Heart of Darkness: My Dinner with Esther Perel & Hinge (Pt. 1)
"This essay looks to be a clear violation of terms.”
The subject line was overwhelming, bedazzled with emojis and punctuation. It looked like spam to me.
[TIME SENSITIVE] 🕯️🗣️💞 Hinge | Dinner + Paid Campaign | August’s Newsletter
But no, this was a very real invitation to an influencer event in LA, sponsored by the dating app Hinge and hosted by renowned relationship expert Esther Perel. “Chic and intimate” the invitation promised. “Three-course meal.” In exchange for my attendance and a hashtag-sponsored essay about it, I would receive [redacted] thousand dollars.
Attached to the email was a 16-slide presentation with guidelines on content creation (“authentic storytelling”) plus a reminder to “keep it light” because, after all, I’d been chosen for “the fun, silly ways [I] engage [my] community.”
Was this invitation really intended for me, August Lamm, vocal dumb phone user and aggressive anti-technology activist? Had no one looked me up? If they had, they would’ve seen I’m about to publish a “manifesto” on the evils of screen addiction, surveillance capitalism, and yes, dating apps. The book is titled You Don’t Need A Smartphone. Hinge is a mobile-only application, i.e. You Need A Smartphone To Use It.
Or was it possible that they knew exactly who I was? That a tech corporation had the audacity to solicit the “voice and perspective” of a confirmed enemy? More likely, they’d just read my most recent essay, featured in that day’s Substack Post, which had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with love.
“I kind of wish there were a way to go to the event just to roast it afterward,” I emailed my publicist. “Let me know if that’s a horrible idea!”
“Up to you if you want to do this,” she replied, keeping her distance.
I weighed the risks. Money was a big factor. As someone who had, in the words of my accountant, “blown through” my book advance long before publication date, I could really use some cushion. But would I ever see that money? Certainly not until my sponsored essay went live—and I wasn’t about violate my principles so tastelessly, not even for [redacted] thousand dollars.
Another stumbling block: photographers and videographers would capture the event. The images might, according to the contract, be used for [redacted]. I imagined my smiling, hypocritical face all over [redacted]—excellent ammunition for the haters.
I read and reread the contract for some magical loophole that would allow me to do everything I wanted (take the trip, write an honest essay, get paid) without a lawsuit. But the wording could not have been clearer: [redacted].
The story, however, was irresistible. I signed the contract, charging the flight and hotel to my personal credit card with the dizzying sense that the money was gone forever.
“Great news!” a marketing agent replied. “The brand is looking forward to you attending!”
Too late for it to matter, I sent the contract to a lawyer friend. “If the essay does really well,” he warned (I interpreted it as praise), “and damages the company, the odds of litigation go way up. They might ask for an injunction asking you to take the piece down—likely after threatening much worse. This essay looks to be a clear violation of terms.”
It is nice to think that a personal essay could damage a multi-billion dollar tech company with 30 million users. But let’s be real: anti-tech activism is like bringing a fist to a drone strike. How could anything anyone writes be more powerful than the promise of true love and endless sexual options?
Hinge will be fine. Its users are wholeheartedly hooked. I should know: I wasted my twenties on Hinge, swiping, searching, hoping. It took much more than an essay to get me to quit.
Like most digital platforms, dating apps fail at solving a problem that never existed in the first place—or if it did, was created by other digital platforms.
Ask any young person and they’ll tell you that dating today is harder now than ever. Sex rates are shockingly low. Screentime is shockingly high. It was easier to find love without technology getting in the way.
Dating apps have so profoundly altered the course of romance that we no longer expect to find partners through traditional means: friends, work, serendipitous encounters. To the delight of Big Tech, we’re now convinced we need a middleman.
We hardly bother searching for love in our day-to-day lives. Instead, we wait until we’re home (on the toilet) to open our hearts. Apps make us less attuned to the possibilities around us. They’ve dismissed the meet-cute without providing sane alternatives.
My hotel in Venice Beach was cheap and strange, with surrealist murals and windows looking out onto astroturf. For breakfast, I walked to Erewhon, the iconic LA grocery store and hub of health extremism, where my critical distance was overpowered by the promise of packaged redemption. “Even you,” the shelves seemed to say, “yes, you with the dry elbows and stained shirt—even you might buy your way to wellness.” And I almost believed it, until I saw the prices.
I settled for a small bottle of coconut kefir ($11) and made my way to the checkout line. In front of me, a pair of men were carrying to-go boxes with, unbelievably, $35 stickers. They were in the process of choosing between water options. One man gestured to a tall, blue glass bottle: “I wash my face with that.”
The event was at six p.m. but according to the movies, LA rush hour is hell on earth, so I decided to leave my hotel at four. I called the number of a cab service I’d copied down in my notebook and was greeted by an AI agent that requested then liberally employed my first name. “Alright, August,” it said, “your car is on its way.”
A full hour early, I was deposited outside the gates of the [redacted] Foundation, which Hinge had rented out for the evening. A last-minute email (which my boyfriend read aloud to me over the phone) relayed that I was no longer permitted to take identifiable photos of the grounds. Initially, I’d been encouraged to shoot as much “content” as possible. Did the change bespeak growing tensions? Was the Foundation, like me, belatedly regretting partnering with a dating app?
The evening was young: catering vans still unloading, influencers still en route, and no sign of Perel. I walked back down the drive so as not to be seen. There were no benches for miles. I waited on the sidewalk outside a gated, keycard-access park—the closest thing to a public space in a neighborhood with a median home value over 3 million—then walked back to the Foundation, notebook in hand, ready for a scoop.
