Event

For much of the early 2000s, seduction forum users struggled with magic. They had gathered online to perfect methods for persuading women to have sex with them. Having perfected their methods, however, they found themselves in a secular pickle: is the effective seduction method a trick, inauthentic but capable of enchanting modernity’s gullible others, or is it an actual perfect instrument, miraculously capable of realizing men’s desires and thus marking theirs as an enchanted social world? This talk takes up users’ innovative way out of this dilemma—their turn to the seduction algorithm, or to intelligent artifice rather than to metaphysical deliberation—as emblematic of computational answers to modernity’s contradictions.

Suzanne van Geuns is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion. Her research interests are in American religion and computation. She is currently writing a genealogy of online sexual frustration for the University of Chicago Press’s Class 200 series, entitled Computational Creep: Sexual Success in the Age of Algorithms.