• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 13, 2015

Of all the companies to demonstrate a hilarious lack of self-awareness in their social media posts, I never imagined the prize would go to Tinder, that cool, edgy hookup app. But see, I already erred: I guess Tinder would object to that description, since it’s really not about hooking up, but just helping people meet people.

In case you’ve been living under a rock in a cave on the bottom of the sea, this week Tinder blessed the Internet with one of the most epic, passive aggressive, and generally bitchiest Twitter meltdowns, following an article in Vanity Fair, casting Tinder as part of a larger trend towards, ahem, promiscuous behavior. Someone at Tinder took grave exception to the profile and proceeded to crank out dozens of tweets in, what can only be described as an act of escalating unconscious self-parody.

Although the tweets are all over the map, including the throwaway swipes at journalist Nancy Jo Sales’ professionalism, two tweets kind of sum it up: “Tinder users are on Tinder to meet people for all kinds of reasons. Sure, some of them — men and women — want to hook up… But we know from our own survey data that it’s actually a minority of Tinder users.”

Yeah, right. I imagine people tell Tinder all kinds of things in their surveys, but you know what? People are friggin’ liars. While I have never personally used Tinder, I have seen plenty of people who do use it in action, and let me put it this way: they are all (straight) guys my age or younger; they are all horny as hell; and they are all using it to get laid, with considerable success, I might add. But I emphasize: Every… Single… One… Period.

But the reason Tinder’s PR meltdown is so funny is actually twofold. First of all, as noted above, the apparent lack of self awareness about their corporate brand identity is breathtaking: does everyone at Tinder really not know what people use their app for? Do they really imagine millions of young urban professionals meeting up at midnight for tea and crumpets, or to talk about a good book?

The second reason it’s so funny is because Tinder assumed that the article was really principally about them, when in fact -- as stated so often in this blog -- technology has no moral content in itself, because its value depends on how we use it. The article isn’t about Tinder at all, but the fact that we are all a bunch of horndogs who, following the decline of traditional social mores, find ourselves free to do pretty much anything we want, without much consideration for the inevitable emotional ramifications; Tinder is just the messenger, the medium by which this occurs.

In short, sex makes people dumb, and our society reduces all human interactions to commodities -- both things which we knew all along. The end, by me.