Daylight swiping

A killed essay

Last year, I was commissioned to write an essay for a technology publication on the digital gesture of swiping. The section that I wrote it for was dissolved shortly after I completed (and was paid for) the piece, and it was left to rot in my drafts for a few months. I recently discovered it again after a draft dumpster dive, and thought… Why not let it see the light of day? It also reminds me of my Dirt piece on skeumorphia, aka the unbearable flatness of being online.

Still from Ryusuke Hamagachi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)

THE DIGEST:

March has been… busy. I’m contributing to NY Mag’s monthly design edit, so please send me any object-oriented, interior design shows that pique your interest! My ultimate (un-published) take on Silencio, the Manhattan outpost of the David Lynch’s Parisian club, is that it’s more Old Hollywood glamour than ominously Lynchian — “Lynchian,” having become a popular aesthetic shorthand, is often erroneously applied to any locale with sexy red curtains and beautiful women, instead of truly claustrophobic rooms with scary red curtains and bewitching, albeit demonically possessed women.

I also saw Dune, Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (this NYRB piece convinced me I needed to watch more Yang), Ryusuke Hamagachi’s stellar Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and fell asleep at Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (in my defense, it was an 8:35 pm showing…). I went to the Whitney Biennial and… it was thematically incoherent with a few interesting pieces/films to look at. Nothing to fawn over, except Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s rollicking canvases and Jes Fan’s ethereal, alien-y sculptures ft. glassy organs and 3D-printed CAT scans of the artist’s body:

Contrapposto (2023), Jes Fan

I’m back watching the Bachelor, after, like, three years of refusing to watch reality TV so I haven’t been reading much this month, aside from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry. I’m listening to Hana Vu and eagerly anticipating the release of her next album. I’m wearing Jo Malone’s Nectarine Blossom & Honey on my wrists because… spring! I love smelling like spring. I love feeling spring. I just filed the first draft of a piece of poetic criticism that I’m excited to share with the world so stay tuned (soon!) for a ficto-critical diary entry on Dune.

SWIPE: A HISTORY & A DILEMMA

Before swipe, there was slide. At Apple’s launch event for the first-ever iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs began the product demonstration by unlocking the device. “We wanted something you couldn’t do by accident in your pocket,” Jobs explained, dragging his index finger across the bottom of the screen. There, a semi-transparent rectangle instructed the user to “slide to unlock” its glassy surface. Jobs switched the phone off and swiped his finger again. “Just slide it across,” he said. “Boom.”

Nearly a decade later, Apple phased out its iconic “slide to unlock” feature, replacing the home button with the Touch ID fingerprint sensor: The phone would automatically unlock upon pressing the home button, so there was no longer any need for the gesture. With the introduction of Face ID in 2021, Apple updated its lock screen design once more, prompting users to “swipe up to unlock,” a vertical gesture that recalls the now-retro “slide to unlock.” Most Apple users have paid little mind to this semantic switch-up, but the linguistic preference for “swipe” over “slide” alludes to how a simple gesture, first popularized by Apple, has evolved beyond its original, single-use application: to unlock a phone. Within the decade that Apple had patented and introduced “slide to unlock,” touchscreen devices have proliferated, leading to all manners of scrolling and swiping and very little sliding.

In hindsight, swipe’s success seems unequivocal. Slide lacks its quippy immediacy. Swipe also benefits from having fewer obvious real-world referents, though its earlier definitions are more severe, even violent. To swipe is to steal (in the comics world, it refers to intentional copying without credit); to deliver a strong sweeping blow or a sharp critical remark. Pickpockets swipe wallets from unsuspecting pedestrians; shoppers swipe credit cards. 

Today, the act of swiping is intimately related to touchscreen technology. It has evolved from a isolated gesture in any direction (Candy Crush players try to maximize the number of points achieved in one swipe) to a rapid and repetitive motion (swiping on a dating app), akin to leafing through the pages of a virtual book (swiping through an Instagram carousel of images or an e-book). In doing so, users are more often repeatedly swiping than performing a standalone swipe: The gesture inculcates a false sense of infinity among users, who are accustomed to swiping as a means of pursuit, often with no clear end goal in mind.

When we swipe, our fingers are like mini wipers. We succumb to the compulsion to swipe left and right, up and down across feeds, profiles, web pages, and apps, in a neverending on-screen migration. Users are primed to keep swiping onto the next profile or the next page, in the hopes of finding something—or someone—more exciting, more interesting to hold their attention. But the swipe only simulates the sense of infinitude: There are only so many Instagram Stories or Tinder profiles to swipe through. Like a traffic sign, it urges us to keep moving forward. We must have a destination in mind to mediate our swiping, lest we risk trapping ourselves in this stalled state of discovery, swiping to find nothing that we don’t already know.

Since Tinder’s launch in 2012, the dating app has become synonymous with swiping by popularizing the gesture among a generation of young singles. The swipe has since become a common reflex, a shorthand for dating and the ongoing search for a suitable partner that, at times, can feel more like an algorithmic struggle than a hopeful hunt. Users scan and swipe past hundreds, if not thousands, of profiles. And not all swipes are made equal. The right swipe signifies potential—for liking, lusting, and maybe even loving someone. The left swipe, on the contrary, is rarely mentioned. It’s a throwaway gesture, a stand-in for rejection. Those you swipe left on are meant to be forgotten. There is little deliberation. It takes a matter of seconds, rarely over a minute, for someone to swipe left or right. 

