The tinderization of everything

We live in an increasingly tinderized world, one in which the trend seems to be to trivialize just about every aspect of life.

Above and beyond any moral judgments about whether or not it’s a good thing or not that our relationships can now be decided on the basis of swiping a finger across a screen, there is no denying that applications such as Tinder — users of which were generating 1.6 billion photographs and 26 million matches every day in April 2015 — have prompted any number of clones.

It’s not hard to find Tinder equivalents for gays and bisexuals: Grindr and Scruff respectively, or 3nder, for threesomes, along with many others for other options, or even others that offer help for choosing restaurants, adopting pets, finding apartments, buying shoes, getting a job, and naming babies. There’s even a meta-Tinder, a kind of Tinder of all Tinders that allows users to swipe right of left if the idea of a Tinder for this or that seems like a good, or bad, idea.

How many other decisions will we soon be able to tinderize, and how do you feel about it: good, bad, or indifferent? Are there any processes where you work that could be given some Tinder loving care?

So far, the only industry that seems to have resisted Tinder is politics; but that’s because it was tinderized a long time ago. The majority of voters, rather than actually bother to read the parties’ programs and make a decision based on analysis and serious thought, just move their finger to the right or left, as though voting one way or another still meant anything other than a crude simplification of a much more complex reality… (I’m only saying this to get a reaction :-)

(En español, aquí)