Romance – the last frontier of automatization – has alas been taken over by the world of computers. Not pheromones, but algorithms now orchestrate our love lives.

When I first heard of this – that the world of romance was now ruled by high-tech dating technologies and matchmaking software programs that chart patterns in our personal data, seeking the binary code for compatibility – I was repulsed. What have we come to when we can’t bump into each other in the street, meet eyes, and actually feel the magic of chemistry running through our veins? The transcription of our flesh-and-blood selves into digital avatars seemed to me like an eerie process of progressive disembodiment. The exodus of more and more life activities from physical into digital felt not like “progress”, but rather, as if a dystopic sci-fi plot was taking over the world in real time.

“What are you, a Luddite? Don’t be so nostalgic!” That’s what everyone said to me. But I endured being labeled anachronistic and romantic: I was committed to my stance that something was deeply amiss...and that match-making software was the final straw in the rampant virtualization of everything, celebrated under false pretenses in the name of “efficiency”.

But then I moved... from a decently sized city to a sprawling metropolis: New York City. I guess I met some okay people at work, and at school. I had a roommate. But within months I realized that all these regular encounters were just touch-and go, rarely adding up into real relationships. See in New York City, everyone is too god damn busy with their careers and their part-time jobs and their status and their turbo workouts – yes, even the starving artists, vagabonds and rogue Brooklyn hippies – that no one has “time” to unplug from the robotic rat race to casually “hang out”. That’s when I found myself desiring to do exactly what I forbade myself from doing: registering for an OK Cupid account. But I had no interest in dating at the time; I was just hoping to find someone who wanted to hang out.

As months in New York City went on, I met some sharp intellectual-types who urged me to correct what they perceived as my “philosophically naïve perception of the nature of technology and virtual reality”. They schooled me in Baudrillard, Heidegger and Steigler. They showed me how I was creating a false binary between what’s “natural” and what’s “unnatural”. As they cited the myth of Prometheus – with fire as the first technology, which man acquired a stolen gift from the Gods – they proved to me that “technological innovation” was something “natural” and endemic to the human condition. The only sound philosophical stances would be, as I was told, either: everything is “natural” or everything is “unnatural”.

Still, I began to sense something eerie about the popularity of online matchmaking platforms. I felt that they offered a premonition of our future as a species whose mission on earth, hitherto for, has been to sexually reproduce itself, and multiply. Technosexuals (those who prefer robots or automatons sexually instead of humans) seem to be exceptional cases now, but just wait a few more years… robot love is on the horizon. “Hot” and “sexy” fembots are now used in an advertisement for vodka that’s unusually prolific across NYC, men masturbate to photos of women that are entirely digitally constructed, and the popularity of “RealDolls” (the world’s finest adult love doll) spreads from Japan across the globe.

Though my intellectual mentors, and experience, in NYC altered my evaluation of all of this, nothing can assuage the overwhelming, surreal, and disorienting feeling of the uncanny. It's like a miasma in my brain that thickens each day as we are immersed, more and more, into an entirely virtual and hyperreality. As permanent fault lines cut jarringly into the real, are we not increasingly unable to distinguish the “real” from simulation, that is, to be philosophically correct, if there ever was...