Dreher points to Vanity Fair’s shocking Tinder article:

He says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder—“Tinderellas,” the guys call them—in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.

. . .

“We don’t know what the girls are like,” Marty says.

“And they don’t know us,” says Alex.

 

People used to meet their partners through proximity, through family and friends, but now Internet meeting is surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.” As soon as people could go online they were using it as a way to find partners to date and have sex with. In the 90s it was Craigslist and AOL chat rooms, then Match.com and Kiss.com. But the lengthy, heartfelt e-mails exchanged by the main characters in You’ve Got Mail (1998) seem positively Victorian in comparison to the messages sent on the average dating app today. . . .

Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating. In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people—perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone—using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. “But you’re ordering a person.”

The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one. Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. The innovation of Tinder was the swipe—the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded. OkCupid soon adopted the function. Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables G.P.S. tracking to show whether matches have recently “crossed paths,” use it too. It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.

Much more where that came from.

It reminds me of Coase on the nature of the firm. He wondered why firms exist at all, instead of paying secretaries and engineers and janitors on a task by task basis, like a real world Mechanical Turk. There are lots of reasons, but a big one is search costs. It’s a pain to hire somebody. Why not do it once and for all?

It now seems that since the sexual revolution and maybe since forever and aye, a lot of mid to long-term sexual relationships have been firms. It was the search costs of different parties that was holding them together. Now that search costs are plummeting, the firms are disaggregating.

Conclusion: too many people are searching for the wrong thing. No, not the wrong thing. Copulation is grand. Too many people are searching for too little of the right thing.

Sex is synecdoche.

Sex is a fractal of the whole.