-0657 • E-ISSN: 1940-9206
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/15240657.2021.1961498
OpenAlexW3133611632
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited36

As algorithmic media amplify longstanding 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 absent-minded engagement, they allow unconscious racial preferences to be expressed without troubling users’ perceptions of themselves as non-racist. 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 behaviours 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 paper analyses interviews from fifty 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

Cognitive psychology · Computer security · Internet privacy · Lens (geology · Oppression · Political science · Priming (agriculture · Salience (neuroscience · Sociology · SwIPe · Through-the-lens metering · Uncanny · Unconscious mind · Computer Science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology

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