Dear readers, allow me to tell of a truly awful set of circumstances. It is, as you know, the season for internship applications. I know, I know, if I were in your position, I wouldn’t either. But you must keep reading.

The story begins one day as I sat at the Missing Bean. Extremely flattering turtle – check, bitterly elitist coffee – check, the week’s magnificent edition of Cherwell – most definitely check. It’s the early afternoon and the stuffy heat of the café is thick enough to make the ‘atmosphere’ almost tangible. It is the bubbly Oxford illusion embodied, where hot air seems substantially real.

Because it is the Oxford illusion par excellence I stress the ‘almost’. Oxford’s rarefied airs compose clouds that one alas can never catch. It is also the place where floaty dreams get punctured by stony spires. Right on cue, as I raised the liquid punishment that is my double espresso, a wave of icy malevolence broke onto the shores of my island-like pretension (that is to say, solitary.)

I attentively peered over the rim of my cup and gulped in horror. An incarnation of evil had just walked in. We’re talking about the sort of person who wears their utter worthlessness on their sleeve – literally, they dress like the H&M catalogue that befits their shameless boringness. I had to act. Cup at the ready, I made my attack.

“Oh sorry, did I spill my coffee on your (chromatically subnormal combination) of chinos and hoodie. I’m, so terribly sorry”.

The reference to a soulless commercial retailer is not passing. The villain in question had not only dared to invade this sacred space but had the audacity to betray a certain sense of buoyancy. It’s that buoyancy that the blaring soundtrack of H&M megastores attempts to enforce upon you, confusing your shopping experience with a trip to Wahoo. Or perhaps Wahoo is trying to confuse you into thinking you’re going to H&M – I don’t know. In any case, the smile on his face was as fake, miserable and momentary as any club that promises a ‘good time’. He needs to smile so that we might be believe that he is in possession of the satisfaction that is missing. Woe is me, if only he knew how hollow he is.

“Mate,” he said to his accomplice (for our purposes, lets call him H&M 2), “I just heard back from *insert anonymous management, legal, relations, trading, money corporate neoliberal capitalist something*”. H&M 2 appeared visibly animated. “Really, ‘mate’, like what did they say, ‘mate.’” The villain’s empty eyes flash. It’s like the moment on a stormy night in the middle of nowhere when the flash of a lightning bolt momentarily reveals the void around it. “Yeah, like legit, yeah ‘mate’; *insert anonymous management, legal, relations, trading, money corporate neoliberal capitalist something* said they so wanted to take me.”

And that’s when I got mad. A coffee cup results when you push water with 16 bars of pressure at a temperature of 92.7 degrees centigrade through 20 grams of meticulously selected, roasted and ground Arabica coffee. It also contains my spit. A coffee cup is the product of a brutally systematic process. It also contains the product of one’s most sordid and intimate biological depths. It is ironic that in attacking H&M 1 and 2, the weapon of choice was the synthesis of myself and the system.

Its impossible to understand how Mr H&M so happily accepts the system. Because of that, I hate him. Like my coffee cup – he can mix the most repugnant depths of himself with the produce of a murky, ethically questionable and ironically international system.

He’s happy to spend ten of his best years living in zone 78 of greater greater greater London in a semi-impervious box in order that he might spend half his monthly salary to perform a two-hour commute to a soul-crushing office at which to beg his manager for the opportunity to work past 22:00 in order to edge out the equally tortured competition.

He’s happy to forego his friends and family by living out his frustrations over cheap water cooler talk and indiscriminate office sex. He’s happy to delude himself that the problems of the world will be solved by the ethically responsible corporate outreach of *insert anonymous management, legal, relations, trading, money corporate neoliberal capitalist something*. He’s happy that the company-funded mindfulness session will be adequate reparation for the impoverished wreck of an existence that the simple quest of a reasonable living will cost him. But most of all, he’s happy that what he’s doing is what he ‘wants’ to do. The lesson I learned, dear reader, is not that we need the revolution, nor that we need to accept the inevitable submission. No the lesson is, I shouldn’t have wasted the coffee – it might be the last I can afford

Where have all the good men gone? And where are all the gods? After a combination of a first term’s attempt at half-hearted self-loving and failing to fi nd the requisite ‘streetwise Hercules’, I have made the executive decision to join Tinder. The theory: what a lark! What a joy! The ability to choose people I find attractive, go on dates with them, live happily ever after. Tinder is weighed down by none of the late-20s desperation of match.com: a light-hearted essay distraction.

