A manifesto in 31 profiles

Designed
to Be Deleted

What happens when intimacy is organized like a market?

Dating is not outside capitalism.

It borrows its interfaces, incentives, measurements, and promises. This reader treats each claim as a profile to encounter—not a person to consume.

Why thirty-one?

The number comes from a consumer investigation that found thirty-one prices for the same Tinder subscription within one country. Here, that pricing grid becomes the structure of the argument.

How to read it

Move non-linearly. Filter by chapter, follow the related theses, or begin with a number. Evidence is separated from interpretation, and every source is indexed for cross-checking.

What is being tested

Not whether dating applications “work,” but what kind of relationships become legible when intimacy is organised through subscriptions, ranking, scarcity, and data extraction.

Explore the complete source index →

The thesis selector

All 31 profiles

Four chapters · thirty-one theses

01 PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO

Revenue per user rises while the number of users falls.

Fewer paying users. More revenue extracted from each one.

Intimacy hasan interface.

Designedto Be Deleted

Dating is not outside capitalism.

All 31 profiles

Revenue per user rises while the number of users falls.

The revenue model is indifferent to whether a user succeeds, and is mildly penalised when one does.

The scarcity is manufactured, and the removal of the scarcity is the product.

Over twenty brands, one owner.

Users were ranked, were not shown the ranking, and the gesture itself is patented.

Volume produces refusal, and the refusal outlasts the session.

The application is the destination rather than the route.

Price is set by demography.

A measurable share of the interest shown to users was fabricated.

Safety was withheld from the free tier and later sold as an upgrade.

Intentionality is a growth segment.

The consolidation has reached the communities the industry once ignored.

The sector is contracting while the extraction intensifies.

The paying minority is small, and the free majority is the inventory.

The risk is distributed globally and the revenue is not.

Health status was handled as telemetry.

The user base has been treated as a national security asset.

Membership is itself the sensitive datum.

A man was identified using data that nobody had to steal.

Profiles circulate as commodities on a resale market.

The record kept on a user exceeds the record the user keeps.

The company that sells community suppressed its own.

The extractive configuration is optional, and some firms have declined it.

Refusal is not innocence.

The interface is optional, and some products refuse the grid entirely.

Removing a filter is not the same as removing the sorting.

The applications work, and the argument survives it.

The same infrastructure is the lifeline and the trap.

The population being metered is measurably dying.

The successor product removes the other person.

Regulators have named the mechanism without halting it.

Intimacy has
an interface.

Designed
to Be Deleted