AlgoMatch Complete Compatibility Through Complete Visibility
Project Overview
AlgoMatch is a speculative dating platform that imagines what happens when the logics of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic optimization fully colonize intimate life. Presented as a sleek, premium service that guarantees perfect compatibility, AlgoMatch exaggerates real trends in biometric monitoring, behavioral nudging, and predictive analytics until their seams become visible.
Framing
A pastiche of Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Smell Dating, grounded in Eva Illouz’s analysis of emotional rationalization and Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of surveillance capitalism.
Materials
Paper, slide deck, and visual prototypes for the AlgoMatch ecosystem.
Concept & Theoretical Grounding
AlgoMatch takes contemporary dating platforms/apps that mediate how people meet, rank potential partners, and manage visibility, and pushes them to a deliberately uncomfortable conclusion. Where Brain and Lavigne’s Smell Dating rejects optimization by returning to analog scent, AlgoMatch embraces optimization to the point of absurdity, treating intimacy as a problem of prediction, risk management, and continuous adjustment.
The project is informed by Eva Illouz’s account of how emotional life is rationalized and commodified, and by Shoshana Zuboff’s description of “behavioral surplus” and predictive control. Together, they provide a frame for understanding AlgoMatch as both satire and plausible near-future system: a dating platform that does not merely broker encounters, but governs them.
Core Features of AlgoMatch
Features are arranged along a spectrum from “already normalized” to “openly dystopian,” tracing how incremental extensions of current practices could lead to full algorithmic management of relationships.
Continuous Location & Activity Inference
Passive collection of mobility and activity data via wearables: exercise patterns, movement routines, and proximity become inputs to a Mobility Harmony Index™ that estimates compatibility based on overlapping daily rhythms.
Financial Compatibility Metrics
Through AlgoPay integrations and credit monitoring, the system constructs a Financial Harmony Index™ and Spending Synchrony Profiles, drawing on research that links money conflict and mismatched spending styles to diminished relationship well-being.
Biometric Mood Forecasting
Biometric streams (heart rate variability, sleep quality, stress markers) feed an Emotional Harmony model that issues alerts such as: “Your partner is likely to experience elevated anxiety in the next three hours, offer reassurance and avoid difficult topics.”
Relationship Management & Termination
Aggregated signals drive predictive “relationship stability curves.” AlgoMatch identifies conflict windows, prescribes “stabilizing actions,” and ultimately recommends proactive relationship termination when a partnership is statistically forecast to fail.
Visual Prototypes & Interface
The visual language of AlgoMatch borrows from premium fintech and wellness dashboards: soft gradients, neon accents, and calm typography that help make invasive data practices feel natural, even desirable. Data visualizations render compatibility scores, emotional volatility, jealousy risk, and breakup forecasts with an air of clinical precision.
Interpretation
AlgoMatch asks what remains of intimacy once it is fully reframed as an optimization problem. By literalizing the shift from individual to dividual, or from whole person to a set of biometrics, financial signatures, geolocation traces, and affective indices this project foregrounds how contemporary systems already nudge us toward seeing ourselves as data to be managed.
The work sits at the intersection of speculative design and critique: close enough to existing dating platforms to feel plausible, but exaggerated enough to expose the stakes of allowing predictive infrastructures to mediate not only whom we meet, but how we feel, when we stay, and when we leave.