Ghosting and the Illusion of Infinite Choice

Ghosting and the Illusion of Infinite Choice

The Aesthetics and Economics of Disappearance

Designed optionality, relational cost externalization, and the ethics of leaving in the age of the infinite feed.

Anna Ehrsam
Battery Journal, July 2026

There is something almost sacred about a luxury boutique before it opens. The floor is polished to a reflective silence. Handbags rest beneath calibrated light. Garments are arranged with architectural precision. Every object appears singular, indispensable, worthy of desire. Yet the deeper promise of the room is substitution. If one object fails to hold us, another waits nearby. Nothing asks us to remain. Nothing remembers that we passed it by.

It is difficult now not to recognize this choreography in the architecture of digital life. We move through faces, opinions, bodies, images, and possible selves with gestures developed for browsing merchandise. The thumb replaces the walk through the showroom. The profile becomes a vitrine. The feed offers an endlessly replenished inventory in which every encounter is shadowed by the possibility of the next one.

Ghosting is usually treated as a failure of dating etiquette, a contemporary name for cowardice, avoidance, or emotional immaturity. These descriptions may be accurate at the level of individual behavior, but they do not explain why disappearance has become so culturally legible, so easy to enact, and so widely expected. The more consequential question is not why one person fails to answer another. It is what kind of social world makes the withdrawal of recognition feel like an ordinary option.

I approach this subject as an artist, educator, parent, and cultural producer, but also as a participant in the systems I am trying to understand. I use these platforms professionally and socially. I experience their pleasures, compulsions, distortions, and interruptions. I observe their effects in the classroom, where attention has become more difficult to gather and sustain, and at home, where the digital world enters the intimate space between parent and child. That position matters because this essay is not simply applying established theories of surveillance capitalism, emotional capitalism, algorithmic power, or digital disconnection to a familiar behavior. It proposes a new model of platformed disappearance.

I call the condition that makes this model possible designed optionality: an engineered environment in which alternatives remain continuously visible, comparable, and immediately actionable. Under designed optionality, disappearance takes four linked forms. Economically, it externalizes the work and cost of ending onto the person who remains. Aesthetically, it trains the eye to perceive persons through a regime of replaceability. Temporally, it allows one party to privatize closure while the other is left with socialized uncertainty. Ethically, it mistakes freedom from coercion for freedom from acknowledgment. I describe this mechanism as relational cost externalization, and I argue that its alternative is accountable disconnection: a right to leave joined to a proportional responsibility to recognize the relation being ended.

Students have described days in which they remain on a feed, inside games, or moving among platforms for sixteen hours or more. This is an observation from my teaching, not a population estimate. The broader figures are nevertheless striking. In 2024, 46 percent of American teenagers told the Pew Research Center that they were online “almost constantly,” and 96 percent reported using the internet every day.[1] The contemporary classroom gathers people who are physically together while psychically distributed across messages, games, streams, avatars, and algorithmically ordered worlds.

This is not simply distraction. It is a transformation in the location and texture of social life. Young people, and increasingly all of us, inhabit two environments at once: the material world of bodies, classrooms, families, work, and consequence; and the platform world of profiles, metrics, notifications, rankings, and reversible affiliations. This second world can generate knowledge, artistic invention, political community, intimacy, and genuine friendship. But its architecture is different. It permits controlled self presentation, asynchronous response, frictionless exit, and nearly limitless substitution. It trains us to be continuously reachable while only intermittently present.

Within this model, ghosting is not an isolated pathology of romance. It is one visible expression of designed optionality: a culture that has learned to withdraw attention without ceremony, to confuse access with intimacy, and to experience other people as one stream of possibilities among many. Ghosting is therefore economic, aesthetic, temporal, and ethical at once. It belongs to a broader process by which time, attention, emotion, recognition, and even care have become increasingly transactional.

José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal describe a platform society in which social, economic, and interpersonal traffic is increasingly routed through a privately governed digital ecosystem. Platforms do not merely host exchange. Through datafication, commodification, and selection, they establish the terms on which people, images, ideas, and opportunities become visible and valuable.[2] The platform is not a transparent passage between individuals. It is an active social architecture, one that determines the available gestures, the sequence in which options appear, and the metrics through which response becomes legible.

Designed optionality gives transactional time a visible interface. The question “What is in this for me?” migrates from the marketplace into the smallest gestures of social life. A like is withheld or granted as though it were a scarce investment. A message is evaluated against competing claims on time. A friendship, conversation, class, family meal, or romantic exchange is subjected to an implicit calculation: What will I receive if I give this person my attention? What return justifies the expenditure?

Economics has always understood choice in relation to scarcity. To choose one thing is to forgo another; time spent here cannot be spent elsewhere. Platform culture makes that opportunity cost immediate, visible, and almost impossible to forget. Every conversation occurs beside an open field of alternatives. While one person speaks, hundreds of other people, images, games, messages, and possible rewards remain available in the same device. The cost of presence is continually advertised.

Herbert Simon recognized the underlying problem before the contemporary feed existed. In an information rich world, he wrote, abundance produces “a poverty of attention.”[3] Judy Wajcman has since shown how digital capitalism intensifies temporal pressure, promising efficiency while producing an experience of acceleration in which time seems perpetually scarce.[4] The platform does not simply occupy time. It changes how time is felt. Pauses become waste. Delay becomes failure. An unanswered message can register either as an accusation or as an opportunity to withdraw.

