Love in the Age of Data - Los Angeles Review of Books

Dreams spring from reality and are realized in it. IN 2017, with an almost imperceptible ripple, a story broke out in the French media reporting on the bizarre case of a young Danish proto-fascist who had become a kind of "alt-right" data miner. The misguided racist was using information harvested from one of IAC's biggest Match Group relationship websites, OkCupid, to support a fake-science argument in favor of an apparently new form of white supremacist eugenics. The story picked up little attention, and those who commented on it -- in the progressive media at least -- saw the attempt as a deliberate and gratuitous misuse of data to support a dangerous political agenda, which in some ways it was. Although part of a wider rise in dangerous right-wing "race science," which Jordan Peterson can be seen as the soft edge of, there is something particularly important about data drawn from the realm of love.