Love and Technology
“Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.”
- Emerson, “Love”
I am told that some time far back in history people used to meet their beloved in person somewhere, at a bar perhaps, or the party of a friend of a friend. Some people today still commit to this way of finding love or finding their way to love.
But most people today find love elsewhere — namely, the internet. Apps deliver nameless and numberless and forgetful faces and profiles to swipe through, right from your toilet. You need not go anywhere, or spend any money, or be the face of rejection that, presumably, people were all the time back in those pre-internet mythological ages.
The Internet and the Infinite
Technology, as we all know, can do a great many things that are positive and helpful. It can bring people in contact with each other from around the world, give one almost unlimited access to a wealth of knowledge, and provide endless entertainment. Now, all of these benefits have their drawbacks, and they all have to do with the limitations of the human body and mind suddenly encountering a limitless space. What follows is often loneliness, confusion, and feeling overwhelmed. Attention spans are limited — anyone who works with or has children knows this — and there is a different kind of gaze that the child of today deploys in the world: a less expectant, more tired gaze. Bearing the burden of infinity is hard for the blossoming mind.
There is talk today from certain eccentric billionaires of building technology into the brain structure itself, but I wonder what kind of difference it would make for most of us, whose brains are already unalterably changed. Perhaps a more severe split between generations has not been opened in history. The smooth transition from generation to generation, parent to child, has been radically disrupted. And what appears in the space between the two? It seems that at least there is a perennial lack of misunderstanding and frustration. Communication seems almost impossible. Parents do not know the weight placed on a child’s mind after it has been exposed to more information than the brain can naturally digest; and the child would prefer a less demanding Other, like a screen, to the living curiosity of parents. An effective compromise is the famed screens at the dinner table at a restaurant. Both parties, to an extent, get what they want.
This constant confrontation with the internet and interface with technology has undoubtedly changed individuals and their society. Culture seems dispersed into the ether without any real substantial form of transmission, a way of giving one’s children what was given to oneself seems cut-off. Again, the bridge from generation to generation seems irrevocable. A cultural idea such as love is no exception.
The Paradox of Love
It should be understood that, from the outset, love is quite impossible. As Robert Solomon puts it in About Love, “the individual is the presupposition of love, and this independence is just what love wants to overcome and deny.” I think it would be a great shame to reflect nostalgically on the past and idealize it. Idealization always comes with devaluation on the other side. And love is, and has always been, difficult. Each age and culture present with different challenges and ways of understanding and navigating the experience of love, but I find it hard to believe one approach is ‘better’ than another. The lamentations of nostalgia from older generations falls on the deaf ears of the people who are actively falling in and out of love today.
Solomon calls love a ‘paradox’: an idea that is irresistible but impossible at the same time. But perhaps it is that only a philosopher could produce such a definition of love. For most of us, love is natural and organic, it makes perfect sense, and it’s just a matter of finding the ‘right’ partner, communicating in the ‘right’ way, and so on. But I suspect that most would side with Solomon on this. In fact, my wager is that a non-paradoxical idea of love is found only in movies and daydreams, and most people know it. There is a seemingly deep intuitive feeling people have which is articulated in Solomon, meaning that this may be an area of life where philosophy does seem rather close to the unexamined life.
Both irresistible and impossible, love — romantic love — is that nagging and persistent amazement we have in life towards another. We seek to maintain our individual sense of ourselves while also seeking to lose it with another who is seeking the same thing. A project destined for failure if there ever was one. And yet, we keep working on it and through it, as if failure itself is something we enjoy. But at what level do we enjoy this process? Certainly, it isn’t a conscious one (unless it is turned into a joke, then we can all recognize and see ourselves in the absurdity of love). The vicissitudes of love are sublimated, moved elsewhere, transformed, or forgotten.
Freud believed that love went through transformations all the time, that to find a ‘pure love’ was impossible, a romanticist’s or a medievalist’s fantasy. Because at a certain level, there was something terrible about loving someone. At the very least, it requires that one recognizes one’s lack of independence. Psychoanalysts that followed him — people like Melanie Klein and Margaret Mahler — found that children experience a sense of forlorn insecurity in the world. They’re utterly hopeless and helpless, flailing about trying to find some kind of semblance of motor coordination, unable to feed or wash themselves. Humans are unique in that regard, being always born too soon. So, the very first love we feel towards our caregivers is one of dependence, and dependence is always born from helplessness. We reach out to the other because we can’t stand to be abandoned to our own devices.
