What do you think?
Rate this book
Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships
'An exciting, astute analysis of how our capacity for desire has been slotted into the grooves of digital capitalism, and made to work for profit - from porn to Pokémon' - Richard Seymour
We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organizing and mapping the future. What we don't seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.
Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire - re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible.
From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. This book considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.
We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organizing and mapping the future. What we don't seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.
Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire - re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible.
From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life. This book considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
160 pages, Hardcover
Published May 20, 2022
6 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 8, 2022
Everyone wants a piece of your love life. For centuries, it was religion, putting up barriers, rules, restrictions, and of course, punishment. Then it was psychology, in the form of psychiatrists, various flavors of therapist, psychologists and life and relationship gurus, who went after ever larger portions of wallet. Then, a widespread political movement tried to unite sexual liberation with the end of capitalism, with poor results. Now, according to Alfie Bown in Dream Lovers, it is tech, in the form of dating sites, online coaches, artificial intelligence and games that run our lives.
The way they have done it is to broaden love to desire, he says. If you can't find actual love, let them stimulate more desires in you. Endless scrolling, the reward of the occasional like, retweet or even a response, keep billions away from other people and glued to their devices instead. Best friend and lover chatbots using artificial intelligence tell you what you want to hear. Endless porn shows you what you want to see. Combinations of both are readily available now. He repeatedly refers to the example of trump.dating. The gigantic dating industry presents a meat market of clickbait - scrolling, commenting, interacting. Meanwhile, actual love is not available. Bown says "we live in an arcade." That is the future of desire.
It has come to the point where the data is sufficient to change the whole set up. Unfathomably deep data is available to all who will pay. It can be sliced, diced and manipulated as needed to take desire to whole new paradigms. Bown says there is something called Q-ser, qualified communities of quantifiers. They edit the data into new lifestyle patterns, looking for ways to get more people clicking at more customized choices, looking to satisfy more desires, inventing them as they go. And there's always more to invent to consume users' time.
Imagine, Bown says, if dating sites were run not as markets where everyone they let you see likes the same things you do, but instead is in the format of a game, where your clicks take you on an adventure of discovery, seeing more kinds of candidates, interacting with them in the game context. As long as you keep clicking , satisfying desire is just around the next corner. Just make it desirable and they will come.
Not only does this trivialize matchmaking, it is as insulting as the dating industry already is, with its infinite scrolling and no going back, reductionist questions and dehumanizing processes that cause people to click away at the slightest difference that catches their eye. Bown cites the almost perverse example of a hacker who broke into a dating site in order to find someone who was not like him in every way. Seeking virtual perfection, people come away with nothing but unsatisfied desire. So they come back for more. This is the society tech has spawned.
Bown says that sexting and dick pics are little different from the ads that creepily follow people around the internet: "The digital objects of consumer capital, then, function like an unsolicited dick pic and so it may be contemporary capitalism that is the truest pervert." Sexting is an adolescent game that prepares kids for the adult online dating world, with unattainable desires galore.
He discusses the valuation of daters as Sexual Market Value. SMV ranks people and can present them according to need, desire and budget. All this might be offensive, but escaping the offensive has become the Everest of the internet. Unwanted dickpics Airdropped onto unsuspecting phones are the new normal in this scheme.
The book is not a dating site analysis; it is a leftist analysis. And not only leftist, but psychoanalytic. This seemingly odd combination leads Bown through countless citations from papers in both those fields. It's online dating with Freud, Lacan and Deleuze vs Marx, Engels and Badiou, if you can imagine that.
The internet has been prepping people for this for decades: "It is Uber that dictates the path of our taxis, Google Maps that selects the path of our walks and drives, and Pokemon GO that (for a summer at least) determined where the next crowd would gather." And that is just the start. Rewarding people with privileges in their real world lives - or denying them - has become reality. The Chinese have implemented this concretely, causing citizens to always be on their best behavior. Literally playing for the cameras, microphones, and spies. Failure to do so can result in being banned from public transport, reserving tickets early, blocked from restaurants and endless other insults. For example, 27 million have been barred from purchasing plane tickets, as of 2019.
