Against The Grind
“You will love again the stranger who was your self. /Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart/to itself, to the stranger who has loved you/all your life, whom you ignored/for another, who knows you by heart.
— Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”
Grindr has bothered me for a long time. I used to download it when the stark isolation of my paralegal job made me crave bodily contact. I lived 90 hours a week in my burlap cubicle, in a windowless room, in the bowels of the UBS building, surrounded by computer screens. Work involved the seamless transition between answering emails and indulging the sedate pleasures of Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. After work, I’d throw myself on my feather bed and upload Grindr. I had deleted it repeatedly, each time with the less confident belief that I could stay away for good. Grindr almost never lead to sex. And when it did, the contractual quality of these arrangements deprived it of erotic force. Fellating men whom I’d met an hour before felt no sexier than my annual testicular exam. But these mutual humiliations could not prevent me from uploading Grindr again. As the sky over Prospect Park turned orange, I would lie on my cheap mattress, alone with the buzz of Grindr notifications, the glare of my iPhone, and the pursuit of an intimacy whose digital possibility rendered it precarious.
“Rather than words,” writes Phillip Larkin in “High Windows,” “Comes the thought of high windows:/the sun-comprehending glass,/And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows,/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” Infinity, for Larkin, is ethereal. He stands in a church somewhere — I imagine the Scottish Highlands — and looks out the window. The endless “deep blue air” lets him perceive what exists beyond language, what opens out onto transcendence, if only for an instant. But infinity horrifies me. Yes, I want to see what Larkin sees, and sometimes I almost do, like each time I stand in front of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Two Circles or listen to Chopin. But I believe that Kafka’s infinity, not Larkin’s, is more apropos to our digital present. When I’m on Grindr, I’m the man in Kafka’s “Before the Law,” the man who demands to be seen before a judge, who must enter through an endless series of doors only to have a gatekeeper warn him that “from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other.” “The man from the country has not expected such difficulties,” Kafka writes, “the law should always be accessible to everyone.” The man is paralyzed. He lingers outside the first door and eventually dies. Grindr is a Kafkaesque joke: it’s promise of endless and ubiquitous sex opens doors through which we will never fully pass and fulfill our desire. Grindr is the gatekeeper that halts us before our screens, alone, though we did not expect such difficulties. After all, sex should be accessible to everyone, and how curious that it’s contained at the very point of its (infinite) possibility!
Grindr extends the present and postpones the future. It makes a Pyrrhic victory out of sex, so long does it take to achieve it, so economic are its terms. If you are gay, dear reader, then perhaps you recognize that curious mix of desire and frustration that Grindr arouses after three hours of use. You know the feeling — you’ve just messaged numerous guys, none of whom respond, and the ones who do stop answering after 15 minutes of inane banter that makes you want to self-immolate, so agitated are you by conversation that goes nowhere and is endless: “What you into?” “Pics?” “Stats?” “Host?” And then the dick pics. Oh, yes. The dick pics. Dick pics galore. Enough dicks to fill ten encyclopedias. Dicks that run the gamut. Dicks that are white, black, brown, cut, uncut, some that drip semen, all erect, all anonymous, all spectral in the iPhone’s harsh light, pics that are less enticing than 8th grade sex ed. You do not hate these men. You hate yourself. You have wasted hours of your life in a pursuit that has siphoned off time you were supposed to Hamlet or write your novel or stroll outside and find a person, a real person, to fuck. You could have spent those hours developing yourself, a self, which is difficult to do when machines beckon us with their sedate pleasures, infinite swipes, chats that make eternal a hyperstimulating present.
If we’ve let ourselves be lured into this endless digital pursuit, then I credit Larry Kramer for holding a mirror up to our collective folly. “We have everything required to save our world except the will to do it,” Kramer scolded us at the Queer Liberation March. “Most gay people I see appear to have too much time on their hands. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on drugs and do your endless round of cyber-surfing until dawn, then you do have too much time on your hands.” A man next to me screamed, “Queer joy matters! It’s okay to live just for yourself!” Is it okay to live just for yourself? Isn’t that the neoliberal palaver that masquerades as liberating? Queer joy, whatever that is, might matter. But Grindr does not offer us joy, nor do any of the other places we go, in Kramer’s antique lexicon, to “cyber-surf.” Joy opens us up to aesthetic and political possibilities that let us imagine otherwise. And perhaps we create new futures, new ways of existing together, when we lift our gaze from the screens that steal so much of our attention and discover what it means to live amongst each other again, those complex entanglements of flesh upon flesh, those ambiguous, brief stares that gay men, especially older gay men, know from their walks in any city street, from West Hollywood to the West Village.
