Dating Apps: A Machine for Incels
User Experience As Rhetoric
If you’re reading this, I’ve deleted my dating apps.
They were too damn depressing, and the more time I spent engaging with them, the more I came to believe that rather than being a machine for producing dates, dating apps are a machine for producing incels.
Dating apps express the propulsive relationship of capitalism to incelism unwittingly but comprehensively. While said apps pose themselves as veritable machines for love, offering convenience and efficiency, firsthand study by me reveals that the user experience rhetoric of dating apps produces the thought patterns of incelism.
I’m pretty darn old, but I’d blessedly never been on dating apps before April 2nd, 2026. What struck me immediately about the structure of these apps, obvious in hindsight, is the manner in which they argue for self-as-commodity. I must self-advertise, select my best angle, talk up not necessarily my best features but my most accessible ones. I must engage daily to prove my value and interest. I must dispose of others in the race to claim my ideal partner before someone else does.
The styling and copy of dating apps emphasize love, romance, even horniness, but they operate as markets. These markets create incel-thinking. I know this because the longer I spent on there, the more I could feel my own thoughts bend with the crushing force of resentment, desperation, and nihilism, the affective trifecta of inceldom.
Logos: Spend to Succeed, or Get Hotter
Markets provide a venue in which we can assign arbitrary, abstracted value to commodities and then exchange said commodities based on the values upon which we’ve agreed. My ex-Republican grandpa would say that markets thus create conditions of increased freedom because we can shop around for the optimal deal on our desired commodity. Certainly, this is what the communications teams of Bumble and Hinge would like us to believe: By going on dating apps you are making your dating process more efficient and optimal. You will see every single of your desired type in your geographic area. They will be laid out in a successive scroll, allowing you to weigh each person’s value against your own, thereby selecting the most suitable.
It was very hard to look at that infinite scroll of fellows and evaluate them without also, in the back of my mind, evaluating myself. I have no knack for marketing or branding, and I know that my product--my self--is defective. Every time I judged a guy, I felt the cruelty rebound into me, needling me with hypocrisy. I don’t like assigning people value. It doesn’t make sense.
The desire to assign objective value to people is an outgrowth of the worst impulses of The Enlightenment, as with so many bad things today. There’s no way to optimize or mechanize the process of attraction because it is both unreliable and unpredictable. Seeing everyone I might theoretically date laid out in a row, though, I felt intense pressure to produce a set of standards by which to judge them, to drive myself to interact with them when, to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to because the vast majority of profiles provoked apathy or anathema in me. By the time I was on the apps, I already wanted off.
I never hit the like or swipe cap on either Bumble or Hinge. Every time I logged on I would give up after about 30 minutes after seeing an uncountable numbers of persons. This was because the apps maintain certain significant exclusion factors only behind their subscription fees, filling my scroll with people I actively don’t want to date. I’d love to excise every brawny-tall “aPoLItiCaL” Catholic dude, perhaps the least attractive-to-me people on Earth, but I’m not gonna pay for that. Maybe I would have changed my tune if I stayed on for another few months, but unfortunately for the Match Group’s bottom line I love defiance more than success.
The survival of these apps depends on their ability to maintain a certain constant level of dissatisfaction within you-the-user, a chilling sense that the people you’re looking for are thinned out among vast legions of the unappealing combined with the promising certainty that your ideal partner is just behind the next cringe-inducing profile. You can overcome this human chaff by 1) coughing up, like, $20 a month to make your filter functions work, or 2) optimizing yourself into the ideal partner through marketing and self-improvement to attract others’ attention.
Optimizing yourself towards a false ideal for human beauty and prowess is of course fundamental to the Clavicular strain of incel philosophy, but the impulse to pursue this end goal is innate to the apps. They force you to stare at yourself in the form of an aura-less fuck-resumé. They incentivize you to tweak your own spirit in the hopes of getting one or two more people to send you a heart emoji. Surely you’d get more if you were just better in some way.
I struggled to remember that “better” isn’t real, though I know it isn’t. Most of the time, when I’m not on dating apps, I like most of myself and more importantly I know I’ve got stuff going on that people don’t see just looking at me. My appreciation of people in real life is formed holistically and calibrated against the other people I know personally for my satisfaction alone. There isn’t an impartial, omniscient arbiter of who’s hot and who’s not.
But there is a stupid slot machine.
Ethos: How Could the Algorithm Be Wrong?