Life is mutating towards gaming. More and more entrepreneurs adapt this model to sell their goods and services. Very often, it is those clicking away who are the product being sold, to others who will manipulate the data for their own new ventures. Whatever it is in real life, we have learned to click our way to it, feeling some modicum of satisfaction in getting what we came for: stimulation. As we become accustomed to it, there will come a time when we can't do anything without checking online first (where that will be recorded). The quickest path for all desires will be clicking.
At the same time, data collection will become even more intrusive. Smartwatches will send body data to match the clicking. Heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, perspiration and so on, while the phone camera sends expression and emotion to round out the effects of every click. Phones already have sufficient penetration but watches might have to be made mandatory to get to the same point faster. It will of course be framed as for your safety and protection, the fastest way to acceptance.
And all along, humans have been giving up on humans: "When Allison de Fren studied the early online Usenet group alt.sex.fetish, she noticed two patterns: those who desire robots and those who desire to become robots." The virtual world has become the refuge for desires: "The digital as infinitely reproducible media of virtual desire-experiences which not only respond to but construct the desire of its users," he says.
He has found an online dating service called Affectica, which has reduced emotions to just four: happy, confused, surprised, and disgusted. These four are "perfectly sufficient and successful at predicting and anticipating human emotion and desire." All the rest are superfluous, merely variants of the big four, and unnecessary for finding a mate, apparently. This has the potential to streamline online dating, or at very least, offer an approach different from the mass of dating services now available. And yet, it is just a further invasion of the psyche.
And sooner or later, it's not enough: "Deconstruction teaches that the digital object is never as good as the real-world one it represents, but psychoanalysis teaches that the actual object is never as good as the digital information which represents it. At the same time, digital objects like those that have become ubiquitous only since ... 2001 seem to offer another way of thinking through the relationship between objects and their signs. In cases of today's information-objects, both statements seem true."
Bown tries hard to merge Marx and Freud: "What psychoanalysis offers is a way to make visible how we are being tricked at a psychic level by the economies of desire found in capitalism." Capitalism doesn't care. It will exploit any gap it finds. But the value of psychoanalysis in the argument remains clouded, at least for me.
The book is a classic leftist screed, a tangle of ideas, citations and concepts from other leftists. Bown himself is a gamer, and comes at this with that bent. It all makes for a complex and busy book. Not necessarily an easy read, but chock of full of different angles.
It is true, but is it valuable? I am less than convinced.
Ultimately, he says "We are left with little desire, undertaking the endless expenditure of capital in small zombified gestures of unfulfilling, micro-pleasure-yielding moments that characterise contemporary life."
That is a depressing thought to end with, so I offer a little Haiku from comic Amanda Lund to put it all in perspective:
“Human connection
Is what life is all about”
she typed on her phone.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
The way they have done it is to broaden love to desire, he says. If you can't find actual love, let them stimulate more desires in you. Endless scrolling, the reward of the occasional like, retweet or even a response, keep billions away from other people and glued to their devices instead. Best friend and lover chatbots using artificial intelligence tell you what you want to hear. Endless porn shows you what you want to see. Combinations of both are readily available now. He repeatedly refers to the example of trump.dating. The gigantic dating industry presents a meat market of clickbait - scrolling, commenting, interacting. Meanwhile, actual love is not available. Bown says "we live in an arcade." That is the future of desire.
It has come to the point where the data is sufficient to change the whole set up. Unfathomably deep data is available to all who will pay. It can be sliced, diced and manipulated as needed to take desire to whole new paradigms. Bown says there is something called Q-ser, qualified communities of quantifiers. They edit the data into new lifestyle patterns, looking for ways to get more people clicking at more customized choices, looking to satisfy more desires, inventing them as they go. And there's always more to invent to consume users' time.
