'Discrete and looking (to profit): homoconnectivity on Grindr' by
Chase Aunspach in (2020) 37
Critical Studies in Media Communication 43-57 comments
The queer dating and hookup app Grindr evidences a technological and economic intensification in queer spaces online. The dominant modality of capitalist power is no longer consumerist norms but the collection and analysis of data. Grindr’s participation in datafication distributes increased risks upon its queer users and necessitates a renewed politics of queer privacy beyond homonormativity. I name this arrangement of power homoconnectivity and detail four techniques that capitalism deploys to capture and monetize queer social production. Ultimately, this article unpacks how Grindr designs experiences that move users to log into the app while hiding its engagement with multi-sided markets. Oscillating between producing continuous experiences and deploying annoying constraints, platforms like Grindr privatize and monetize user spaces, communities, social production, and lives under the guise of increased connectivity. With the goal of building more just queer worlds, homoconnectivity makes legible new pressure points to push back against the growing ubiquity of capitalist datafication and queer world-taking.
Aunspach argues
Love, Simon’s (2018) sugary-sweet, queer coming-of-age narrative can evidence that there is more to queer media politics than representation. Take the following exchange between Simon and his father, Nick (Godfrey, Bowen, Shahbazian, Klausner and Berlanti, 2018). After a quick hug and apology for his casual homophobia, Simon’s dad offers, “Hey. I thought maybe we could sign up for Grindr together.” Simon puts his hands in his pockets, digging for the right thing to say: “You don’t know what Grindr is, do you?” “It’s Facebook for gay people!” flexes Nick, stepping inside their house and into his newfound allyship. Looking down, Simon says plainly, “ … not what it is,” before following his dad through the doorway.
Obviously, Simon’s dad could have used more background information about Grindr. Released in 2009, Grindr is a geolocative mobile application with over 3.8 million daily active users who are primarily men-who-have-sex-with-men, as well as transwomen and non-binary individuals (Bucksense and Grindr, 2018). Arranging hookups is predominately why people log into Grindr (Licoppe, Rivière, and Morel, 2016), and other uses include simply passing the time, coordinating sex work, chatting with queer friends, organizing intimate and sometimes non-sexual chemsex sessions, generally locating oneself within a broader queer community, and consensually exchanging self-pornography (Ahlm, 2017; Brennan, 2017; Cassidy, 2018; Hakim, 2019; Miles, 2017; Tziallas, 2015). Researchers have argued Grindr, due the app’s networked immediacy and the relative discreetness of cell phones, can challenge the heteronormativity of otherwise contextually “straight” spaces (Batiste, 2013). Affordances like this can make Grindr feel like a hard break with previous queer spaces. However, Mowlabocus (2010) pointed out that Grindr is one technology in a long history that demonstrates how the seemingly firm lines between the public–private, online–offline “are at best, difficult to maintain, and at worse, fabrications that conceal the truth of” queer subcultures’ terrains (p. 15). These similarities do not stop at the public–private, online–offline divide; Grindr and its users’ communication often reaffirm the long history of inequalities sustained in otherwise “inclusive” queer spaces along power lines like citizen status, class, and whiteness (Shield, 2019).
In this article, I argue that Simon—not his dad—is mistaken. Grindr and Facebook are more similar than different. They are platforms that bring together users, corporate partners, and even governments who have a vested interest in “the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data” (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018, p. 4). Thinking with Grindr and similar apps extends previous work about queer commercialization online (Campbell, 2005), privacy (Fuchs, 2012), technoliberalism (Pfister and Yang, 2018), and platform studies (van Dijck, 2013) to better enunciate the material and political stakes for queer people in this current mutation of capitalism. I offer the concept of homoconnectivity1 to illuminate the risks LGBTQ people as a group face online—not just because Grindr encourages stranger sociability (Albury and Byron, 2016) but due to datafication (Crain, 2018; Mai, 2016).
I am not alone in this concern. In March 2019, Reuters reported that the Federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) notified Grindr’s parent company Beijing Kunlun Tech, after considering its plan for an initial public offering, the organization needed to sell the app outright since its Chinese ownership posed a U.S. national security risk (O’Donnell, Baker, & Wang, 2019). This follows a U.S. government trend of questioning how companies located in China might be pressured by the Chinese government to give up user data. In the case of Grindr, its collection of users’ sex practices, locations, and serostatuses could make rich fodder for Chinese agents to coerce people who might not be openly queer into carrying out military and corporate espionage (Finley, 2019). Despite the fact the CFIUS rescinded its objections in July 2019 (Yang, 2019), this anxiety over queer data is not just some Cold War hangover. Grindr’s (2018) Terms of Service boldly declare that by logging into the app “you consent to the transfer and processing of [y]our data in the United States of America and any other jurisdiction throughout the world” (“Use Outside the United States,” para. 1). In a heteronormative world with surveilling governments and corporations unaccountable for their privacy practices, the distribution of risk placed on queer people online calls for further theorizing and political action.
In what follows, I establish the concept of homoconnectivity to then zoom into Grindr as a specific instantiation of its data extraction. I join a growing group of scholars (Faris, 2018; Race, 2015; Shield, 2018; Woo, 2015; Yeo and Fung, 2018) taking Grindr itself as a text to counteract a general trend in queer media research that “treats the medium of delivery—television, radio, film, the internet, and so on—as neutral, universal, or presumptively masculine” (Shaw and Sender, 2016, p. 1). The remainder of this article unfolds in three main moves. First, I animate homoconnectivity to illuminate how platform capitalism and datafication affect queer users in queer-for-queer online spaces. This sets the stage to, second, analyze Grindr’s design, following how the app creates user experiences that teeter–totter between continuity and constraint to smooth over the app’s multiple market pressures to render and collect user data, advertise, and obtain purchases of its subscription service. I end with a brief meditation on the media struggles and futures of homoconnectivity.