This dichotomy between right and left introduced the idea of the swipe as a filtering mechanism—albeit within a system where the user has little control over the profiles they see. Users have little choice but to perform the act repeatedly: The more you swipe (and the more you are swiped on), the better your chances are of algorithmically encountering a profile of someone who might be a potential match. Tinder has more data on you as a user, which increases your odds of being presented with a profile that aligns with your internal desirability score.

Curiously, Tinder’s founding team was initially hesitant about the functionality of the swipe. The app’s first iteration had no option to swipe, according to its former chief creative officer, though early testers kept trying to do so on profiles they liked. Swiping was later integrated and championed by former chief strategy officer Jon Badeen who claimed the motion came to him one morning after a steamy shower. “I saw myself staring back at myself [in the mirror]. Then I wiped the other direction,” Badeen told Wired in a 2016 interview. “All of a sudden it clicked.” 

A different executive disputed this story, claiming that Badeen had cribbed the swipe from his work on Chegg, the flashcard app. If the swipe was, in fact, modeled on Chegg, then the gesture has evolved from something intended to help students learn and memorize vocabulary words to a more repetitive, rote act. The intentionality of the swipe is lost when it’s applied to dating profiles as a discovery tool. When traveling, it’s become common for singles to open up Tinder or Bumble and spend a few minutes swiping to get a sense of the dating pool. 

The real genius of the gesture is how addictive it’s proven to be among users. People kept using Tinder because they were hooked—not by the prospects of falling in love, but the sheer satisfaction of swiping itself. In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed, one researcher likened swiping to a form of psychological conditioning. “Since users don’t know which swipe will bring the ‘reward’ of a match, Tinder uses a variable ratio reward schedule, which means that potential matches will be randomly dispersed. It’s the same reward system used in slot machines, video games and even during animal experiments where researchers train pigeons to continuously peck at a light on the wall.” Serial swiping easily becomes addictive. Users get a dopamine rush whenever a swipe triggers a match.  

And since Tinder was designed to make dating more fun, it had to feel more like a game than a chore. The swipe, then, is no longer a means to an end, but an end unto itself. The gesture is once again unsoldered from its original intent: to function as a sorting mechanism, so users can distinguish between liked and disliked profiles. Badeen had compared the act of swiping to organizing photos and files in real life, saying: “Swiping [gives] you that same personal, sort of manipulable experience.” 

In reality, swiping actually feels quite random, like rolling a dice to make progress in a game. Potential matches are randomly dispersed. And while the interface is designed to be easily used (and thereby manipulated), users have little control as to what profiles will pop up next. My friends have coined a term for this: swiping purgatory. Your love life feels in limbo: You’re either swiping right and hoping for the best, or you’re waiting around for matches to respond. The only thing you can do in the meantime is swipe some more. This is, of course, a trap. It’s an illusion that users can escape their predicament by swiping their way out of it.

@ heavnlynobody

Tinder generates roughly a billion swipes per day and about 30 million matches, according to data from the app. In recent years, however, competitors like Hinge, Feeld, and Coffee Meets Bagel have gravitated away from swiping, opting instead towards tapping (or heart-ing) as a more concrete metric for liking someone. Hinge phased out swiping in 2016, sending an email to users declaring, “We’ve swiped left on swiping.” In a now-defunct FAQ page, the company said it felt that “the world of mindless swiping was ruining romance.” Swiping, according to Hinge, is bad because it encourages users to quickly (and harshly) judge and objectify others. With mindless swiping, users can be more flippant; the motion even allows them to seamlessly flip through profiles. Still, even without deploying swipe as a gesture, these dating apps rely on a similar algorithm and sorting apparatus for profiles, based on the user’s past swipes.

Swiping, then, seems to lend itself best to circumstances where users are trying to discover something specific, be it a date, a job (Blonk), or even a baby name (Kinder). A few mobile games, like Reigns: Her Majesty, have based their entire gameplay on swiping: Every swipe is a decision that progresses the plot forward. It makes the most sense from a gaming perspective as there’s an inherent randomness to any app interface that relies on swiping: The user can only see one option at a time, instead of being presented with a range of options simultaneously—a more effective alternative. We think of it as a gateway to encountering limitless possibilities, though progress can be shockingly incremental. After all, it’s in the interests of the app’s creators that we don’t ever stop swiping for long. No one wants the game or the adventure to end.

The motion is akin to flipping through the pages of an infinite book, an imaginary tome of all the contents found in the Library of Babel. In Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story, the universe is a vast library that holds ​​an unfathomable number of books, presumed to contain every possible ordering of letters and symbols. The internet is no omniscient library, but the parallels between Borges’ story and the web are clear. The librarians of Babel are paralyzed by this glut of information and exist in a state of constant despair.

The librarians’ predicament is familiar to anyone who’s spent time on a dating app. I’ve had friends take time off the apps, before eventually returning, enticed by the potential of finding that special someone. But unlike the librarians in Borges’ story, we exist in a finite world with finite options. Dating profiles are often recycled. Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany reported in her investigation into the Tinder algorithm, “As you get closer and closer to the end of the reasonable selection of individuals in any dating app, the algorithm will start to recycle people you didn’t like the first time.” The ceaseless nature of unchecked swiping often leads us to forget that we can hit the virtual limit of these apps. The game has to end. Or else, we risk remaining trapped in this cycle of mindless swiping, not realizing that, like a dumb dog chasing its own tail, we’re presented with the same options over and over again.