Who do we swipe right for and why?

Summer of Algorithmic Love

Are we approaching a summer of algorithmic love? Developments in romantic matchmaking are being fueled by the mundane practice of swiping upon potential partners on dating apps. These apps appear to feed us recommendations of possible lovers, but we are going to dive a level deeper and ask how these recommendations actually interact with our romantic and sexual preferences.

During this event, the youth editorial team SPUI25 in Spe, will question the interplay between the construction of our dating preferences, online partner recommendations, and contemporary matchmaking. How can we understand the underlying mechanisms of desire that are often unequally distributed across axes of discrimination? Do we have our own internal algorithms or are we getting seduced by those in our phones? Through this panel discussion, we will reflect on the political and ethical dimensions of preferences in dating, how these preferences come to be, how they are tracked and used by dating apps’ algorithms, and how we could challenge this system.

About the speakers

Thomas Crul
Thomas Crul is a matchmaking researcher and data analyst for the dating app Breeze. Breeze aims to take ‘online dating offline’ by bypassing the messaging stage and directly arranging real-life dates for its users after a match. Crul specializes in developing recommendation algorithms responsible for connecting potential partners. He is interested in investigating and addressing biases within these technical systems.

Erinne Paisley
Erinne Paisley is a writer, researcher, and lecturer in the UvA Media Studies Department. Her research touches upon online dating practices as well as the effects of digitization on love and intimacy. She is currently working on a book about ‘Love, Sex, and the Technologies That Shape Them’. In September 2024, she will continue researching location-based dating practices, in a Danish context, at the University of Copenhagen.

Veerle van Wijngaarden
Veerle van Wijngaarden is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), researching the social constitution of desire and the possibility and/or desirability of changing (sexual) desires politically. She also teaches political & social philosophy and ethics at the University of Amsterdam.

Leo Ranieri
Leo Ranieri (moderator) has a multidisciplinary background spanning the biomedical sciences, medical anthropology, politics, and philosophy. His interest lays at the nexus of these disciplines, particularly around the notion of “the human” and who gets to be considered as such. He mobilises a philosophical repertoire inspired by the biomedical sciences to speculate towards a novel conceptual vocabulary geared at contemporary political problems, notably questions of borders, gender, and identity.

Lisa van Oosten (moderator) is part of Spui25 in Spe. She graduated in International Communication and Media and is currently pursuing a degree in Information Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. As a response to her fascination towards the ongoing digitization of everyday life, her interests lie primarily within the intersections of internet technologies and inclusive social change.