I wake up in the morning and search for my phantom vape. It’s not there. Already the day begins with absence — a flicker of disembodiment. I make a cup of coffee or, depending on my level of self-loathing, walk down to the annoyingly bougie café where I can spend $6 on a cup of drip that tastes like shit, but it’s convenient.

I open Substack. Every other essay is about love or loneliness or the dry ache in the space where love should be. Spring fever is setting in. It’s in the wind, in the memes, in the group chats. Every conversation I have lately ends with some variation of the same sigh: what happened to intimacy?

My friend Anthony has been brilliantly tracking this collapse — tracing the rise of boutique sexual identities and the gamification of eros. Polyamory is in, commitment is out. We swipe and scroll and like and ghost, but we don’t tether ourselves. To tether would be to risk. To choose. To give up the infinite for the particular. And we are terrified of that.

Our subjectivities have been reshaped by screens — flattened, gamified, optimized. We chase quick dopamine hits, flickers of attention, digital highs. And then we move on, unsatisfied. We ghost our way out. We project our desires into the void, and the void — the algorithm — projects its own desires right back at us. Projects them as if they’re our own, as if we thought of them ourselves. Cyborgian intimacy. Intimacy without intimacy. Fleshless love. Underpinning it is a deep fear or even disgust with the body, with the messiness of the body. In the digital age, we want everything clean, everything optimized, everything sterile. Everything safe.

I keep coming back to a remark Nina Power once made — or maybe it was a friend of hers she was quoting — that “the next summer of love will be sexless.” It sounded absurd when I first heard it. Now it just sounds inevitable. On the internet, there are no bodies. Only avatars. As that old New Yorker cartoon put it: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But it’s worse than that now. On the internet, nobody cares if you’re a dog, so long as your profile picture is hot and your politics are brand-safe, boring, and conformist.

This is where Mary Harrington’s work hits with the force of a thunderclap. Her argument — that the techno-utopian dream of liberating us from our bodies has instead made us more lonely, more manipulable, more prone to the domination of markets — rings truer every day. Harrington has written powerfully about how postmodern feminism, in chasing freedom from constraint, accidentally signed us up for the perfect neoliberal consumer identity: floating, unanchored, easily optimized. No kids, no commitments, just vibes and birth control. She has a whole thing about “rewilding sex.” I’m not on board with all of it — lest you accuse me of being a TERF or a fascist — but she’s smart, and she has a point, and her ideas deserve to be engaged and not dismissed as “fash.”

We were promised liberation. What we got was fragmentation.

Dating apps are the apotheosis of this world. They are the new village matchmakers — but instead of a well-meaning yenta with a headscarf and a sense of who your mother would approve of, we have cold-blooded code written by autistic nerds who think "compatibility" can be solved like a math problem. The algorithm doesn’t just sell us therapy and SSRIs. It sells us ourselves — or rather, an optimized version of who we might be if we just made the right choices. It decides who we’re allowed to desire, and it trains us to desire who it presents.

Recently I joked that the algorithm thinks my soulmate is an anthropology PhD who watches cinéma vérité and plays the theremin. But the joke lands because there’s truth in it. It’s a parody of personalization — a fantasy of specificity so precise it becomes absurd. And yet, we swipe. We search. We hope. We are, in the deepest sense, being sorted.

At the height of Occupy Wall Street, Natasha Lennard was mocked — viciously — for suggesting that the internet was warping our inner lives. She wasn’t wrong. She just said it too early, and without the buffer of irony. What we now call “chronically online” used to be called prophetic. She understood something elemental: that political liberation without subjective transformation is just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. You can’t challenge capitalism if you’re still formatting your desires according to its logic.

And what is dating app culture if not the purest expression of capitalist desire? Maximize choice. Minimize cost. Replace the messy inefficiencies of love with data. Swipe until you find someone with the right bio-to-photo ratio. Ghost them if they bleed too much. If they want too much. If they ask for something as unreasonable as your presence, your loyalty, your time.

But love without sacrifice is not love. It’s marketing.

Commitment is not the enemy of freedom — it’s its condition. To choose one person, to bind yourself to them, to stay when it would be easier to go — this is what makes love real. It is the resistance of the infinite scroll. It is the refusal of optimization. It is saying: I will not upgrade. I will not swipe. I will not treat the most sacred part of my life like a product.

The cyborgian dream is that we can have intimacy without pain, connection without risk, pleasure without presence. But what it gives us is alienation. A curated loneliness. The endless hum of the timeline in the middle of the night.

Love is not a vibe. It is a vow.
And we are starving for it.