This project aims to intervene in Grindr Studies by introducing theoretics of Zionism and homonationalism to contextualize harms on the Israeli-founded app. Part 1 thinks through desirability-based filtering on Grindr as an exercise in Zionist-homonationalist eugenics, focusing on “Right Now” as a key feature in the construction of the homosexual settler self. Part 2 explores Grindr’s distinct geolocative surveillance interface and its commitment to capital, through the lens of pinkwashed benevolent branding.
The Virile Diamond Market
That’s how it is in any market. Look at diamonds. Once you would go to the diamond exchange, you’d circulate around a big room with your diamonds, see what people were looking for, meanwhile you’d have a coffee and ask, ‘How’s the wife and kids?’ Today, it’s all done online. I look at Grindr the same way. We’ve made the process more efficient, more modern…maybe we made the market too fluid, but it is a market.[1] – Joel Simkhai, 2016
To say that queer dating app Grindr promotes a fetish mindset would be an understatement. While dehumanizing tropes proliferate on the app, Grindr’s political economy cannot merely be understood as another blase way of depersonalizing human connection. Rather, they are a direct outgrowth of Israeli-American Israeli-American founder Joel Simkhai’s own investments in what what Jasbir Puar describes as “a cosmopolitan, urban (metro) formation of sexual laissez fair.”[2] Notably, such globalized erotic discourses would have dominated the War on Terror years that exactly surrounded Grindr’s launch. This, just a decade after the 1993 Oslo Accords – a landmark pair of peace agreements around refugee, violence and border issues brokered between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – which merged international donor funding, development, and policy recommendation to ultimately inaugurate a tradition of neoliberalisation in the Palestinian economy.[3]
In her description of capitalist globalization under homonationalist politics, Puar explains that heterosexual rape often serves as a metaphor for economic conquest and neoliberal domination, introducing the framework of “market virility” as a rubric by which nationalism-savvy queer citizens come to participate in the sexualized economy.[4] Commodification and sexualization thus emerge as twin discourses intertwined within the Zionist libidinal economy, fundamentally concerned with the “pleasures, pains and suffering instilled by warlike relations with others.”[5]
Anecdotally, it is a cultural sign of the times to hate Grindr: screenshots of absurd interactions that take place on its platform proliferate virally for comedic value on Twitter, and contemporary queer spaces are filled with ragging jokes about its mainstay as a ‘guilty pleasure’/‘necessary evil’ for 21st-century gay cruising. Yet, in the last two years that I have spent studying the platform, I have noticed a glaring lapse: these discursive echochambers largely tend to skip over Grindr’s homonationalist frontiers. And, not just by way of its founder’s individual Israeli nationality. Rather, it is Grindr’s entire ethos and economic universe that have been rooted in a Zionist-homonationalist libidinal economy, since its origin. As a result, its digital interface and cultural milieu are inseparable from the larger Israeli settler-colonial project. Ignoring these origins is not just a simple oversight. Without situating Grindr as a “technology of occupation,” it is impossible to properly appraise the harms of the platform, or the insidious ways in which settler-colonial power has shaped the economy of modern love. To tell this story, I borrow from Jasbir Puar’s framework to theorize the Zionist-homonationalism – referring to the “historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states,” in service of the project of eliminating others.[6]
Following from Part 1 of this essay, I contextualize two main platform concerns on Grindr from a Zionist-homonationalist theoretic: (1) a relentless imperative of corporate commodification and (2) the app’s anonymous user interface of geolocative surveillance. I join scholars Joshua Tikka,[7] who argues that “Simkhai developed Grindr amidst Israeli pink-washing…as a product of queer-consumer-Zionism; a tool that disregards borders, much like the home country of the app’s founder;” and Emerson Barrett,[8] who traces the propagation of normative citizenship standards on multiple gay apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Jack’d. Tikka substantiates the Zionist-homonationalism of Grindr by evidencing repeated statist ads for Tel Aviv Pride on the app’s interface.[9] But Grindr rears its Zionist head not only with its explicit endorsement of Israeli pinkwashing, but also through designed participation in several related forms of eugenics and exclusionary violence.
