Grindr Goes Global

Grindr Goes Global

          Admit it, you’ve heard of Grindr, the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people.  My wife Kim and I have many gay, one trans and probably a lot of queer friends (even though I do not think I could adequately define that term with any precision).  You notice I do not suggest we have bi friends, though we may, because how would we know unless we choose to discuss their sex lives.  So, we’ve established that you know what Grindr is and you probably know it is most often referenced as an app that lets people of those orientations hook-up with one another whenever and wherever they wish.  It is GPS/locationally focused so that you can know who around you are of like mind, taking much of the guesswork out of the hunt for connections.  Grindr seems to fill an important need for a segment of the population and therefore deserves to become a successful product or business.

          What I learned this morning, compliments of the Financial Times, is that Grindr is owned by Beijing Kunlun Tech, a Chinese gaming company.  That alone is interesting and given to a great deal of thought, given the general posture that autocratic states and China, in particular, have towards the rights of the LGBTQ community.  I learned this because it seems that Grindr is successful enough to be seeking an IPO on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and thereby giving rise to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.  That committee had been balking at approving this IPO listing on the grounds of national security.  Can you imagine the fun that John Oliver or Stephen Colbert could have with that one?  National security?  Really?

          Grindr, for its part, has been standing strong against the United States’ attempt to interfere.  I have this mental image of the Fearless Girl statue that was anonymously placed facing off against the Wall Street Raging Bull.  Grindr might want to commission a statue of a well-dressed and well-coiffed queer person to stand defiantly next to the Fearless Girl.  Maybe (and I may be running too wild with my imagination here), that Fearless Queer should stand strong against both a Bull and a Tank and should place it in Tiananmen Square.  See how I coalesced all of that?

          Beijing Kunlun Tech has had to agree with the U.S, regulator that they will divest themselves of the company in a short period of when it goes public.  The U.S. administration is slanting this as an anti-trust action as well as a national security issue.  The FT has said, “The Trump administration has also expanded Cfius’ powers to review investments in critical technologies, over concerns that Chinese investments could be used to gain access to valuable early-stage technologies.”  You have to love that.  Trump thinks that a photo-based service that allows you to cruise and hook-up with other LGBTQ people is valuable early-stage technology.  I guess he has found his Tinder account valuable and has recognized that we cannot let the Chinese control us through our libidos.  Maybe we can put a tariff on it.  Swipe left all you want but swipe right and you owe the government some money.

          As we contemplate that all, it makes me wonder more about the whole swiping protocol.  In researching it, there are a distinct set of reasons why one would swipe right for good news and left for bad news.  Since most of us are right-handed, a left-to-right motion is considered easier. Right is right also seems to work well for Trump and his Republican buddies like Mitch the Bitch.  In fact, the right is might. The truth of the etymology of this seems to stem mostly from the direction we in the West read our language.  In countries and languages where the direction is reversed and therefore right-to-left, the logic tends to get reversed.  Studies show that there is no pre-destined preference in such movements, it is considered learned behavior that gets imbedded and creates the bias.      

          That says volumes about the whole LGBTQ tolerance issue.  Teach people to be directionally-agnostic about swiping tells us you can undoubtedly teach them to be tolerance-agnostic in similar manner.  In Israel they have been experimenting with eliminating the whole swipe thing and just moving to a click-through approach.  There is something very commercial and therefore objective about that solution, don’t you think?

          Grindr is problematic.  I don’t think its about its LGBTQ nature.  I don’t think its about its swiping protocol.  It has nothing to do with Kunlun, the Chinese or even the Cifus concerns. Let me explain.  A friend of ours who is gay uses Grindr quite regularly.  Twice now in two different apartments we have lived, he has come over to do some work with Kim and had his Grindr antennae on (I suspect he never turns it off).  In both cases we had known gay inhabitants on our apartment floors.  This is New York and we tend to live in the more diverse areas of the City by preference, so none of this is a surprise to us.  But what was a surprise to us was that he noted in both cases that one of the members of the couples on the floor also had Grindr and were also trolling for connections.  In fact, in one instance, both members of the couple were on Grindr.  Hmm?  Is that something we want the Chinese to know?  And if the Chinese know, won’t it just be a matter of moments before Putin knows?  And if Putin knows we know Kim Jung Un will know as well as Maduro and Erdogan sooner or later.  Eventually, one of them will meet with Trump in the oval office and let it slip to him (since his unstaffed intelligence departments will be way behind).  The next thing you know, Grindr will have to disclose all its transactions or at very least, Wikileaks will hack all of that and the world will know.

          I don’t know about all of you, and you can call me old fashioned, but if my information and privacy are going to be breached, I would rather it happen in the old-fashioned way with the Chinese food menu with the imbedded RF chip that gets slipped under my door.  I do not want Grindr and its hideous global ecosystem taking over my juicy gossip provinces.  We have told our friend that when he comes over, he is to put Grindr on airplane mode.  If he wants to meet one of our neighbors, he can just tell us and let us have a good old chin-wag over it all.