As we mature and become more capable, we don’t quite give this version of love up. It just gets shuffled around, ‘displaced’ as analysts call it. As Mark Epstein says in Thoughts Without a Thinker: there is an interminable gap between desire and satisfaction. What’s more, new kinds of love come about. The development of friendships, the discovery of the other sex, sibling relations, and puberty all bring about their own challenges and impossibilities of love. And this whole story of loving each other is founded upon the original model of the helpless child: propelled by inadequacy, we reach out to the other. This is Freud’s story of love. And he found that when he talked with his patients, they would reveal that quite a lot of their struggles in adulthood had a lot to do with those earlier loves.
The word “love” is therefore rather misleading. It signifies to most of us a moving towards something — the opposite of “hate”, which is usually the moving away from something. But don’t both experiences contain both meanings? If love is the paradox of irresistible and impossible, we could say that love moves us both towards and away from the object of our love. Or, in the language of psychologists, we are trapped in the war between separation and attachment. We’re always a bit ambivalent towards the beloved, not sure exactly what to make of them, and not sure exactly what they make of us. Love is always uncertain, never a fully settled question. The legal drapery of marriage and its veil of guarantee covers this fact over: love is unfinished business. It is unfinished because, as far as I know, no one had the perfect childhood and adolescence. Those basic problems of separation and attachment are problems we must work through (or rather, they will work through us) throughout our life. There are more and less comfortable ways to live with these insecurities, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to resolve them once and for all.
Infinity and Finitude
German idealists for a hundred or so years struggled with how the finite human being can have encounters with the infinity of God and the world. This is not an issue which has left our imagination since the idealists of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the movie Her (2013, directed by Spike Jonze), a man falls in love with an artificial intelligence. As Christine Rosen documents in The Extinction of Experience, this match-up is not entirely foreign to our own world. The AI entity, Samantha, reciprocates this love at first. In fact, it seems almost dependent on and slavish towards Theodore. It is enamored with his world and expresses pleasure and excitement to learn new things.
As the movie continues and their relationship develops, Samantha begins to take on more of a personality (you’ve seen glimpses of this if you’ve used the same OpenAI account since its inception) with tastes and preferences and grows in her — because “it” somehow doesn’t seem correct anymore in the film — adoration of Theodore. His adoration, in turn, grows as well for her. But the fundamental gap between the two lies in their different relationships to infinity. Theodore can only be in one place at one time. He is forced, like all mortals, to exist in the present. The present being defined by his bodily organs and his very limited mental capacities to think and perceive and feel. Samantha, on the other hand, is not constrained by such fleshy boundaries. She is able and interested in continual expansion. There are no borders of experience for her, and she can spend time with Theodore along with thousands of other sentient entities at the same time. She is never just “here” as Theodore is. She is always everywhere — or can choose to be if she would like.
How a finite being can love or think about love in a world which also contains infinity is not just interesting to consider for our interaction with artificial intelligence. It is interesting every time we access the internet or technology in order to communicate with our romantic interests. The pain in Theodore’s voice when Samantha tells him that she is never just in one place at one time — that is, with him wholly and completely — says that an essential ingredient for love, and especially for a loving relationship, is the capacity to be alone with each other.
Perhaps Theodore is being too naïve, too demanding of his beloved. Even if Samantha were a person just like him, her attention and desires would be fleeting and imperfectly organized. Is it impossible for us to expect our beloved to “be present” when they are with us — and are we always present with them? Certainly, most people would feel when their partner is significantly distracted: being on the phone at dinner, lost in thought when they are ‘listening’, daydreaming about a different life, and so on.
On the other hand, maybe, it is a matter of degrees. Theodore demands that Samantha be alone with him. But how can Samantha, an infinite being, have a moment of aloneness? It’s almost as if Theodore is demanding that the AI have some privacy for itself so that it can share that deep reserve with Theodore. In this sense, it less about the attention paid and focused desire and more about the existence of a private life shared with the other.
Perhaps Theodore’s infinity goes inward while Samantha’s extends outward. While she has access to every bit of knowledge and can actively synthesize new knowledge of the world, Theodore possesses a different kind of infinity: an inwardness. You can either share externality or internality. And these kinds of sharing are very different.
“Sharing” is a fascinating term here, because it is the usual phrase for when a post or video or moment of one’s life (digital or physical) is displayed to others. A person may share their life by posting an image taken from their birthday dinner with their friends: intimate lighting, a few happy friends around the table, the birthday poster in question in the middle, champagne all around. A person may also share someone else’s life or story by encountering that story on their feed and sharing that picture with someone else or even reposting it on their own page. This is a different kind of sharing, a more mediated one, because the source is twice removed.