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Grindr’s Queer Origins
I begin by arguing that Grindr demands to be situated as a strange technology of occupation – one that complicates journalist Antony Loewenstein’s framework of the “Palestine Laboratory” and adheres to Jasbir Puar’s theoretic of homonationalism. Marketed under the glitzy language of innovation, Israeli startups in actuality churn out a whole array of technologies of occupation – ranging from the Pegasus spyware installed on dissident citizenphones (now redeployed from India to the US), to AI-powered drones (that continue to surveil refugee mobility at EU borders). Loewenstein writes, “[t]hat Israeli companies make money from the occupation shouldn’t be a controversial view” – dubbed the “start-up nation ideology.”[10] Silicon Valley plays no small part in this settler-colonial laboratory, feeding a pernicious “‘digital orientalism’” that systematically silences Palestinian assertions.[11]
Pinkwashing Propaganda, Images by Blue Star PR (Puar & Mikadashi)
Chronologically, the latter years of the 2000s were rife with Zionist claims to homonationalist rhetoric. The OutRage! Pride posters in 2005 that patronizingly asserted a saviorism of Palestinian queers, followed by controversy around World Pride 2006 in occupied Jerusalem, set the stage for a budding Israeli strategy of occupation. In 2009, the pornographic film Men of Israel was released to portray Israel as a land brimming with irresistible gay sexuality, while 2010 saw the Tel Aviv tourism department spend $90 million on gay tourism campaigns targeting young Western gay men in particular.[12] 17 years later, this despicable strategy has only continued to mushroom, as Israel currently prepares for the “Pride Land” festival to be held as “the Middle East’s largest ever LGBT festival” in June of this year.[13] Yet, it was in the heart of these early years, marked by the propagation of “nationalist gay porn” and fantastical marketing of queer tourism, that Simkhai’s startup first took seed.
Joel Simkhai: The Man & The (Zionist) Myth
To better understand Grindr’s cultural and financial links to Israeli settler-colonialism, it is necessary to begin by visiting the star-studded story of founder Joel Simkhai. Born in Tel Aviv and raised in New York City, Simkhai himself epitomizes the liberal Israeli gay archetype, a savvy entrepreneur who frequents Tel Aviv Pride Week and explicitly embraces the fact that Grindr is meant to satisfy the “transactional” nature of hookups.[14] By way of an origin story of the app, Simkhai describes his own use of anonymous online chatrooms to be “gay-born online,” frustrated by the lack of options to meet gay men pre-Grindr.[15] After learning about WAZE – “the location-based social media app developed to enable drivers to avoid congestion on the Israeli road system” – Simkhai hatched the idea for Grindr. In simple terms: “What WAZE had done for gridlocked drivers, he believed he could do for lost gay men in search of sex.”
Many Israeli outlets have also eagerly claimed Simkhai and his success as evidence of the national project’s “start-up nation” spectacle, particularly in the golden years of “pinkwashing” 2009 onwards. Across mainstream Israeli media, including Haaretz and The Times of Israel, searching Simkhai’s name pulls up scores of results lauding him as “Tel Aviv-Born,” “Israeli-born, the “Israeli loins” behind the app and a “queer Jew to be reckoned with,” while Grindr is regularly referred to as “Israeli-founded.” One article in The Times of Israel even expressed outrage at someone mistaking Simkhai to be a “famous Palestinian entrepreneur,” declaring this confusion to be an act of anti-semitism and staunchly reasserting his legacy as an accolade of the Israeli nation.[16]
Qualitatively, almost all of his interviews proudly mention his Israeli origins, and in one article entitled “Embodying the American Dream,” he even explicitly credits these roots for his entrepreneurial success: “As an immigrant from Israel, I remember my dad explaining…you could find financial success anywhere if you’re solving problems and keeping your ideas practical.”[17] Later in that same piece, he describes himself as a “gay, dyslexic immigrant” who founded an “LGBTQ business.” American and Israeli discourses of neoliberal immigration and bootstraps-style innovation converge in Simkhai’s rags-to-riches story of entrepreneurial excellence and exceptionalism, resonating with Puar’s notes above on how certain homosexual bodies come to be “worthy of protection.” Simultaneously as Simkhai amassed extreme wealth from Grindr’s profit margins, he also became a major donor of many transnational Zionist networks. For example, he is listed as a key supporter of the Israel Democracy Institute, a right-leaning nationalist think tank that is “dedicated to strengthening the foundations of Israeli democracy” and, in so doing, normalizing the brutal occupation of Palestinian land.[18] Rather than being confined to his individual trajectory, Simkhai’s support also reflects a larger libidinal-economic funding pipeline behind Israeli genocide i.e. OnlyFans billionaire founder Leonid Radvinsky contributed $11 million to the rapacious AIPAC pro-Israel lobby.[19]
From 2009 to 2015, Grindr had no outside investors, entirely self-funded by Simkhai’s initial personal contribution of $5,000 and a hired software engineer.[20] It is notable that in financial terms, then, for the first several years of Grindr’s popularity, the only channel of financial and ideological influence was Simkhai himself. In 2018, Simkhai sold the company in 2018 to Kunlun Tech Co Ltd, a gaming company based in Beijing which had already bought a $93 million majority stake two years earlier.[21] Then, in 2020, due to the persistence of concerns around users’ HIV status and the breaches of privacy that Grindr committed in sharing sensitive data, the app was sold for $620 million to American investing group San Vicente Acquisition LLC.