The reality: I didn’t expect Tinder to be what it is. I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of power. The premise is deceptively simple: a clear and easy-to-use interface masking a complicated algorithm which sees your inputted preference, your swish of the finger left or right, and ‘matches’ you with others in the local area. I become the maker of my own destiny. I am the playwright and the protagonist. I am the alpha and the omega. ‘With great power comes great responsibility’, I think to myself, as a scroll through Oxford’s ‘finest’ with increasing speed. The trouble is that the power is simultaneously wielded in the hands of the individual and the masses. Really, I’m not special – someone else has the power to reject me just as equally as I do them. Egalitarianism in online dating – who would have thought it?

And so comes the anxiety – which version of ‘me’ will promote me best to potential mates? Funny and irreverent, or a little more serious? A picture of me looking arty and wistful, or a club photo with aggressive flash to prove that I not only have friends, but also have left the library this term. Extra kudos for the ‘SE10’ logo to up the #edge. Self-selecting tells one a lot about oneself; when boiled down the absolute primacy of attraction, it’s easy to see trends in our attraction, and our prejudices too (shamefully, I haven’t yet swiped right on a Brookes student). Economists love Tinder for its almost perfect randomized controlled trial-like ability to test people’s preferences, and its creation of a marketplace for romance. Indeed, with or without Tinder and its compatriots, we are all consumers of romance – Valentine’s Day’s relentless capitalism infiltrates our consciousness more and more each year – so why not capitalise on the fi rst stages of attraction?

As a semi-failing economist with far too little time on my hands, I decided to set up a social experiment on Tinder. One particular specimen tells me that I have a ‘delicious face’, and another that I am the emoji for ‘bomb’ and the emoji for ‘shell’. Top class emoji play; I salute you.

Frankly, though, I’m disappointed with the men Oxford has presented me with. Horror stories from friends at other universities prepared me for the worst. There have been no unsolicited photos of the nether regions, few horrible pickup lines, and most fundamentally, no acts of aggression or sexism towards me. But also no conversation. Or very little at least. Perhaps I’m attracting the wrong type of men. Perhaps telling people that I’m only on Tinder as a social experiment may clue them up to the fact that I’m not entirely serious about who I swipe left and right upon. The most exciting moment was when I matched with popular reality television star Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea – it was an ad, of course. My advice for the Tinder rookie? Prepare for disappointment.

What one does notice, is that when confronted, nobody is seriously on Tinder in Oxford. Oxonians, never willing to be caught dead conversing via a medium so direct and (dare I say) louche, are all ‘joking around’, or ‘procrastinating for collections’. It’s the handy get-out clause for those moments when you recognise a match in lectures, or on a night out, or realise that they are your college mum’s college dad. I suspect that this is a bashful cover-up for a real desire for love (or sex). Not for me, of course – I only downloaded it as a joke with my girlfriends. You may well wonder what Tinder says about modern romance. Who cares? In my opinion, it does not require much strenuous thought. Like many other irrefutable technological aspects of our day-to-day living which did not exist in the golden years – Instagram, mobile banking, cyber-bullying – there’s little point theorising. Tinder is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Its magnifi cently swift appearance in nearly all of the iPhones and Androids in my friendship circle is staggering. A hackneyed cynic would have mind to say that Tinder’s reduction of romance into the bare minimum is symptomatic of the modern consumer’s short attention span and insatiable desire.

This is probably true, but is so much the voice of a disheartened Generation X-er who mourns the loss of vinyl to synthetic princess pop. We are no stranger to human attraction stripped down, words on a page, a snapshot of a life and an imagined future together – lonely hearts columns have been going for as long as there have been newspapers. Tinder replicates this in a form easier to digest for the technically literate, and goes further to mimic the real-life ‘hot-or-not’ aspects of face-to-face dating.

Yes, oftentimes the onus is on sex rather than love, and I will concede that it is probably not a route for mating for life. But perhaps when all you want is another warm body in your bed for the night, Tinder is all that is required. For now though, my foray into mobile dating has been fun. Viva la Tinder!