National Communication Association Annual Convention
Human Communication and Technology Division
Washington, DC
November 23, 2013

"I saw you on the Manhattan-bound Brooklyn Q train.

"I was wearing a blue-striped t-shirt and a pair of maroon pants. You were wearing a vintage red skirt and a smart white blouse. We both wore glasses. I guess we still do."

So begins an August 8, 2013 post on Brooklyn's Craigslist Missed Connections page. This piece of short fiction masquerading as a lonelyhearts ad filled Facebook news feeds and Twitter streams the next day.

Amidst the casual sexual relationships and used furniture, Craiglist's Missed Connections stand out. On the surface, they offer an opportunity for individuals to connect with people they have found attractive. Posts describe glances across subway cars, reminiscences of lost loves, missives for hot guys at Wal-Mart.

I argue that Missed Connections serve an additional, subversive purpose: offering their authors a tactic of what Galloway and Thacker call "nonexistence," of "not being accounted for," in distributed networks. As such, they provide single subjects an antidote to online dating, a significant technique of power in contemporary control societies.

Galloway and Thacker situate identification as the central problem of the 21st century.

They offer examples--profiling is replaced by DNA matching as the standard of evidence in criminal prosecution; logistics is replaced by RFID databases as the standard of efficiency in consumer-product distribution.

This primacy of identification is indicative of the shift to Deleuzean control, post-disciplinary power that rules not through confinement or bodily intervention but through permission.

On the surface, understanding online dating as a technique of control may not appear as important as examining algorithms used for security purposes.

Online dating sites catalog and categorize vast amounts of user data.

EHarmony uses twenty-nine traits to match its clients with one another, and new members answer over 300 questions as part of the personality test and initial account setup process.

Match.com accounts for 1500 VARIABLES, relying on users' stated and revealed preferences when making recommendations.

OKCupid requires users to answer and rank at least 50 Match Questions before beginning the matching process, and some users report having answered more than 4000.

There are more effective, and more efficient, ways to locate a lost love. Googling, searching Facebook, perhaps hiring a private investigators, but these posts most do something beyond creating or re-establishing relationships.

And this brings up back to Galloway and Thacker, who offer "nonexistence" as one way to escape from pervasive techniques of control.

Craigslist Missed Connections offer single subjects a tactic of nonexistence. Messages require little identifiable or identifying data from their posters, and what the site does gather is hard to catalog.

This experience stands in contradistinction to online dating that pulls contemporary unmarried men and women into the enclosure of marriage.

On Craigslist Missed Connections, inventorying every attraction, every lost love, every high-school sweetheart, inundates the system with disingenuous data.