Popularly, these paper trails of Israeli funding are not well-known[22] As of 2026, the international Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement has not picked up or commented on Grindr – for understandable reason, given the strategic political program of only "targeted boycotts” that “focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies” and prioritize a criteria list for “direct complicity.”[23] Still, some have interpreted their personal BDS commitments as inclusive of shunning Grindr.[24]
Profit Imperatives
Taking stock of these damning origins, what does it look like to think through two key concerns on Grindr’s platform – profit imperatives, and anonymized geolocative surveillance – with the “technology of occupation” framework in mind?
Firstly, on profit – Grindr’s commercial motives are nothing short of relentless. In no uncertain terms, Grindr commodifies social interaction – with potential partners being served up as nothing more than usable and disposable experiences in a gridlike UI that eerily resembles sites like Amazon or even shelves of groceries at a supermarket.[25] Shopping for partners emerges as a bizarre outgrowth of the company’s gold-star goal of ‘fast sexual experiences’ – exemplified most in Right Now mode – which hooks users into a commodity mindset and, in so doing, liquidates human interactions for cash profit. It should be no surprise, then, that compulsive sexual behavior disorder and chemsex (the use of illicit drugs during sex) are addictive, occurring with alarming frequency on the app.[26] Researcher Rusi Jaspal summates these experiences as addictively “coercive norms” which result from the design of the app’s interface – creating the illusion that “everybody was necessarily seeking sexual encounters and that there must be ‘something wrong’ with users with alternative intentions.”[27]
As Michael Dieter reminds us, one can learn a lot about an app’s design by identifying traps, enclosures, and asymmetries on a given interface.[28] “Design patterns” (solutions to design problems that are quantized and recurrent) shed considerable light as a prime enclosure on many interfaces – and more specifically, dark patterns, as interfaces that deceptively toy with users’ psyche to introduce forms of control. Grindr specifically utilizes dark patterns to create addictive and gamified forms of sex-seeking in a way that aligns with sexualized-commodified understandings of globalization.[29] The grid-like interface of Grindr’s UI, a repetitive design pattern that calls to mind mainstream design pattern orientations popularized by Microsoft, creates a gamelike structure where user information is, quite literally, trapped to a dark cell-like unit. More pertinently, the grid also stands as an archetypally militaristic spatial artifact, originally derived from the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) as a standard geocoordinate frame for states under NATO (a metaphor only furthered by the likening to WAZE’s promise of clarity for “gridlocked drivers”). Paired with the infamous Grindr notification sound (so distinctive that it has been sampled in many queer pop culture soundtracks since), it is no surprise that Grindr functions for many users like a gay-sex slot machine.[30] The addictive patterns produced by these affordances ultimately function to suck the user/cruiser into a perpetual cycle of sexual consumption and libidinal exchange.
The problem on Grindr, then, is not simply the perpetuation of bodily “fetish,” as mainstream queer discourse might have us believe. Rather, it is fetish of body as commodity – the totalizing alienation of soul, into a market where bodies alone rule. For Marx, all that is social between people is fantastically recast as social “between objects” under commodity fetishism.[31] Applied to Grindr, bodies (now transmuted into their most primal ‘commodity-form’) are extricated entirely from the human networks of love, kinship, and cosmology to which they belong. In other words, it is not people that talk to each other on Grindr, but bodies: alienated and ever-distant, despite being just 500 meters away. Flesh can function almost autonomously – “endowed with a life of [its] own,” and “always ready to exchange…with each and every other” – bypassing the need for human formality, into a primal, and endless, matrix of digital interaction and hormonal signal. In turn, voids of screentime around the world line Grindr’s corporate pockets, reiterating the start-up nation project of Israel.
