Claude is the new blue bubble
Just in time: a fresh red flag online
Ladies.
What are we doing?
Are we on the threshold of the next generation of a new breed of green bubble discourse? The vibes say: 🙂↕️🤦♂️.
Reasons to say no
Years ago, I was using the apps in Brooklyn. Like a lot of guys, I didn’t get a ton of matches — maybe one or two per week? So any match was an event. You wanted to see what the deal was.
If I recall correctly, this one was an inbound — no swipe by me. These were real rarities! The gold foil Pokémon of online dating! Well, it turned out that she had only matched to tell me that one field on my Hinge profile was a turn off.
I had written something on there — I don’t remember what — that was not very Brooklyn, so she screenshotted it to tell me it was red flag.
And I quote: “🚩 🚩 🚩”.
I unmatched with her or swiped away without replying (I think?). I confess that I might also have changed whatever she critiqued (it was a long time ago). But for sure I moved on.
A favorite pastime for singles these days is clout-chasing social media by coming up with new items to add to the long collective list of reasons to say no to getting to know someone new.
So. There’s a growing array of red flags tied more to people’s behaviors as a consumer than they are tied to their character as a human being.
Other dumb things folks reject each other over:
And now, apparently, some folks want to add which robots-on-the-internet-that-change-completely-every-few-weeks people choose to the set of verboten preferences.
It’s like:
And before someone points out that these things are jokes, get real. On the internet, memetic flippancy becomes reified via spread. When a joke strikes a cultural chord it doesn’t take long before others take it seriously, the Slendermanification of dumb gags.
Good news tho. Fishing has been ruled mostly okay.
Look.
Everyone has had one of those short, bad affairs where they got hurt hard fast, and they want to cast a magic spell to make sure it never happens again.
Like: “I will never again go out with someone who wears cowboy boots/Ray Bans/paisley ties” or whatever.
But we all know that lots of folks just aren’t connecting these days. And it’s not just that social media has given the losers-who-have-always-been-with-us a way to finally be heard. No, the change is demographic and historic.
So. The magic spells are not helping. It turns out your little charms of heartbreak protection are — in fact — self-inflicted curses.
Listen to me now and hear me later: If Mary Matalin and James Carville can make it work while manning opposite sides of the George H.W. Bush vs. Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992, you can handle seeing someone who uses ChatGPT.
Or even Grok.
Yes, prediction markets have won, but why do they feel so gross? (with Kate Irwin)
I feel weird about prediction markets. I think a lot of us do?
P.S. And btw if you do start seeing someone, just don’t even ask him or her to turn on location sharing. You never have to know if they will or won’t say yes if you just never ask! And I promise you — no matter what! — that way lies madness.
Though OK if someone actually says The Human Centipede, like — fair enough. Get out now.