Death to dating apps: Ash Sarkar on how Big Tech killed romance

Ash Sarkar’s disdain for dating apps has been simmering away for the best part of a decade. The journalist and activist had her first foray into the world of online dating around 10 years ago, when she entered the online meat market feeling like “somebody’s country cousin who didn’t know the complex city ways”. Her time on the apps was mercifully brief, but she still remembers the immediate takeaway: people here are dismissive and non-committal.Luckily Sarkar’s pursuit of offline dating was far more fruitful. “I found a man whose self-esteem was low enough that he wanted to marry me,” she laughs. She deleted the apps as easily as she joined them, but she could not escape the degrading state of online dating. It lived on in the experiences of friends or the woes of strangers, often submitted to the dilemmas section of her hit podcast, If I Speak, which she hosts alongside journalist Moya Lothian-McLean. Relationships have been changed by the particular stage of capitalism that we’re in When the Southbank Centre approached Sarkar to deliver the inaugural lecture for their Letters from the Future series (running September 18-20), there was no question over what her topic would be. “It’s been in my head for a really long time,” she says. “This idea of how relationships have been changed by the particular stage of capitalism that we’re in, the sense that all of us are immersed in a disembodied, hyper-stimulated digital world and the epidemic of loneliness that people seem to be struggling with.” How much blame, I ask, can be laid at the door of Big Tech? “Oh, 90 per cent!” she says, not missing a beat.Falling out of love with appsDating apps are the easiest example. “If me and you decided to go on a date now,” she says, “and I treated you really badly. Let’s say I was insensitive, or I ghosted you. There is something which holds us together.” This “something” being that Sarkar and I are sitting across from each other, speaking in real life. “A container exists in which there are mutual obligations, and so there can be a degree of trust that I’m not going to be a complete asshole.” Ash Sarkar Jonathan RingOn dating apps, there are no containers. What happens next, Sarkar reasons, is a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. “The [typical] prisoner’s dilemma is who’s going to snitch first. But the prisoner’s dilemma of dating apps is who’s going to reject first,” she says. Even the core user interface (UI) of dating apps fosters a level of carelessness. “You’re throwing faces into the abyss. All these hopeful faces who are just looking for love, and you go, ‘F*** you’.”It’s well known by now that life on “the apps” is miserable. Dating app developers know this, and they’re scrambling to claw back interest, trust and (more importantly) money from their disheartened users. Usage of the most popular dating apps in the UK has fallen by 24 per cent and Bumble has been forced to fire 30 per cent of its global workforce.Breeze bans messaging before a date has taken place, while Thursdays limits in-app interactions to a single day of the weekTo combat messaging fatigue, more and more apps are incorporating in-person meetings. Breeze bans messaging before a date has taken place, while Thursdays limits in-app interactions to a single day of the week. Bumble, once hailed for its “feminist” UI that only allowed women to message first, recently scrapped the policy following research that found 70 per cent of women felt burnt out by having to initiate conversations. Dating columnist Annie Lord recently argued in The Sunday Times that this was evidence of the dating world forcing women to do “all the work”, but Sarkar argues that the resentment is very mutual. “You constantly have women saying, “Well, it’s so much easier for men because all of us [women] want commitment, and [men] get to choose as though they’re looking over at the cheeses at the farmers’ market,” she says. “But then men are going, ‘I’m this close to putting my penis in the hollow of a tree because nothing else is gonna accept me.’” Step away from the screenGranted, it’s not all dating apps’ fault. There are plenty of other areas where Big Tech is castrating us too, such as our screentime. Sarkar points to a piece in the Financial Times which explored declining birthrates worldwide, while London’s birth rate has dropped by roughly 20 per cent over the past decade, with Islington having the lowest rate in the country. “It used to be a rich country problem, and now it’s an everywhere problem, and there is no single explanation that makes sense for all countries apart from, ‘Here’s when smartphones were introduced,’” she says. Then there’s social media, littered with “perfect” faces, tiny bodies and porn, but lacking any eroticism. “Vanity is not sexy,” Sarkar says. “Vanity is attention on the self, right? Whereas sexiness is sort of about this thing that we’re generating together.” She thinks that as a society “we have failed to stigmatise vanity” as much as we could have. AFP/GettyEven if it doesn’t seem like it, Sarkar is hopeful about the future of dating. “I often think about the remarkable resilience of human sociality in the face of much worse things than the internet,” she says. “In previous generations, it was the shadow of nuclear warfare. Human beings always meet; they always fall in love. You really can’t stop us from doing it.” The tide is already turning, she thinks, as we see phone-free childhoods and low screentimes being held up as markers of what she describes as the “high-status bourgeoisie”. This naturally increasing desire for getting offline is exactly why dating apps like Breeze and Thursdays have cropped up and continue to exist, though Sarkar doesn’t think another dating app will ever be the solution. “My answer to how you fix anything is in-person social contact,” she says. “I have felt at my most resentful when I am at my most isolated. That’s true of anything — family, friendships, romance — and I think that what we need to do is disengage and disentangle ourselves from these apps of all kinds, which have taken us away from the thing that we actually need as human beings.” You heard her. Get deleting.