Geolocative Surveillance & Anonymity
As an extension of these cycles of commodification, a major violation on Grindr is that of its geolocative surveillance and anonymity features. Continuing with a dark-pattern analysis, Grindr undeniably facilitates multi-dimensional surveillance structures. For one, large swaths of sensitive data are shared with advertisers: the Norwegian Consumer Council actually charged Grindr with a $7.1 million fine in 2021, alleging that the company shared sensitive user sexuality data with adtech companies and used dark patterns to “manipulate consent.”[32]
Moreso, unique from any other similar dating platforms, Grindr also operates on a distinct interface where anyone can contact anyone, and users are anonymously displayed in order of their geolocation, a surveillance scheme that leaves marginalized users fully exposed and reifies urban spatial hegemonies of race, caste, and power. The anyone-can-contact-anyone universality may facilitate rape culture on the app and lead to a much higher proportion of “unwanted interaction” on Grindr as compared to other dating apps.[33] The process of seeking any sort of affirmative consent for digital – or, scarily, even in-person – interaction is affectively nullified by the geolocative grid system, and researcher Christopher Dietzel’s study confirms that large swaths of Grindr users report horrifying instance of sexual violence on the app. Relatedly, grooming, predation, statutory rape, and possession of child pornographic content are nauseatingly common phenomena on Grindr. Although stated to be for the safety of closeted queer users, the anonymity and confidentiality features of this app often serve to enable these regimes of violence.[34]
How does this reiterate a Zionist-homonationalist agenda? For Puar, the “spatial politics of surveillance” remain unattended within liberal gay rights frameworks.[35] In its clean separation of public respectability and private intimacy, mainstream discourse tends to assume that the realm of the private is a safe and protected home for queer subjects, when in reality it functions as a “relative, tenuous, and often impossible affair for people of color and immigrants.”[36] In one foul swoop, the private — and its popular buzzword extension in critical technology spaces, “privacy” — now encompasses the liberal fetish for everything from the violence of the natal family unit, to the control endemic within “discreet”-ness on platforms like Grindr. Catering to a particular homonormative cisgender/gay/dominant-caste/white demographic, Grindr’s paradoxical straddling of both hyper-anonymity (blank profiles) and hyper-visibility (location-based surveillance) purports safety and fun at the same time, under the guise of protection. However, as Jasbir Puar warns, “[t]he private is, therefore, offered as a gift of recognition to those invested in certain normative renditions of domesticity and as an antidote, with many strings attached, to those otherwise unable or unwilling to avoid public surveillance.”[37] In the homonationalist dialectic, we might read this through an unsettling reiteration of Zionist immigration policy for Palestinian queer people: if Palestinian publics are de-facto violent and homophobic, the Israeli private can be its “antidote” vis-a-vis the gracious offer of asylum, and (conditional) entrance into the sphere of surveilled gay life, physical and digital alike.
PalesGrindr
The experiences of queer Palestinian users are maybe most telling of all – the violence and censorship they experience being the ultimate epitome of the aforementioned concerns around commodification and surveillance. In 2014, the PalesTinder project on Tumblr had compiled an archive of screenshots of conversations submitted by American users in Palestine on a range of dating apps, including Grindr, with the goal of unearthing how “the Israeli occupation of Palestine will be reflected in dating apps.”[38] Like clockwork, users began submitting experiences of unmatching and blocking at best, and harassment and abuse at worst, in response to disclosure of their residence in Ramallah.
As the archive’s founder herself writes, “If this is what happens to a group of Americans, how are Palestinians treated?” In striking contrast, during the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has been characterized as a second “Nakba” (trans: catastrophe) by historians around the world, journalists have reported on a disgusting phenomenon – wherein Israeli occupation forces have uploaded to their personal Grindr profiles photos posed with Palestinian political prisoners in ravaged homes.[39]
Similarly. Palestinian-American poet George Abraham recounts his experience: after months of persistent, racialized, and unchecked anti-Palestinian harassment, Abraham created a new profile with the bio “PROUDLY PALESTINIAN! ZIONISTS UNWELCOME! COLONIZERS BE GONE!” accompanied by Palestinian flags and “Free/Palestine” pronouns.[40] Grindr swiftly censored Abraham’s profile for violating community guidelines and deleted his pronouns. Abraham adds that it was precisely his hypervisibility as a queer Palestinian person within Grindr’s “game of seduction and attraction” that left him “vulnerable, targeted, unsafe.” Grindr’s queer entanglements and affinities with the Zionist settler-colonial project render the app little more than “a microcosm of the colonial apparatus, a magnifying glass where all gazes were honed in on my performance of [queer Palestinian] self.”[41] Meanwhile, earlier this year, simply including the phrase “No Zionists” was deemed “inflammatory” by a new Grindr update and led to an error message in user profiles, while bios including phrases such as “‘no Arabs,’ ‘no Blacks,’ ‘no Palestinians,’ ‘no Muslims,’ ‘no Christians,’ ‘no Jews,’ ‘no trans’” and more raised no issues – a decision that was later reversed due to public outcry and an inquiry by 404 Magazine.[42]
Hate Speech and Zionist Carcerality
To top all this off, Grindr has followed suit with many other Big Tech companies to generate a rigorous PR campaign about its benevolence and good intention. Its campaigns constitute a crucial part of its deeply corporatized universe, and speak to the larger trend of what some scholars have called “ethics-washing,”[43] where conglomerates respond to accusations of harm by introducing unsubstantial ‘ethics’ frameworks to manage their image as good actors. In this case, Grindr’s hate speech framework is an example of “ethics-washing” away from what has been a years-long history of pinkwashing for Zionism. Grindr’s own community guidelines claim that “Hate, racism, harassment, bullying, and violence are unacceptable on Grindr” – a PR shift from Simkhai’s original nonchalance about discrimination on the app, reflective of the DEI craze of the last few years in Silicon Valley.
