The largest smartphone “dating” app for gay people believes it can boost its stock price, it seems, by optimizing even more for promiscuity and sex with strangers.
Dating sites typically try to match users with other users who live in the same city. Grindr’s executives worry that this standard is growing stale, according to media accounts, and dragging share prices down. In response, the app is launching a new function it calls “Roam,” which allows users to find “dates” in any city they may be traveling to for a night.
“We’re working to meet our users where they are,” CEO George Arison said. Arison apparently believes that “where they are” is at hotel bars seeking self-destructive trysts with men they don’t know and will likely never see again.
Axios, the inside-the-Beltway website that aims to be buzzy and promises to help its readers “get smarter,” celebrated this on X: “Exclusive: Grindr plans to offer a pocket ‘gayborhood.’”
The article ran in Axios’s “AI+” vertical, which promises to take “you inside the AI revolution, and delivering scoops and insights on the technologies reshaping our lives.”
The new shape of Axios readers’ lives, apparently, includes random sexual liaisons on business trips.
America is in the depths of a loneliness crisis. We have an epidemic of isolation and alienation, and a dearth of love, commitment, trust, and connection. In this environment, there’s a perverse sensibility to a CEO of a publicly traded company touting that he is selling more alienation and offering customers more ability to treat others as objects.
And if a news outlet’s only aim is to be buzzy and make friends, then I suppose there’s also some business sense in Axios AI+ becoming a hype site for promiscuous gay sex.
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“In the U.S., almost 30% of Gen Z adults identify as queer,” Grindr’s CEO told Axios. “All of these people will need a tool for connecting with others.”
“Connecting” is a run-of-the-mill euphemism for trysts, but human connection is definitely not what this evolving technology is providing.