At stake for me in Grindr, then, is futurity. I mean that we have lost the sense of a future beyond the present, beyond 24/7 digital labor and leisure that accompanies everyday life under contemporary capitalism. We live so much of our lives in machines that stimulate everything but our collective ability to imagine otherwise. And I wonder whether Grindr is the queer expression of Mark Fisher’s famous term, “capitalist realism,” the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.” I amend Fisher’s definition and argue that neoliberalism, not capitalism, dominates our field of vision. Political theorist Wendy Brown tells us that neoliberalism is not synonymous with capitalism. Rather, it is far more intrusive than Marx could have ever imagined. Brown argues that neoliberalism extends the logic of the market into every crevice of our existence: it transforms humans into human capital, a being that sees each pursuit — romantic, professional, spiritual — as a way to increase its competitive position. Neoliberalism threatens democracy, Brown says, because the human is no longer understood as a creature that rules itself (homo politicus) but one that must comport with the market (homo oeconomicus) or die. This person lacks the vocabulary or imagination to determine its means and ends. I argue that a world in which homo politicus has vanquished homo oeconomicus is a world that cannot imagine a future. Neoliberalism has replaced self-determination with competition as the greatest manifestation of freedom. We compete for today at the expense of the future. And this logic dominates our social and political existence. I see “neoliberal realism” as Grindr’s operative mode, a queer world that exists in the ceaseless present of competitive time, the “grind.”
Nowhere is this more obvious than Grindr’s newest ad. The tagline for Grindr Unlimited — “Endless possibility. Infinite Connection” — harkens back to Kafka’s horrific parable. Grindr Unlimited provides “unlimited” options for possible hookups. It markets itself to people whose competitive ethos precludes meaningful romantic and social connections: “Your weekend is booked. You’ve got dinner with clients in an hour, drinks with friends after, and a flight to Hong Kong in the morning. When it comes to your grinding, every minute counts, and you can’t afford to waste time.” You can’t afford to waste time. In neoliberal fashion, Grindr transforms sex into a competitive pursuit. The time that you fuck feels the same as the time that you work. Replace “grinding” with “investing” and the tone does not change. Even the word “grinding” hitches sex to the alienating tempo of competition: “In the grind.”. In Freudian terms, the Reality Principle absorbs the Pleasure Principle, digital leisure resembles digital labor, and this pursuit becomes no more sensual than my paralegal job. Above this advertisement we see an image of two muscly, white men who look like they’re either wrestling or fucking. Grafted onto their bodies is the mathematical symbol for infinity (). Further down, we read the tagline: “Scroll forever without running out of people to browse or chat.” Forever scroll. Forever search. Browse. Chat. Swipe. Fuck. A person who swipes forever is a person without a future.
What’s beyond neoliberal realism? In his prophetic book Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The future is queerness’s domain.” “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing,” Muñoz writes, “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” I’ve tried to develop a critical language for why Grindr fucking sucks, and what this means for you straight people, too. But it’s also been my aim to imagine how to open up more humane ways of seeing and feeling beyond Grindr’s regime of perception. For Muñoz, it is the aesthetic that opens up to futurity: “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” But what does he mean by “queerness”? Muñoz isn’t talking about the muscled hunks who shake their asses on Goldman Sachs floats at Pride, work at McKinsey, and support the U.S. military. Rather, queerness is a critical stance towards a present that offers no more than competition, profit, and conformity. And I believe that we ought to view queerness as a critical stance towards neoliberalism itself, so profoundly has it shaped us. “The present is not enough,” Muñoz writes, “It is impoverished and toxic for queers who do not feel the privilege of…‘rational’ expectations.” Rationalism, Muñoz suggests, dominates our social and political vision. In Muñoz’s words, rationalism privileges the empirical, the “here and now,” over a feeling of a “then and there.” Queer utopia depends upon the unseen, the ineffable, the “presence of absence,” as Mahmoud Darwish might say. You can feel it, not measure it. What I felt in my room was disenchantment. Grindr led me nowhere but to the sedate pleasures of the here and now.