Such anti-hate policies function as a Zionist-homonationalist political tool in practice. As many scholars of hate speech have long highlighted, the delimitation of what is “hateful” is always an inherently political exercise, one that often reproduces colonial fantasies of terror and paranoia.[44] What is particularly noteworthy is the outsized role of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a right-wing Zionist think tank, in popularizing liberal frameworks around hate crime/speech that abound on corporate platforms through the often-weaponized rubric of ‘antisemitism.’[45] That violent threats and harassment run rampant for Palestinian users (and even those non-Palestinian users merely located in Palestine), that the Israeli sexualizations of bloody murder is a consistent phenomenon on the app – all while so much as asserting “Free/Palestine” results in a total algorithmic dissolution of one’s profile – makes clearer than ever that Zionism is not tangential but central to the algorithmic ecosystem of Grindr.
Within the Zionist dating ethos, murder and detainment are sites of twisted libidinal appeal, especially given that Israeli soldiers feature as “queer icon[s]” in the popular imagination of gay Israeli men, eroticized for their patriotic commitments to genocide.[46] These men circulate as emblems of a “proud gay patriotism and belonging” – reflective of a larger hegemonic cis gay man’s culture of desire, which has constituted itself via the violent unmaking of certain bodies which fall outside of its scope. This is not to argue for an easy monolith, but rather to say that there are unique investments in cisgendered, racial, and casteist purity which have tended to structure homonormative registers of desirability.[47] To borrow from anthropologists like Nick Seaver[48] — who have convincingly shown us that algorithms themselves are important forms of culture — what does it mean for us to see Grindr’s algorithmic universe (with all its filtering, sorting, and loading) as the site of a concentrated cis gay man’s culture? Indeed, from the vantage point of my argument, I suspect Grindr’s Zionist-homonationalist project can function as smoothly as it does precisely because of this rendering: what are in fact the eugenicist logics of settler-colonialism are easily concealed behind the more digestible language of mainstream homosexual desirability — anyways culturally understood to be exclusionary.[49] For those of us whose bodies have always fallen outside of these hegemonic ‘queer’ worlds, then, the stakes of an unflinching materialist analysis are only clearer. As I wrote in a co-authored piece with my dear friend Noa Sepharia last year, “any meaningful aspiration towards trans women’s life and liberation can only originate through a transnational critique of settler colonialism, caste, and capitalism.”[50]
Kindr Grindr?
Grindr’s purported valuation of equality thus amounts to little more than liberal lip-service. Its community guidelines page continues to wax poetic with creative campaigns of social justice, likely in response to the immense bad press Grindr regularly receives about its harm to marginalized users. Most recently, the “Kindr Grindr” campaign depicted was launched, where the company has actually created and published aesthetic reels of trans, fat, HIV-positive, femme, and racialized users (almost as if in checklist format) describing their experiences of discrimination to promote kindness on the app. Below, photos abound of differentially-marginalized users coming forward with their experiences of harassment and unsafety on Grindr, with feel-good testimonials like “This is wrong to say these things to somebody” and “It's OK to have opinions and it's OK to have a preference, but it's not OK to discriminate,” and even “I think all trans people deserve to be loved and cared for.” In a cursive font, the Kindr Grindr page concludes with lettering that reads, “It's time to play nice,” followed by a link to download the app, while assorted sexual health and anti-bullying resources are scattered in the bottom navigation bar. Clearly, the days of Simkhai openly flouting his indifference to racial violence on the app are gone, and Grindr’s team has since pursued a new PR strategy. Notably, one that displaces any responsibility to individual user behavior, while failing to redress any of the financial, ideological, or structural motives that shape the app’s violent design. And, this is far from a new pattern: in 2013, Grindr launched a matching campaign to financially support a gay Israeli couple’s attempt at surrogacy in 2013 – work for the “the cause of our community,” in Simkhai’s words, always coded in colonial garb.[51]
As preposterous as much of this campaign reads, though, perhaps the most peculiar element is the picture of a man wearing a multi-color DECOLONIZE shirt, clearly centered on the page. I single out this element because I believe it epitomizes the failures of liberal critique of violence on Grindr. It is not just that the Kindr Grindr is a rosy attempt at the company coming clean about the harm that takes place daily on its interface, as much as it is not just a lack of kindness that characterizes the problem. Rather, if we properly situate Grindr as a deliberate product of a colonial strategy, a technology that itself reflects eugenic logics of racial purity, Foucauldian surveillance, and Zionist homonationalism, the company’s entire PR strategy appears deeply incoherent. Anything to do with decolonization is simply incommensurable with something so inherently and immutably an artifact of Zionist settler-colonial logics.[52]
Perhaps most on the nose of all was the 2011 controversy, ““Grindr Remembers the Holocaust,” where gay men spent months uploading hot photos of themselves posed outside Berlin’s Holocaust memorial[53] (a campaign which later provoked widespread backlash for being “‘shameful’” online).[54] Berlin’s Holocaust memorial is a monument “undeniably important and impressive” yet “[i]nevitably…, because of the reality of colonial Zionism…implicated in the question of Palestine”[55] – and, unsurprisingly,Simkhai’s response to the campaign included an admiring conflation of being “Jew” and “Israeli”. The point being: as a digital artifact, Grindr is actively imbricated in staking certain kinds of claims to cultural amnesia, nostalgia, and memory-making – what have always been centrifugal modes within the Zionist-homonationalist agenda.
