Research

 

Work in progress

The book is entitled Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination and under contract with the University of Chicago Press. A genealogy of misogynist frustration and an inquiry into our shared computational condition, it is also a history of seduction forums. Seduction forums are online domains that begin from the assumption that sex with women, or indeed success more broadly, is an achievement born of men’s methodological expertise. Across the forty-year archive this book will assemble, from scattered bulletin board systems in the 1980s to consolidated social media platforms in the 2010s, seduction forums envisioned a path toward success that is distinctly computational: systems, loops, and algorithms are integral to the methods they espouse. When users imagine themselves improving their social intelligence, they reach for the language and logics of artificial intelligence. Seductive Methods follows this computational imagination as it structures increasingly violent misogyny on computer networks, from the successes envisioned by methodical virtuosos who call themselves “seduction gurus” to the growing number of mass shootings perpetrated by “involuntary celibates” certain that no method will work for them. Drawing the study of religion, gender studies, and the history of computing together in a new analytic of methodological form, Seductive Methods presents ways to think about the intimate power that the computational imagination now exerts over hope, desire, and its frustration.

Also coming down the pike:

  • Book review for Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, with Judith Ellen Brunton and Cody Musselman. Public-facing journal supplement commissioned by American Religion.
  • “Attraction to the Sequence: The Algorithmic Approach to Success on Seduction Forums.” Book chapter in American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Three.

 

Published work