A modern tech product demands an algorithm: a smoothbrain sorting machine to show you things similar to what you like but not the same. Silicon Valley’s tin-pot cry-bullies would like us to believe that algorithms are the solution to everything, as if they are perfect clairvoyants always reading our minds and matching us to exactly what we need (but faster if we paid for it).
We do enjoy our optimized products: the perfect route calculation on the maps app, the perfect YouTube short to introduce right-wing cognitohazards to our elderly. Why shouldn’t we allow the machine to pair us optimally?
But if the algorithm is a finely-tuned machine to shuttle me right to my ideal partner, who definitely exists and is in my area right now, and then it doesn’t work, the problem in the equation must be me.
No! The algorithm is just a stupid slot machine. It’s no better than my friends, my habits, or my hobbies at matching me with people I like. It simply replaces human blind spots with machine eccentricities.
After a while, I began to resent the algorithm's inability to intrigue me, its grasping desperation to maintain my interest by pulling people from states away. I began to resent the guys in my scroll for not being more attractive to me, which is obviously insane. I began to resent them for not being creative or interesting, for all having nothing to talk about but a recent trip to Japan or an interest in kayaking. I began to resent each new guy who popped up and had nothing new or funny to say.
It’s not fair to judge them that way. In real life, I meet people and have no point of comparison for them. They are simply there as themselves. On a dating app, they’re supposed to have a purpose, a use-value to me, and it crushes the appeal out of them. They’re slurried into Boylent, the machine helpfully offering me a straw.
Pathos: Rejection, Rejection, Rejection
Rejection sucks. Everybody knows this and everybody’s felt this, if not in romantic relationships, then in some other facet of their life. But to be on a dating app, you have to reject people and you have to get rejected. Worst of all, you can’t know how much everybody else is getting rejected. You’re alone in it.
One problem I assume to be particular to heterosexual dating app usage is the terrifying lacuna that is The Competition. Since you, as a heterosexual person, see only potential partners of the opposite sex, you have infinite space to fill with paranoia, anxiety, and shame in the form of everyone of your same sex whom you can’t see. It’s easy to imagine that every other profile in your preferred sex’s queue is a type of nymph or superhero, an impossibly hot and perfect person who’s making you look like an under-the-bridge troll. It’s very hard to remember that you’re not competing for that imaginary enemy’s potential partners. It’s very hard to remember you’re not competing at all.
Contemporary technology is pitched to us as a pathbreaker for achievement: innovative, transformative tools ought to produce results! We all know what results looks like: it looks like porn and rom-coms, your favorite TV sitcom ship or airport novel couple. We must activate all our technological resources to battle our way to those results, which are presumably achievable. They must be achievable…
It takes a great deal of effort to reach out to people when you’re used to rejection, when you know you do not meet the standard of attractiveness. For every guy I turn down because he’s not hot to me, I am him to some other swath of dudes to whom I send likes. I am the middle rung in a ladder of unhappiness, and I’d rather be anywhere else.
After being on dating apps for approximately two months, I have a huge and terrible sadness for those awful incels. I see exactly the thought patterns and cognitive paths they’ve walked down, along red carpets rolled out for them by these machines and others. There is no version of a dating app which does not create this dismal experiential rhetoric because there is no dating app which doesn’t make people into disposable products who dispose of each other.
I can’t bear it. Though after many years of fulltime celibacy whole houses of my heart lie empty and will soon run to ruin, still if I never have what I wish for it will be merely disappointing.
The world is already filled with people who love me: my family, my friends, the many communities of which I am a part. I could name ten or twenty people who help me with almost anything I asked right now. For all the times in my life when I felt so lonely I thought I might die, I was never without someone who cared about me. How much lonelier are all those people who answer all those polls to say they have no one to turn to in hard times? How sad is it that they must apply to apps in the hope of curing their isolation?
What did I learn about dating apps by finally visiting them at the age of 29? I learned that they are systems designed to leverage people’s loneliness into money, obviously. I learned that in doing so they certainly warp people’s perception of others into a market-tastic commodity-oriented funhouse mirror view which makes others as trashable as crumpled paper towel, obviously. I learned that if you seek happiness, you will not find it by making yourself profoundly unhappy.
Obviously.
I don’t control whether other people find me attractive or whether I am a desirable person. This would be true even if I could change every single thing about myself, which I prefer not to. I only control myself, my mind and my body and what inputs I give them.
So, not this one anymore. I’ll put messages in bottles and throw them in the sea. It will work just as well, and be more beautiful.
“There is in certain living souls
A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