Imagine, Bown says, if dating sites were run not as markets where everyone they let you see likes the same things you do, but instead is in the format of a game, where your clicks take you on an adventure of discovery, seeing more kinds of candidates, interacting with them in the game context. As long as you keep clicking , satisfying desire is just around the next corner. Just make it desirable and they will come.
Not only does this trivialize matchmaking, it is as insulting as the dating industry already is, with its infinite scrolling and no going back, reductionist questions and dehumanizing processes that cause people to click away at the slightest difference that catches their eye. Bown cites the almost perverse example of a hacker who broke into a dating site in order to find someone who was not like him in every way. Seeking virtual perfection, people come away with nothing but unsatisfied desire. So they come back for more. This is the society tech has spawned.
Bown says that sexting and dick pics are little different from the ads that creepily follow people around the internet: "The digital objects of consumer capital, then, function like an unsolicited dick pic and so it may be contemporary capitalism that is the truest pervert." Sexting is an adolescent game that prepares kids for the adult online dating world, with unattainable desires galore.
He discusses the valuation of daters as Sexual Market Value. SMV ranks people and can present them according to need, desire and budget. All this might be offensive, but escaping the offensive has become the Everest of the internet. Unwanted dickpics Airdropped onto unsuspecting phones are the new normal in this scheme.
The book is not a dating site analysis; it is a leftist analysis. And not only leftist, but psychoanalytic. This seemingly odd combination leads Bown through countless citations from papers in both those fields. It's online dating with Freud, Lacan and Deleuze vs Marx, Engels and Badiou, if you can imagine that.
The internet has been prepping people for this for decades: "It is Uber that dictates the path of our taxis, Google Maps that selects the path of our walks and drives, and Pokemon GO that (for a summer at least) determined where the next crowd would gather." And that is just the start. Rewarding people with privileges in their real world lives - or denying them - has become reality. The Chinese have implemented this concretely, causing citizens to always be on their best behavior. Literally playing for the cameras, microphones, and spies. Failure to do so can result in being banned from public transport, reserving tickets early, blocked from restaurants and endless other insults. For example, 27 million have been barred from purchasing plane tickets, as of 2019.
Life is mutating towards gaming. More and more entrepreneurs adapt this model to sell their goods and services. Very often, it is those clicking away who are the product being sold, to others who will manipulate the data for their own new ventures. Whatever it is in real life, we have learned to click our way to it, feeling some modicum of satisfaction in getting what we came for: stimulation. As we become accustomed to it, there will come a time when we can't do anything without checking online first (where that will be recorded). The quickest path for all desires will be clicking.
At the same time, data collection will become even more intrusive. Smartwatches will send body data to match the clicking. Heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, perspiration and so on, while the phone camera sends expression and emotion to round out the effects of every click. Phones already have sufficient penetration but watches might have to be made mandatory to get to the same point faster. It will of course be framed as for your safety and protection, the fastest way to acceptance.
And all along, humans have been giving up on humans: "When Allison de Fren studied the early online Usenet group alt.sex.fetish, she noticed two patterns: those who desire robots and those who desire to become robots." The virtual world has become the refuge for desires: "The digital as infinitely reproducible media of virtual desire-experiences which not only respond to but construct the desire of its users," he says.
He has found an online dating service called Affectica, which has reduced emotions to just four: happy, confused, surprised, and disgusted. These four are "perfectly sufficient and successful at predicting and anticipating human emotion and desire." All the rest are superfluous, merely variants of the big four, and unnecessary for finding a mate, apparently. This has the potential to streamline online dating, or at very least, offer an approach different from the mass of dating services now available. And yet, it is just a further invasion of the psyche.