Towards an Anti-Zionist Articulation of Refusal
In light of the extraordinary staying power of Grindr’s Zionist-homonationalist logics through years of development and multiple financial acquisitions, the question arises of what possible ways forward might exist. In 2020, Palestinian civil society organization al-Qaws powerfully noted: “While pinkwashing often appears to the world as a global marketing strategy, it is ultimately an expression of Israel’s deeper gender and sexual politics and the ideological foundations of Zionism.” Per al-Qaws’ writing, the call of the hour is to “center queer Palestinian voices and incorporate approaches that have developed throughout two decades of grassroots organizing in Palestine.” This crucially involves reframing popular Western understandings of pinkwashing – not merely as a tool of “propaganda,” but instead a means of “colonial violence.”[56] Above, I have argued that violence on Grindr does not exist in a vacuum, or as a mere symptom of the broader racism that characterizes all online space: there is a specificity to its homonationalist logic. But, to stay with al-Qaws’ analysis, apps like Grindr are not simply expressions of state propaganda. Rather than being a mere byproduct of the Israeli marketing machine, Grindr and its associated ecosystem have been fundamentally productive of the sexual politics of Zionism itself.
Routing these digital debates back to the materialities of settler-colonialism is a reminder well worth taking. It perhaps offers a radical interruption to a cycle of repetition for those of us inhabiting Western discourses. For, in the words of queer Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi, there is a “totalizing violence” to the settler colonialism being enacted in Palestine – a finality which renders impossible our lazy attempts to “reset” and “reboot” a system premised on death-making itself.[57] Speaking of Zoom’s violent deplatforming of Palestinian voices in 2020, Abdulhadi continues: “What does it mean to pay for a technology product that then is going to cancel the work that you do?” Grindr demands to be understood as more than just a governmental marketing ploy.
In other words: what might it look like for us to “say Palestine, instead of all these hyphenated or slash terms that obscure the reality” which litter the academic papers, book talks, and conferences on digital design? What, instead, might it look like “to not accept that invitation down that death making cul de sac?” For Abdulhadi, everyday refusal – or “throwing sand into the gears” – is the most urgent and accessible form of conscientious objection.
If we understand that “Palestine is everywhere,” how might we open up a deeper, more thoroughgoing line of inquiry and refusal, where digital technologies – entangled as they are in a web of human political-economies – may be positioned as a product of settler-colonial complicities and collusions? Where might we locate queer Palestinian imaginations of love and loss, which often are “alienated” by Global North discourses – even critical ones?[58] What can Palestinian anti-Zionist organising and analysis elucidate about apps like Grindr, which are known bastions of online harm – particularly given that “violence enacted against Palestinians is violence against all of us”?[59]
It is my hope that, in using Grindr as a case study, this project creates space for the further theorization of complicity as an alternate axis of critique, with all its shades of messy and discomfiting candor. More specifically, one that invites tangible actions which have long been outlined by Palestinian organizers and movements – such as boycott, refusal, and collective pressure against Israeli-affiliated corporate entities. To be clear, this project does not seek to exceptionalize Grindr as a bogeyman whose violence no other digital artifact, dating app, or social media platform could possibly emulate. Rather, it is to say that it is a radical, abolitionist project to recast Grindr as an artifact of Zionist-homonationalist violence rather than just an unkind gay forum, as much as it might be a radical project to more honestly reckon with all of today’s digital technology giants in their full-fledged webs of complicity with capitalist, colonial, and often right-wing political-economy. Even within the field of AI Ethics, this holds true, as researchers Corinne Cath and Os Keyes argue that “knowledge about AI ethics cannot be separated from the people undertaking that research.”[60] Joel Simkhai’s seed investment of $5,000 and his entrepreneurial role in Grindr resulted in lasting effects within the app years down the line; so, in a high-powered, fast-paced, and state-affiliated venture capital ecosystem, it is worth investigating how certain politics are always inherently tied to certain forms of capital, and further, how these modes of power then come to beat at the heart of various technologies born from particular models of investment. Particularly when Silicon Valley’s development ecosystem greatly hinges upon Zionist funding, influence, and collusion[61], many other apps too may be “exported by, trained by, reproduced by a violent settler colonial apartheid in Palestine.”[62] In 2009, it was Simkhai and Grindr: yet, even without the direct influence of an Israeli founder, startups and apps emerging from the genocidal ecosystem of Big Tech only continue to reify Zionist values of destruction.