Muñoz believes that mutual pleasure opens us up to queer utopia, or, as I stress, life beyond neoliberalism. But Grindr sees pleasure as a technical problem to be managed. James Bridle calls “computational thought,” “the belief that any given problem can be solved by computation.” There’s an app for that! I needed a man because I was alone. And I was alone because I lived in a political economy that separated me from others.: my midtown commute, my cubicle, 24/7 digital work, and the equal amount of Netflix required to numb myself. I was isolated. The present was not enough: something was missing. And Grindr’s CEO and founder Joel Simkhai wanted to create an app for that. “I’d already been thinking about easier ways to meet,” Simkhai told Numero, “When I was living in Manhattan I would wonder about the guys who lived around my block, or the guys in the bar I went to — how do I meet them?” Simkhai never asks why it’s so difficult to meet people. I argue that it’s difficult to meet people because our Uberized economy demands that we work all the time, alone, for less pay. Austerity politics makes survival a constant struggle, and Muñoz’s “new and better pleasures” seem luxurious, even though, paradoxically, they’re needed more than ever. But when the bills mount and your landlord is at the door, “every minute counts and you can’t afford to waste time.” Grindr shows us how neoliberalism undermines care and pleasure and then offers technical solutions that fail to solve this crisis. “The beautiful thing about Grindr,” Simkhai continues,” is that it’s with you anytime. You can sit in the park, you can go to a bar, you can take the bus.” Beautiful? Simkhai wouldn’t know what beauty was if it fell onto his yoga mat at Equinox. But, ok Joel. I suppose Grindr is beautiful. It’s beautiful for someone whose precarious existence deprives them of the care and attention that they deserve.
Muñoz lets me see that the isolation I feel, that we all feel, is as aesthetic as it is political. It is inscribed into the landscape of our work and leisure. My cubicle enclosed my body as well as my mind. It was shaped the same as the grid of users in Grindr’s interface. It occluded my vision. I could not see beyond my cubicle. And I cannot see beyond Grindr to other social and political possibilities. But how wonderful it is that I can turn the street, the subway, the park, into my own digital hunting ground! I do not have look at the man who passes me on Broadway, whose gaze eludes me, because I can look downward, because I can scroll forever without running out of people to browse, chat, and fuck! And I no longer feel that I live among others, I no longer have to think about the man who stands next to me on the Q train, the bearded one who stinks. I live inside my phone, which encloses my imagination and regulates my senses and lets me look away from the unbearable gaze of others, the bodies around me, their unwilled adjacency. And this is a beautiful thing! No longer do I have to be a body amongst other bodies. No longer do I have to bear these people, the way their faces solicit me. I no longer have to imagine a future beyond the screen, this unlimited pursuit. And if I tire of Grindr, there’s always Candy Crush.
I remember life before this, it’s varied texture. But I do not know how to access the feeling of this memory, nor the radical possibilities that it contains. How do I rediscover those new and better pleasures? A world where machines did not govern us so much? A world where us queers were a little freer? Where life lives, beyond neoliberal realism, the grid, the Grind, where fucking fucking sucks?
Fuck it! There’s no other way to say this:
I’m 19 and riding a motorbike. I’m in Luang Prabang, Laos, and it’s 5:30 am. The wheels flirt with the mountain-edge. I’ve left my teaching job in Cambodia and hitchhiked through towns whose names make my tongue do gymnastics — Kratie, Savanakhet, Vientiane — unfamiliar towns, rain-soaked towns, French-colonial towns, towns my country once bombed into submission. Here I’m not alone. I am with Phout and Boun and Somphorn, the gay men, the good men, who found me in the streets with my tousled hair and brown sandals and backpack that smelled like the hockey gear that boys back home flung on the locker room floor. Phout and Boun and Somphorn: three good men who said, “Sit. Feast on your life.” We practically live together, share food, shelter, clothing, and Phout teaches me how to weave, as his mother taught him. At this moment, the sun is about to rise over the rice fields, an anticipatory illumination, and we’re going 90 km/hr. We’re so close to death here, so close, but I clutch Phout’s waist and I laugh and he speeds up. A pint of lao lao vibrates in the cup-holder. We’re together here, not alone, and I’m beside myself as I lift off the seat. Frangipani and incense and dew rises from the rice paddy and shock my senses, as I believe it does to Boun, who rides next to me, and anyone else who’s been to this place and walked its stony streets. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Future tense written in the past. A past that points forward. We climb and climb. We’ve almost reached the top. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life. I look in Phout’s mirror — Whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart — and it shows the dirt road behind us. All at once, I stare ahead at banyan-draped mountains, the wet expanse, and the blue light of morning that claims us and goes nowhere and is endless.
Works Cited
Brown, Wendy. Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
Larkin, Phillip. “High Windows.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
Walcott, Derek. “Love After Love.” Poem Hunter,
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/love-after-love/
“An Encounter with Joel Simkahi, Founder of Grindr.” Numéro, https://www.numero.com/en/culture/culture-encounter-joel-simkhai-founder-grindr#_
“Unrestricted. Unapologetic. Uncensored. Unlmited.” Grindr, https://www.grindr.com/unlimited/