I recently saw a (digital) billboard that announced, “More tools won’t fix what’s broken.” I completely agreed. In this technological age, we have more tools than we can manage. Our instinct is to combat tech with more tech, just as we treat the side effects of psychiatric meds with more prescriptions. We can’t conceive of an alternative, or an escape.
The ad I’m describing is for an A.I. company. Yes, we’ve reached a point where the disease can diagnose itself. If the tech world could go just one philosophical step further, it would hit upon the cure. But like an infinite-scroll ouroboros, it only leads further into itself.
In a recent Instagram post, Esther Perel writes, “We have more reach than ever before, but dating feels like work. It feels artificial. We’re stuck in scripts. Drowning in choice. Disconnected from each other.”
A promising start! But then: “So I partnered with Hinge to create 10 new prompts.”
This brings to mind Anna Weiner’s New Yorker piece on AI companions, in which one tech founder is quoted as saying:
I think we’re in a pretty fucked situation. We got to a point of extreme polarization, loneliness, isolation, and not knowing how to connect—and the dopamine problems, attention problems, communication problems.
A lucid assessment. But like Perel’s, it falls apart in the conclusion, our “fucked situation” becoming just another excuse to innovate.
Something has to be more powerful [than the forces isolating us]. What’s more powerful than A.I.?
Ambassadors of tech claim that the best way to fight disconnection is by reinforcing its foundation. They encourage us to invest further in the very source of our misery. It makes no sense, but they keep saying it. Why? Tech pays its ambassadors; reality doesn’t.
“Can I get some shots of you?” a photographer asked as I entered the courtyard.
“Oh sure,” I said, “like a headshot?”
She seemed confused. “Like a fit pic.”
I was wearing a new red dress because I once read in a magazine that red increases sex appeal. I needn’t have bothered: there was only one straight man in attendance, and his life path was making “humor content” on TikTok. (Also, I have a loving, flip-phoned boyfriend.)
“What should I do?” I asked, standing rigidly against a wall.
“Maybe like this?” The photographer crossed one leg over the other in a pose that registered as vaguely familiar from high school prom and sorority group shots. It bespoke a feminine savvy I could never claim for myself. As a compromise, I slightly bent one of my knees.
“Okay, girl,” the photographer fawned. Though I knew flattery to be a trick of the trade, I was nonetheless flattered. My shoulders relaxed, my smile widened, and the photographer noticed. “Ms. I-don’t-know-how-to-pose!”
Next in line was a colorfully-clad, highly cosmeticked woman who asked zero questions before launching into a rapid sequence of poses punctuated by the camera’s flash. She threw both hands up, tilted her head to the side, twisted a strand of hair around one finger, opened her mouth wide in mock-ecstasy.
I turned to a Hinge staff member and said, “Guess that’s the difference between a writer and an influencer.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “You have to use that as your Instagram caption.”
“How can I start dating if I’m not ready to come out?” a Hinge billboard asks. The answer, supplied by Masami (they/them), is to “make new friendships and relationships IRL. Go to queer-focused, local spaces…Introduce yourself to someone, make a connection, see where it goes.”
Weird advice from a dating app. Are we meant to trust it more for its humility? Possibly. But I think there’s something more sinister going on: Hinge laying claim to the broader concept of love, positioning apps as the default arena for modern romance—not to be questioned, or even mentioned. “Designed to be deleted” is their slogan. Is Hinge trying to delete itself from the story?
In keeping with their ads, the LA dinner had nothing to do with tech. No one talked about Hinge. No one asked whether I used it. Some attendees, myself included, had met their partners offline. The conversation, steered by staff and Perel, stuck to universal themes. Conversational prompts, proffered on a silver tray, made no mention of matches or likes.
I’d been promised “real, candid conversations on the tensions Gen Z is navigating in dating right now.” What tension could be greater, or more relevant, than the tension between us and our technology?
Hinge’s latest video campaign, with well over 100 million views, is titled, “It’s Funny We Met on Hinge.” The argument seems to be that although single people often cross paths “IRL”—taking the same train, going to the same shows, even living in the same building—they need an app to facilitate the introductions.
The ads are narrated by a chorus of couples, soundbites strung together to seem like a one train of thought.
“I did not have the courage to talk to you.”
“It took Hinge to, like, actually pull us together.”
“If we met each other before, I don’t think it would’ve been romantic.”
“We met at the perfect time.”
The point is that we’re unqualified to find love on our own. We lack the requisite courage and insight. We’d be better off leaving it to the algorithm. “Now I believe in fate,” one man says, standing with his partner in a windswept meadow. Hinge wants us to think it has a monopoly on fate: love is all around you, but you need an account to access it.
Part two coming soon…
Also: I’m planning a book + music tour this fall (info here) and could use some help from locals across the northern U.S. Let me know if you’d like a stop in your city – can’t wait to meet you all!
I love the bit about the lawyer. You’re so absolutely spot on with tech making it seem like mediated love/interaction is the only method. Despite having used dating apps when younger (which never lead to any meaningful interactions); Every time I hear a friend talk about meeting someone on Tinder, Hinge, Grindr, etc. I roll my eyes. Not because of some strange superiority complex which I’m sure is a piece of the equation, but because I can’t imagine sitting my kids down and when they ask for the romantic story about “how we met”, I have to look them in the eyes and say “an algorithm told us we might be good together, so we got over our differences and worshipped our tech overlords.” To me, one of the greatest dangers is that which you’ve highlighted, an increasing disconnection with our own internal compass and intuition. When we rely on tools for something we’re wholly capable of, we lose our own internal methods of navigation. Just see all of the socially awkward teens as a result of only two years of covid classes. Now what has 15 years of e-dating done to people trying to navigate natural intimacy?
Hinge influencer dinner in LA is the most dystopic scene I can imagine. Thank you for sharing and violating their terms