Perhaps most importantly of all, we must ask ourselves: what onus lies with those of us who reside in the belly of the beast to extricate ourselves from systems of genocide which encode Palestinian death and disposession into our everyday? From boycotting to direct action, the unthinkable scenes of violence to which we bear witness – violences that is both bolstered and constituted by our comfortable digital political economies – demand us to sacrifice and strategize in the immediate for “Palestinian aliveness,” and reject the inevitability of settler colonialism. May we “refuse a grief that leads to apathy, or one that mistakes consumerism for material reparation.”[63] As Abraham poignantly writes in the conclusion of their auto-ethnographic piece on Grindr: “There is no future in that impossibility. There is no future but our im/possibility.”[64]
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Biography: Mallika Dharmaraj is based out of New Delhi, India. As a creative, writer, researcher and trans woman technology organizer, she is interested in situating “AI” surveillance technologies within historical structures of power, violence, and personal/collective complicity. She holds an MPhil in the Ethics of AI, Data & Algorithms at the University of Cambridge and an A.B. from Harvard College in Computer Science and South Asian Studies.
Acknowledgements: I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Tomasz Hollanek for his advising of the initial stages of this project, the research for which was carried out during my MPhil at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge (2023-2024); my dear collaborator Astha Bamba for her generous editing and conceptual input; conversations with my friend Alexis Queen that helped shape my thinking; and Dr. Eric Stanley for reviewing this piece and providing invaluable feedback.
[1] Halutz 2016.
[2] Puar 2007, 69.
[3] Morrison, Suzanne. Whither the State? The Oslo Peace Process and Neoliberal Configurations of Palestine. Social Science Quarterly, 101, 2020.
[4] Puar 2007, 46.
[5] Gook, Ben. Libidinal Economies of Crisis Times: The Psychic Life of Contemporary Capitalism. New York City, Columbia University Press, 2025.
[6] Puar 2007.
[7] Notably, Tikka’s reflections remain the only piece of scholarship anywhere which explicitly connects violence on Grindr to its Zionist Israeli origins.
[8] Emerson Barrett. Sexing the Margins: Homonationalism in Gay Dating Apps. In: Farris et. al. Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Digital Age, Cham, Springer, 2020.
[9] Tikka 2020, 84-85.
[10] Loewenstein 2011, 15.
[11] Loewenstein 2011, 196.
[12] Anthony Keane. "Pinkwashing Israel." Trinity Middle East and North Africa Review, 8 July 2022, tcdmenareview.com/pinkwashing-israel/.
[13] Esther Davis. “Four day pride festival to be held at Dead Sea, largest in history of Middle East.” Jerusalem Post, 19 April 2026.
[14] Doron Halutz. "Israeli Founder of Grindr Talks About Growing Up Gay and Coming Out to His Family." Haaretz, 28 June 2016.
[15] Andres Jaque. “Grindr Archiurbanism.” Archis, 2022.
[16] Sam Katz. "When Did We Begin To Accept Anti-Semitism As Normal?" The Times of Israel, 1 Sept. 2014, blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-did-we-begin-to-accept-anti-semitism-as-normal/.
[17] Joel Simkhai. "Embodying the American Dream." gaingels, gaingels.com/100/joel-simkhai-2656835549.
[18] "Our Supporters." The Israel Democracy Institute, en.idi.org.il/.
[19] Nikki Ramirez. “OnlyFans Owner Pledged $11 Million to Israel Lobby.” Rolling Stone, 1 Feb 2024.
