How Algorithms Killed Romance

Arranged marriages long ago disappeared from the secular West. Yet marriage and dating are becoming functions of caste once more. This time, it’s dating apps that determine caste, with status signals subtly baked into almost every social-media platform. From Elo scores measuring attractiveness and social desirability to the number of followers to filters used to keep out the lowly, measurable network effects and behavioural engineering regulate how we think and what we’re supposed to feel, structuring our choices in profound but often invisible ways.