Sitting next to a young man in the subway. He’s busy on his phone, and, bored, I steal a glance over his shoulder. At first I can’t tell what he’s doing; he’s flipping through images so quickly as to make them barely distinguishable, and I assume he’s searching for a particular photo. Then, a short time later, I look back over. He’s still involved in the same manic search, only this time, observing a little more closely (and shamelessly), I realize what all the photos have in common: they’re woman’s pictures – profiles from a dating app. He swiping left and right to either ‘like’ or ‘pass’ on different women’s pictures. This comes as a rather shocking revelation to me, for while I’m already familiar with this ludicrously reductive online dating interface, I’ve never actually witnessed someone doing it. For the next couple of subway stops I discretely carry on my observation. There’s a distinct pattern to his swiping, which in itself is hardly surprising: he ‘likes’ women who are conventionally attractive, usually photographed in a seductive pose, while he passes on women who don’t fit these narrow conventions. Finally he hesitates: the image of the woman on his screen is somewhere in between his two established poles of taste, but there’s something playful and aloof in her expression, as if she wants to distance herself from the rather tawdry display of her ‘wares’ the dating app calls for. The man finally makes a decision, swiping this intriguing image into the dustbin of passes.