social-media – A Trumpet of Sedition

The dating-app industry portrays itself as a neutral platform that facilitates human connection. However, it is fundamentally a part of platform capitalism, where the main goal is turning intimacy into a commodity. Its algorithms do more than “match” users—they rank, sort, and stratify them based on criteria that mirror and reinforce existing class, racial, and gender inequalities. Consequently, this creates a digital marketplace where desirability is not a natural human preference but a calculated metric generated through data collection and optimised for profit.

The Commodity Form of Intimacy

Marx’s idea that capitalism turns human abilities into commodities is especially relevant to dating apps. Here, it’s not labour but visibility, desirability, and emotional bonds that are commercialised. The user becomes a product: their profile is a commodity, swipes are acts of consumption, matches are conversion points, and ongoing relationships serve as retention metrics. This isn’t accidental; it’s necessary for making money. The platform first needs to convert users into data—photos, prompts, preferences, behavioural traces—so it can rank, segment, and sell access to them.

While dating-app algorithms are proprietary, their influence is evident. They establish hierarchies of desirability closely linked to class indicators such as income and education—assessed through occupation, location, and lifestyle cues—as well as consumption habits like travel photos, dining choices, and fashion brands. Cultural capital, including writing style, hobbies, and conversational signals, also plays a role, along with physical presentation, including fitness, grooming, and photo quality. These hierarchies are not objective; they reinforce bourgeois standards of attractiveness prevalent in advertising, media, and consumer culture. The algorithms favour those who can display middle-class aesthetic traits and penalise individuals whose material circumstances hinder such performances.

In this context, dating apps act as mechanisms for maintaining class boundaries. They promote assortative mating within the professional-managerial class, while relegating less privileged users to lower visibility. The “80/20” discussion in incel and Femcel circles—where 20 per cent of users get 80 per cent of attention—does not reflect a mental health issue but rather a misperception of this structural pattern.

Visibility on dating apps isn’t a right but a limited resource managed by the platform. The algorithm controls who sees whom, how often, and under what conditions. This scarcity is monetised through superlikes, premium visibility tiers, and pay-to-message options. The platform initially enforces invisibility, then offers temporary visibility as a paid service. This mirrors a classic capitalist pattern: creating scarcity and then commercialising access. As a result, a two-tier system emerges—those who can afford greater visibility and those who cannot. Consequently, dating apps effectively turn economic inequality into romantic inequality, linking class status directly to access to intimate opportunities.

Women disproportionately handle self-presentation tasks such as selecting photos, writing prompts, and maintaining conversations. This unpaid emotional labour is crucial to the platform’s profit because increased user effort generates more data and engagement that can be monetised. Corporate feminism serves as a guise here, where the theme of ’empowerment’ conceals that women are being co-opted into a new kind of reproductive labour: creating appealing digital identities for corporate benefit.

The Crisis of App‑Mediated Intimacy

Bumble’s mythos collapsing exemplifies a wider industry crisis, marked by decreased engagement, user fatigue, declining subscriptions, and mistrust of algorithms. This stems from a fundamental conflict: capital’s need for churn and dissatisfaction clashes with the human desire for stable, reciprocal relationships. As economic instability worsens—driven by rising rents, stagnant wages, and declining living standards, especially among younger users —the conditions for dating and meaningful connections diminish. The traditional dating-app model, reliant on social atomization, becomes unsustainable amid these economic strains.

The algorithm doesn’t just mirror user preferences; it actively shapes them. It trains users to desire what the platform promotes—specific body types, lifestyles, and self-presentation. This process isn’t neutral; it’s how capitalist aesthetics infiltrate intimate life. The algorithm acts as a disciplinary tool, influencing how users perceive themselves and others, and reinforcing market-driven standards of attractiveness. In this way, dating apps function not merely as markets but as ideological tools, teaching users to accept competition, scarcity, and self-commodification as natural.

A Marxist perspective shows that the crisis with dating apps is rooted in social issues, not technology. It stems from the commodification of intimacy, social atomization, the breakdown of communal institutions, and relationships being driven by market logic. Solutions like improved algorithms, ethical design, or “AI matchmakers’ are misguided, as they attempt to fix a fundamentally flawed system. True liberation of intimacy can’t occur within a marketplace that treats it as a commodity.

The way forward involves challenging the social structures that make algorithmic mediation necessary. This includes rebuilding the material basis of human connection—such as stable housing, secure jobs, public spaces, and collective activities—and decommodifying intimacy itself.

I have known Emma for over a month. She has contacted me four times and follows me after I post an article. Although she claims to live in Shoreditch each time, she seems to have multiple personalities. Her end goal appears to be to generate revenue from her OnlyFans page, which she advertises.

To draw in customers, she shares photos of herself in revealing clothing. She is attractive and has a notably large backside, if that’s your preference. The source of these images is uncertain, but they are likely generated with highly realistic synthetic faces, bodies, or bios created by language models to mimic real users. These accounts are primarily involved in coordinated influence campaigns, crypto scams, spam, and political boosting. Research shows that such accounts often operate in groups and tend to have fewer followers.

To understand how these accounts operate, particularly given the advanced AI technology involved, visual and behavioural cues are crucial. Emma’s fake accounts seldom post original or varied content. Other fake profiles often act as reply-guys, spam affiliate links, promote schemes like “get-rich-quick,’ cryptocurrency scams, or use generic language similar to ChatGPT. These profiles usually follow thousands of users but have very few followers.

Although Emma the bot dismisses her work as trivial and insists she’s real, the rise of AI-generated fake identities and synthetic bot networks poses more than just a technical challenge. It exposes a deeper problem rooted in capitalism’s social dynamics. This issue significantly affects humans as aware, social beings and could be harmful. To fully understand this, we must link it to capitalism’s long history of using technology to benefit the ruling class, as well as the wider social crisis capitalism has induced in human awareness and community.

I identified Emm’s game early, but for others less aware, a collapse of Shared Reality can threaten mental health. One of the most damaging effects of AI-created fake profiles is what can be called an epistemic crisis—a systematic breakdown in an individual’s capacity to tell reality from falsehood. This problem isn’t novel under capitalism; historically, the ruling class has sustained control via ideological mystification.

However, AI bots operating on an industrial scale mark a significant advancement. When someone cannot be sure if their online interlocutor is human or machine, if the consensus they see reflects genuine public opinion or a synthetic effort, and if the emotional connection they feel is with a real person or an algorithm the very basis of rational social discourse begins to break down..

This has profoundly corrosive effects on individuals. The natural human response to an environment saturated with deception and manipulation is a generalized suspicion, not merely of bots but of everyone. When you cannot reliably distinguish the genuine from the fake, you begin to distrust all online interactions. This cynicism is, in many ways, a rational adaptation to an irrational environment, but it carries an enormous psychological cost. It deepens social atomisation, makes solidarity harder to build, and breeds a pervasive sense of isolation and powerlessness. People retreat from engagement, or are drawn into filter bubbles where algorithmic amplification — often driven by bot networks — creates false communities built around manufactured outrage.

In this already fragmented social landscape, the emergence of AI-generated fake social environments often results in predictable harms. Young people, still forming their social identities and seeking validation through peer interactions, are particularly vulnerable. When online communities are dominated by artificial personas created to provoke engagement, outrage, or emotional reliance, authentic developmental progress is hindered. The fundamental human ability to form genuine relationships—based on mutual vulnerability, genuine uncertainty, and meaningful stakes—is jeopardised when these interactions occur mainly with machines rather than real individuals.