[20] Leslie Picker and Alex Sherman. "Grindr Said to Explore Sale of Gay Men's Dating App." Bloomberg UK, 8 May 2015, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/grindr-said-to-explore-sale-of-gay-me n-s-dating-app?embedded-checkout=true.
[21] Echo Wang. "China's Kunlun Says U.S Approves Sale of Grindr to Investor Group." Reuters,
29 May 2020, China's Kunlun says U.S approves sale of Grindr to investor group.
[22] Tikka 2020.
[23] BDS Movement. “Guide to BDS Boycott & Pressure Corporate Priority Targeting.”https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott.
[24] Tikka 2020.
[25] Greg Goldberg. “Meet markets: Grindr and the politics of objectifying others.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 26, no. 2, 19 Jul. 2018.
[26] Katarzyna Obarska et. al. "Threats to Mental Health Facilitated by Dating Applications Use
Among Men Having Sex With Men." Psychiatry, vol. 11, 13 Nov. 2020.
[27] Rusi Jaspal. "Gay Men's Construction and Management of Identity on Grindr." Sexuality & Culture, vol. 21, 2017.
[28] Michael Dieter. "Interface Critique At Large." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 30, no. 1, 30 Nov. 2022.
[29] Puar 2007.
[30] Jack Turban. "We Need to Talk about How Grindr Is Affecting Gay Men's Mental Health." Vox, 4 Apr. 2018.
[31] Bilal Zahoor. “Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism and Capital as a Subject.” The Philosophical Salon, 4 Nov. 2024.
[32] Natasha Lomas. "Grindr's $7M GDPR Fine Is a Stark Warning to Adtech Not to Track." TechCrunch, 15 Dec. 2021.
[33] Christopher Dietzel. "'That's Straight-Up Rape Culture': Manifestations of Rape Culture on Grindr." The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse. 4 June 2021.
[34] Julie Kvedar. "Back to the Grind: Rethinking Grindr's Accountability for User Content." Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, vol. 29, no. 541, 2020.
[35] Puar 2007, 120.
[36] Ibid., 126.
[37] Ibid., 127 – italics mine.
[38] Gideon Resnick. "Grindr and Tinder Help the Holy Land Make Love, Not War." Daily Beast, 23 July 2014.
[39] "Israeli soldiers are using photos of themselves inside Gaza homes and with Palestinian detainees on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Grindr and OKCupid to secure dates." Instagram, uploaded by Middle East Eye, 24 Apr. 2024.
[40] Abraha, 2021.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Cole 2025.
[43] Gijs van Maanen. AI Ethics, Ethics Washing, and the Need to Politicize Data Ethics. Digital Society vol 1, Issue 2, 2022.
[44] Jillian York. Silicon Values the Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism. E-book ed., London, Verso, 2022.
[45] Emmaia Gelman. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. University of California Press, 2026.
[46] Haritaworn et. al. 2022.
[47] Cathy Cohen. Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, vol. 3, 1997.
[48] Nick Seaver. Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society, vol. 4, 2018.
[49] CJ Bishop et. al. “The Association Between Gay Men's Stereotypic Beliefs About Drag Queens and Their Endorsement of Hypermasculinity.” Journal of Homosexuality. vol. 61, no. 4, 2014; Tim Bergling. Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior. New York, Southern Tier Editions, 2001; Shinshuke Eguchi. Negotiating sissyphobia: A critical/interpretive analysis of one "femme" gay Asian body in the heteronormative
[50] Mallika Dharmaraj and Noa Sepharia. “In June, Israel Massacred Hundreds of Trans People. So, Which Dolls Are We Really Protecting?” Gay45, 23 Aug. 2025.
[51] Renee Ghert-Zand. “Grindr backs gay pair’s surrogacy bid.” The Times of Israel, Apr 11, 2013.
[52] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012.
[53] Thomas R. Dunn. Grinding against Genocide. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, 2019.
[54] Brian Moylan. “Why Are All These Gays Taking Grindr Photos at a Holocaust Memorial?” Vice, Feb 1, 2013.
[55] Ussama Makdisi. Beyond the Palestine Exception. Critical Times, vol. 8, no. 1, 2025.
[56] al-Qaws. “Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence.” alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, 18. Oct. 2020.
[57] Rasha Abdulhadi. “Refusing Genocide w/ Rasha Abdulhadi.” Death Panel, 16 Oct 2023.
[58] al-Qaws 2020.
[59] Abdulhadi 2020.
[60] Corinne Cath, and Os Keyes. "Your Thoughts for a Penny? Capital, Complicity, and AI Ethics." Theory on Demand: Economies of Virtue, 2022.
[61] Omar Zahzah. Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2025.
[62] Abdulhadi 2023.
[63] Dharmaraj & Sepharia 2025.
[64] Abraham 2021.