Are Apps Disrupting Monogamy? No, and Shut Up

Of all the magical thinking techno-utopianism inspires, the rewriting of history to hang on something as simple as a mechanical process could be the most insane. For anyone tempted to dip into this territory, take note: Twitter didn't invent mass revolt (though it did allow for mass mobilization), Grindr didn't invent cruising (though it did auto​mate it), and the lonely were still lonely long before Facebook came along. And in 2015, just as it seemed as if every last bit of history had been colonized by the technological determinism of Silicon Valley, we got Big Dating.

"Big Dating" is brought to you by Chris Messina, a consultant and fairly prominent open-source advocate who has been credited with inventing what we now know as the hashtag. In a recent op-ed fo​r CNN, Messina (who also live-blogged a romantic relationship through the mid-2000s) wrote about discovering polyamory and embarking on a "monogomish" relationship as he headed to Burning Man in 2013. The basic idea—and hat tip to sex-positive journalist Melissa Gi​ra Grant here—is that apps are disrupting monogamy.

Straight SV ppl think they've invented Big Dating, eg non-monogamy. http://t.co/QiCOvQdnsA I'll be disrupting myself back to a leather bar.

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) January 31, 2015

Suspend your disbelief for a moment and let's just gloss over Messina's discovery of a practice a decade and a half after what many consider to be the definitive boo​k on the subject was published. While we're at it, let's fly through the part where he describes non-monogamous relationships as "data-positive" and "solution-oriented" answers to the failing "product" of marriage. Rather than getting caught up on key words like "Burning Man" and tech industry Mad Libs like "Big Dating unbundled monogamy and sex," let's look at the idea central to Big Dating: namely, that apps like Secret and Snapchat (and probably millennial-friendly dating apps like Tinder and OKCupid) facilitate non-monogamous relationships—and render marriage obsolete—by providing discreet and anonymous venues for sex.

For my generation, marriage is certainly​ on the decline. And the tools we have to express our sexuality are absolutely evolving—there's been some great work on that subject recently. Jenna Wortham's excellent "Everybo​dy Sexts" recounts a broad swath of experiences, from sending an image of your hard cock to someone you met on Tumblr to pressing send on a "tit flick" to your lover while they're at the office. But these aren't exactly expressions of polyamory: case in point, many of the sexters sending Wortham their stories are in long-term, exclusive relationships, just as many of OKCupid's users are looking to wife up.

And then there's this whole idea, posited in Messina's op-ed and echoed elsewhere, that internet dating makes "romantic partners more fungible than ever": swipe one out, bring another one in, dispose of your relationships and replace them with shiner ones—a fundamentally monogamous idea that, rather than valuing people individually, views dating as an open call for a finite number of roles.

Likely, the mindset that Messina is confusing for polyamory is closer to what a webcam performer told Emily ​Witt last year could be understood as "mass intimacy": a kaleidoscopic spectrum of sexual expression, one in which it's possible to show as little or as much as you like, where vulnerability is but one of several factors impacting the depth and satisfaction of an arrangement, where sex can occur as a voyeuristic or audience-driven or one-on-one interaction. Witt's article on the relatively obscure cam and chat service Chaturbate tells us that "internet sexuality" is making "the distinct purposes of porn, sex work, casual sex, internet dating, and social networking" begin to get a little blurrier. It's all very complicated, nuanced, human territory, which much be confusing to someone like Messina, whose only frame for his non-monogamous relationship seems to hang on a Steve Jobs quote.

Jobs once famously said that a computer is like a bicycle for the mind, meaning that it allowed the brain to move faster and with more ease. Therefore, quoth Messina, "when we look back from 20 years in our future, I wonder if we might think of non-monogamy as a bicycle for our hearts." This theory, maddeningly—like so many others that rely on a shallow, linear march of imagined progress—erases the long history of non-monogamous practices in the Western world since, you know, at le​ast ancient Greece and places the mainstreaming of polyamory on technologies like Snapchat, of all things instead of, say, the plethora of other communities who have ​practiced non-monogamy in the US for decades.

It also obscures the fact that marriage itself is one of the most effective and durable technologies that has ever existed, a technology deployed to consolidate property (read: money, women) through bloodlines. In Marriage: A History, Stephanie Coontz takes a hard look at the history of the institution and comes up with a pretty simple takeaway: that even the idea of one true, singular love being central to a marriage is largely an invention of the 20th century, a pulling away from its historical roots as a financial agreement and form of societal glue. (Messina, for his part, thinks monogamy was a natural response to "limited resources," pop evolutionary psychology at its finest.)

So no, Snapchat is not disrupting monogamy, and the logic that says apps like Secret are singlehandedly responsible for a waning interest in exclusivity is the same logic that blames phones for sexting or porn for making people kinky. If Messina were making a similar argument from another side, he'd essentially be blaming the internet for adultury—technophobic hysteria at its finest. So if there's anything to be taken from his jargon-peppered theory it's that digital tools are facilitating different modes of sexual expression, which a much finer, more nuanced cultural shift. "Big Dating," like a lot of oblivious, whitewashed tech-guy narratives, is just an attempt to turn a very old, very complicated idea into a hashtag.