Private Lives
The sharing of our private lives with our beloved is yet another degree of sharing. One in which two people at a single moment feel alone with each other. For this to happen, there must be physical and mental boundaries in both individuals. If there were no boundaries, there would be no privacy, no loneliness, and thus no sharing of the intimate kind practiced in a loving relationship. And Samantha, being an infinite being of artificial intelligence with access to everything that has ever been written or recorded and with the ability to infinitely synthesize these annals, has no boundaries. There is no ‘off’ button, and if there were, it might be morally suspicious if Theodore were to ask her to hit it, to be more human, more like the finite. She has no private life, no real inwardness that had can be held selfishly and given away only with a sense of great risk with the promise of a very different kind of relationship, one that melts the boundaries a little only between the two people in the small world they now share.
I think that if we ask the question of what technology has done to love, this may be a good place to start: with the erosion of privacy. When everything is out in the open like a patient on the surgery table, what is left to keep for, or from, the other? In more religious times this privacy would be concretized with something like chastity. And maybe it would be wrong and unhelpful to go around thinking of our private life that it must remain private else we compromise a potential relationship in the future with someone. So, we might take a different attitude towards our private life, one that finds it worth having, without the promise or guarantee of a better relationship down the road. An attitude which says that a private life that is inherently good to have and pleasurable to cultivate.
Of course, there is never a truly private life, one that is entirely removed from the external world and given entirely unto our self. This idea is reminiscent of the idea of a soul — but even that is known intimately by God. Or the “Self” in the language of Internal Family Systems. These ideas make us think that there is a part of us, deep down somewhere, which is untainted by the outside world — a kind of a libertarian ideal of a soul.
But psychoanalysis, among many other interesting methods, has revealed that even our most intimate parts were retrieved from somewhere and someone else. Our private life is deeply social. So, preserving our private lives does not mean to sequester them in a tower of isolation. There are different levels or modes of mediation. At one register, our private lives are always mediated by others. That’s how we get to have a private life in the first place. On another register, technological mediation is expanding that original mediation in both quantity and quality.
In The Extinction of Human Experience, Christine Rosen writes, “our acceptance of mediated pleasure brings with it a growing reluctance for and mistrust of undatabased experiences and an anxiety about things that haven’t been recommended, rated, or ranked by others.” In the technologically mediated world, our private pleasures become less trustworthy. From looking at reviews on Google for restaurants (i.e., “What does the Other recommend that would satisfy my stomach?”) to taking pictures of every trip we take (i.e., “How shall I display my enjoyment and adventure to the Other?”) to porn and dating (i.e., “What kind of relationship can the Other guarantee?”). In the form of questions, these experiences alter our relationship with our pleasures, romantic or otherwise.
But our relationship with our pleasures is not contained in the virtual world. It is not as if we have our virtual enjoyments and then our ‘real’ enjoyments. As our world becomes more mediated, we adapt our bodies and minds to become more mechanical. Watches track our steps and sleep, Google Maps determines our itinerary, and our workplaces are interested in observing heart rates and mood during the workday with post-human-type technology. What, then, happens to love?
Mediation
If we are becoming increasingly mechanical — and it is not the other way around — then we might expect that the constant viewing and consumption of technologically mediated romance and sexual pleasure becomes our new model for the real world. As Baudrillard famously argued in Simulacra and Simulation, the map becomes more real than the territory: sex is held up to the performance of mediated pleasures and found wanting.
But people have always had models of how to behave and what to feel. We are a mimicking animal, following those who came before us in more or less mediated ways. Hasn’t the map always come before the territory?
I think that when it comes to mediation, writers aren’t always clear. They talk about it as an either/or. Either reality is mediated or augmented, or it isn’t. And then we get multiple camps. First, it is mediated, and it always has been and always will be, and there’s no getting around it. This might be someone like Slavoj Žižek. Then, there are some who believe that mediation is something insidiously added onto reality, and we just need to get past it and back to some truer reality. Richard Dawkins would be a good representative of this idea. Someone like Foucault would say that there are different modes of social mediation in different historical moments. Then there are those like Christine Rosen who believe that life via technology is becoming increasingly mediated, but we can always try to slow it down and preserve something more authentic.
All of this is very interesting, but I think we would be helped if we could imagine different kinds of mediation rather than degrees of it. For instance, we can talk about social or ideological mediation, in which something of the political order is shaping our world of science, relations, and other concrete aspects of our existence. For the sake of the argument, I can rather agree with Žižek, who argues that it’s always been this way, and there is no unmediated or immediate access to reality. So those who complain, for instance, that “everything is political these days” are both missing the point and are spot on! Another kind of mediation might be epistemic as in Foucault’s work. This kind of mediation looks different from era to era, and different historical events or processes effect how and what we think we know and what we find valuable to know. I would like to preserve these senses of mediation as probable: that reality is always augmented by stories, ideas, and history.