And sooner or later, it's not enough: "Deconstruction teaches that the digital object is never as good as the real-world one it represents, but psychoanalysis teaches that the actual object is never as good as the digital information which represents it. At the same time, digital objects like those that have become ubiquitous only since ... 2001 seem to offer another way of thinking through the relationship between objects and their signs. In cases of today's information-objects, both statements seem true."
Bown tries hard to merge Marx and Freud: "What psychoanalysis offers is a way to make visible how we are being tricked at a psychic level by the economies of desire found in capitalism." Capitalism doesn't care. It will exploit any gap it finds. But the value of psychoanalysis in the argument remains clouded, at least for me.
The book is a classic leftist screed, a tangle of ideas, citations and concepts from other leftists. Bown himself is a gamer, and comes at this with that bent. It all makes for a complex and busy book. Not necessarily an easy read, but chock of full of different angles.
It is true, but is it valuable? I am less than convinced.
Ultimately, he says "We are left with little desire, undertaking the endless expenditure of capital in small zombified gestures of unfulfilling, micro-pleasure-yielding moments that characterise contemporary life."
That is a depressing thought to end with, so I offer a little Haiku from comic Amanda Lund to put it all in perspective:
“Human connection
Is what life is all about”
she typed on her phone.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
August 7, 2022
socialist fitbit socialist fitbit sociALIST FITBIT SOCIALIST FITBIT SOCIALIST FITBIT
January 3, 2025
So here's the deal. This book certainly has some good points but basically all I can think about is socialist Fitbit.
What I did like and agree with/was challenged by was the concept of hegemonic powers structures built into the medium, not only the message of digital media. Dating apps, Facebook, and Twitter didn't just end up like that. They used data to direct our impulses to be less fulfilling and more profitable. They not only predict what we would want but actually guide our wants towards their profits.
His discussion of Data as a third thing not native to our experience is also fascinating. What we pull from these numbers does not necessarily or actually express what we live.
However, his ideas of how to reform these systems are laughable at best. He seems t0 be gravely out of touch with how real people think about and experience technology. A socialist Fitbit is an absolutely hilarious idea.
It's definitely not a good book but I am happy I read it! I learned about something I don't think much about.
What I did like and agree with/was challenged by was the concept of hegemonic powers structures built into the medium, not only the message of digital media. Dating apps, Facebook, and Twitter didn't just end up like that. They used data to direct our impulses to be less fulfilling and more profitable. They not only predict what we would want but actually guide our wants towards their profits.
His discussion of Data as a third thing not native to our experience is also fascinating. What we pull from these numbers does not necessarily or actually express what we live.
However, his ideas of how to reform these systems are laughable at best. He seems t0 be gravely out of touch with how real people think about and experience technology. A socialist Fitbit is an absolutely hilarious idea.
It's definitely not a good book but I am happy I read it! I learned about something I don't think much about.
October 9, 2024
Interesting enough but would not recommend whole heartedly. A primer on how the talons sink in, but where do we go? Scattered theoretical questioning but yearning for answers. Nearly unresolved comparisons between the link of violence in video games and violence in other vr media. We learn via mimesis. I would have appreciated more insight into the linkage between desire, simulation, and violence with examples. Again, interesting enough.
Bumped to 4 because the idea of redirecting desire is nice to me personally and something I’ll think about for a long time.
Bumped to 4 because the idea of redirecting desire is nice to me personally and something I’ll think about for a long time.
July 11, 2023
guardatemi prendere spunto da questo libro per fare, ancora una volta, la comunista e scrivere una tesi partendo dalla rhythmanalysis ✨
p.s. il mio pensiero va a quei miei compagni di università triennale che sminuivano e banalizzavano la psicanalisi: non avevate capito proprio nulla (e per fortuna, aggiungerei).
p.s. il mio pensiero va a quei miei compagni di università triennale che sminuivano e banalizzavano la psicanalisi: non avevate capito proprio nulla (e per fortuna, aggiungerei).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews