Patterns within Grids: A review of Tom Roach, Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY Press, 2021

What would follow from detaching considerations of hookup apps from simplistic, pessimistic diagnoses of neoliberal commodification and exploitation, and from coupling critiques of the data economy with a potential queer ethics of relating instead? These are some of the questions that Tom Roach asks in Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. The approach of the book is that of both/and: it addresses the destructive, expansive, and intrusive dynamics of neoliberalism, while also arguing, in response to Audre Lorde, that the master's tools might just be used to dismantle the master's house (127). That is, the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism—where all subjects are seen as ultimately replaceable cogs in the machine, and where social media platforms treat their users as data points visually represented within horizontal grids foregrounding sameness—can bring forth a queer ethics premised on fungibility and shared alienation. Roach's doesn't shy away from complexities and ambiguities that make culture, society, and the self. This approach is refreshing, not least because much contemporary analysis of social media tends to be more unequivocal when outlining what apps and platforms do, and can do. The lines of argumentation are rich, and the examples and comparisons drawn often surprising. For me, Screen Love reads as a welcome invitation to think about networked sexual screen culture through the logic of both/and.

The founding argument of Screen Love suggests that, by presenting individuals seeking company as horizontal elements of an endless grid, m4m ("men seeking men") media such as hookup apps Grindr and Scruff foreground nonidentical sameness and equivalence in ways disinterested in personal connection or inner depth. In so doing, m4m media allow for escapes from their own neoliberal logic. Working with and through Leo Bersani in particular, Roach argues that treating social media users as fungible—both in their visual representation as profile pictures within a grid, and structurally as data points used to aggregate broader patterns of tastes and preferences for targeted advertising—is at once a neoliberal operation of power and an opportunity to foreground an ethical, nonidentical equivalence between people that makes it possible to see life as mattering only as part of a larger composition (17, 22, 50).

In presenting users as types ("the jock," "the daddy," "the bear," "the twink," etc.) rather than as unique characters, m4m media, Roach agues, hollow out personality and perceived individual uniqueness in favor of anonymised, depersonalised patterns. Roach here thinks against or at least beyond most standard analyses of objectification, which see the reduction of people into things as a violent dehumanization that intensifies social hierarchies and relations of exploitation and that is to be resisted at all costs. This does not entail blindness about historical or present practices of racial dehumanization within which fungibility operates as a means of denying the value of an individual person or life. For Roach, fungibility as equivalence does not undo hierarchical relations or stand for equality insofar as in a fungible structure different bodies and data points are differently valued (57). Rather, fungibility becomes an exercise in self-lessening: attending to sameness—from which differences sprout—so that a given self could, by and large, just as well be someone or something else.

Screen Love is at its strongest in mediating something akin to thinking in action, as examples, anecdotes, and theoretical flights spring out of and intermesh with amalgamations where Marcel Proust meets the interface design of Grindr, and where Aristotle's takes on philia (brotherly love) frame promiscuous cultures of cruising. Some comparisons and analogies—such as thinking about the grid-like design of Grindr in relation to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (107–109) that treats all deaths with equal weight regardless of a person's fame, or Andy Warhol's soup cans that repeat so that gradual differences emerge from similarity (144–148)—are likely to rub critics who would foreground the contextual specificity of cultural objects the wrong way. This, however, is not a...