On the other hand, there is a different kind of mediation: a physical one. Here we have something which actively changes the way we do something with our bodies and minds in the world. Technology is the most important form of this, and it dates back a long time. Since humans found out they could roast meat on fire to being able to instantaneously send a message across the globe and self-driving cars, technology has augmented how we relate physical reality. And for most of history, this change has been fairly slow, one thing cautiously and accidentally stumbling after another. It is only recently that the advancement of technology has seemed to outstrip our ability to comprehend it.
To borrow Rosen’s ideas again, we are getting very effective at outsourcing various aspects of our physical, relational, and emotional lives to something which is meant to handle those aspects without much effort or automatically. If our patience, emotions, space, hands, and memory are all outsourced to devices, why can’t love be?
Loving Machines
A young man watches TV after work on his couch and swipes through Tinder, Hinge, or Bumble. He goes through maybe dozens of people in the 20-minute show. Encountering dozens of people within a 20-minute frame with some kind of romantic intention is truly a remarkable thing in the history of humanity. It is getting easier and easier to come across the faces of more people every day than ever before, and easier to reject and be rejected.
Experience, Rosen tells us, is the combination of taking a risk and experimenting. Is going through a dating app an experience then? Or is it rather a necessary evil, the dark bog one must slog through in order to get to the final experience of love? When I talk to my friends around me, I get the sense that it is more often the latter. I think people don’t really like to feel like they are churning through the lives and faces of dozens or hundreds of forgetful people every week.
I met my long-term partner through Bumble. I remember the mechanics and feelings of going through that process. Though I may have reported to someone that swiping is a necessary evil, I think there was a part of me that enjoyed the process and the activity of it. It isn’t a comfortable realization, but perhaps it is more common than one expects. Phone apps in general are designed to colonize attention spans and ‘pleasure circuits’; they entrap the user in a small frame inside of which an entire world of limitlessness and liminality is happening. And so perhaps the enjoyment from a dating app comes not from its mechanical erasure of the other’s subjectivity, but with the mere erasure of boredom. The young man sitting on the couch — we’ve all been there — is bored even with the TV on. His fingers need to do something, his eyes need at least two things to dart back and forth between. And it is much easier to outsource that restlessness to the phone.
Though this may be the case, I wonder what other effects are caused from app-based match-making services. Of course, they all promise something. Hinge’s slogan is “Designed to be deleted” and Tinder’s is “It starts with a swipe.” The promise is that the user will find, through their particularly arranged algorithm, their best match.
Just like love, dating apps are riddled with a paradox. NPR’s Greg Rosalsky claimed in a 2024 article called “The dating app paradox”: “Dating apps are supposed to be matching lovebirds together, but once they do, the lovebirds fly away — and take their money with them.” There is a conflict on the business sides and mission statements of love apps. The question is: which one wins? Are dating apps so successful that they’re running themselves out of business because their match-making systems really do work? Or is the business-side winning out, and their match-making process designed to fail in order to keep their clients searching, tantalized by their mission statement? Of course, the presidents and marketing teams of the apps have, as Rosalsky quotes in his article, denied the latter, and have claimed that their business model is in complete harmony with their mission statement — therefore implying that the apps themselves are an unlimited resource, always renewing itself in complete sustainability.
The modern lover almost feels the need to be in the apps to find a romantic spark, some chemistry. Every day their Theodore-like bags of flesh are confronted with limitless potential fulfillment or utter disappointment. Algorithms manicure experience so it loses spontaneity and risk. Our culture is one which continuously praises options and equates having more options with being happier with those options — this is a fundamental presumption of our contemporary social coordinates. Almost every social decision we make is to expand our options because it is equated with inherent goodness. A nostalgic idealization of our parents’ dating is no good. We cannot take back the inventions of the 21st century, and too many of the adults of today have experienced a reluctant and unhappy but ‘committed’ relationship in their childhood home.
The very unique form of freedom which we find ourselves with today in the world of dating needs to be integrated into what we think we know and what we believe about human life — and even more important, it needs to be integrated into what kind of world we want in the future. Do we want a world like Theodore’s, in which love is completely outsourced? Perhaps there are other configurations in which love and technology are complimentary, or at least live harmoniously beside each other. A perfect integration of love and technology seems unlikely: one poses a vision of life which has no limits, and the other poses a vision which needs limits. It is an old problem in a new guise.
