Have you heard of Feeld? It is a dating app that intends to “open up the future of human connection through normalising sexual desire”. But I think it is opening the future to normalising something else: confusing dating profiles for an interview with the United Nations. It suits me because I need a green date by Sunday 5th of June to attend a public talk for Evanesce, an exhibition by Centre for Projection Art x CLIMARTE that tackles climate emergency. Or I will throw myself into an active volcano. I wonder if Amazon cooked my brain—the ecommerce brand, not the rainforest—and now evangelic corporations take advantage of my generational conscientiousness and call for instant gratification.
Nah, no way. I am not the kind of person to read “open up the future of human connection” with wide puppy eyes. Not me. It is not like Feeld made a vapid market analysis to understand how to compete with Tinder and Hinge, who left a gap in the market by neglecting the desires that it now monetizes. Never! It is not about appealing to the sensibilities of a younger generation for profit at all. Its founders are pure of thought and theirs is a wholly virtuous enterprise. I am pious too. Hence, I decided to make a profile with an ecological bent, see what is out there. The clock is ticking for me a la global warming to attend Evanesce with a plus one.
My bio begins with “I felt like resisting the State, might delete later” and ends with “looking for climate peace (and cuties).” Some Boomer pointed out that Silicon Valley is mediating all my game. But I was like, “Hey! shut the fuck up Boomer, or I will kill you.” My machete felt a bit blunt though, so I began to sharpen it with their Woodstock 1969 vinyl collection. The cold fear in their eyes was so intense that it slowed down global warming by a millisecond. It made me feel like a good person, even though my tendency to categorise people resembles bigotry: welcome to the Anthropocene.
To join this app—unlike Tinder, Bumble and Hinge—one must come up with a fantasy name, which feels like choosing a mask for the masquerade ball. As Diego, I am the recipient of bizarre non-sequiturs such as “I want to visit Mexico.” But now I can uncover the real me with the help of an avatar. So, after an intense period of careful deliberation, I settled for Carlos. Then I uploaded a picture of myself holding a baby lama from Peru inside a blue 7am News Podcast totebag—sizzle. No one will ever suspect that Carlos, who is also shown drinking from a ceramic KeepCup at a zero-waste market, is really Diego. Muahaha.
There is a Desires section in the profile, which is a cool feature that allows users to express themselves without inhibitions. The strange thing is that people use it to virtue signal like they are trying to gentrify their phone. I wrote down “Climate-action” after “Cuddles” and before “Communism”—I call it the three big Cs. It also stands for Critical Contemporary Culture. And Carlitos Cannot Coal. My secret desire is a Terra Madre nerd from Northcote or Brunswick because they are so exotic. But I do not think my family would approve of rock climbing. Last time I said that to a match they felt personally attacked by my controversial views on bouldering. Boohoo, cry me an indoor pool lap.
I scrolled through several articles with pictures of sad polar bears to come up with a pick-up line. But I struggled a little bit. My best one so far is “we have until 2030 before climate change becomes irreversible…kinda getting hot in here.” I also spent a considerable amount of time looking for the carbon footprint of dating apps but Google only returned articles on ‘green dating’ as a new trend. Good not to know. Either way, the sad polar bears bummed me out so much that now I want to do Evanesce solo. I also found out that Emperor Penguins are serial monogamists but that is off topic. It sounds a bit needy though.