Shoshana Zuboff reveals the economic system built upon this scarcity. Under surveillance capitalism, lived experience becomes raw material for behavioral data, prediction, and intervention.[5] Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias broaden this critique through the concept of data colonialism, arguing that contemporary capitalism appropriates the flows of human life itself as a continuous resource.[6] Searches, pauses, likes, messages, locations, and patterns of return are not merely signs of activity. They generate value. The feed is both social environment and production site. What appears to the user as infinite choice appears to the platform as infinite behavioral yield.

This is why the like is never only an expression. It grants a moment of scarce regard while producing information about preference, relevance, and probable future behavior. Social recognition and market extraction occur in the same gesture. Platforms benefit from circulation, anticipation, and return. They need not conspire to produce relational instability for instability to suit an economy organized around continuing engagement. The unresolved exchange, the intermittent message, the return to a profile, and the anxiety of waiting can all keep the user inside the system.

Extraction, however, does not fully describe what it feels like to inhabit these environments. Taina Bucher’s account of algorithmic power is crucial because it explains how sorting and ranking help make the world appear in particular ways rather than others.[7] Users act in anticipation of being seen, amplified, ignored, or made irrelevant. We adjust the image, calculate the timing, monitor the response, and infer what the system rewards. Visibility becomes both recognition and anxiety.

The aesthetics of the interface are central to this transformation. As an artist and designer, I am interested in what platforms teach the eye, and through it, the social imagination. They frame, crop, illuminate, rank, repeat, and discard. The grid converts singular lives into visual units. The swipe converts judgment into gesture. The feed dissolves context into flow. Each face may be vivid for a second, but its vividness is temporary and structurally replaceable. The system trains us to look intensely without looking deeply.

This is the aesthetics of replaceability: everything appears, everything solicits desire, nothing is permitted to remain irreplaceable.

Visibility is never distributed neutrally. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein insist that data must be understood through power: who collects it, who defines the categories, whose interests it serves, and whose labor is concealed.[8] Safiya Umoja Noble and Simone Browne show, in different registers, how search, classification, and surveillance reproduce histories of racialized and gendered exposure.[9] To become visible can mean recognition, opportunity, harassment, profiling, or danger. The ethics of digital response cannot therefore be reduced to a universal command to remain available. The right to withdraw is essential, particularly where contact becomes coercive, discriminatory, or unsafe.

Digital anthropology supplies an equally important correction. Daniel Miller and his collaborators demonstrate that technologies do not enter empty social space and produce identical effects everywhere. Communities remake social media through existing structures of family, class, gender, religion, work, aspiration, and moral judgment.[10] Ignacio Siles likewise rejects the image of the passive user entirely controlled by algorithms. People interpret, accommodate, ritualize, resist, and sometimes deliberately confuse the systems they inhabit.[11] Platform power is substantial, but it is not total. A serious cultural analysis must hold structure and agency together.

This prevents the argument from collapsing into technological determinism. Digital life is not false life opposed to the real. It is part of the real, and it can enlarge human possibility as well as narrow it. Nor does the number of hours spent online explain, by itself, what those hours do. Amy Orben and her colleagues argue that research on adolescent social media use becomes more useful when it studies mechanisms such as social comparison, self presentation, feedback sensitivity, exclusion, stress, and reward rather than treating screen time as a single causal substance.[12] The American Psychological Association similarly emphasizes that outcomes vary according to the person, the content, the context, and the form of use.[13]

Our concern, then, is not that the digital is inherently corrupting. It is that particular platform structures normalize particular habits of perception and relation. They make some actions easier, more visible, and more culturally available than others. They encourage continuous contact while lowering the friction of exit. They multiply communication while fragmenting the conditions of sustained response. They make presence technically possible at nearly every moment while making psychological availability increasingly difficult to maintain.

Dating apps make this visual and economic logic unusually explicit. They translate the uncertainty of attraction into a designed sequence of evaluation. The user presents the self as a compact aesthetic proposition: images, attributes, preferences, signs of cultural and economic capital. Other people appear within a standardized frame, rendered comparable through the grid and actionable through the swipe. The interface does not force commodification, but it supplies its habits: rapid appraisal, ranking, selection, and disposal.

Carolina Bandinelli and Alessandro Gandini call this the platformisation of intimacy, a condition in which users operate as brands within a market of quasi strangers and invest in interactions with the expectation of return.[14] Eva Illouz’s work on emotional capitalism shows how market rationality enters the categories through which we evaluate ourselves and one another.[15] We become both merchandise and manager, curating an image of desirability while scanning the field for a more advantageous emotional investment.

Behavioral economics helps explain why apparent abundance does not automatically produce freedom. The claim that more choice always causes paralysis is too simple; a major meta analysis found no universal effect and substantial variation by context.[16] Dating platforms, however, present conditions under which abundance can become corrosive: difficult comparisons, uncertain preferences, high emotional stakes, and the repeated suggestion that the next option may be better. In a series of online dating studies, Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen found that participants became progressively more rejecting as they evaluated more potential partners. From the first profile to the last, acceptance declined by an average of 27 percent.[17] Repetition altered the posture of judgment, producing what the researchers called a rejection mind set. One learns not only to choose, but to eliminate.

Ghosting is the social extension of that eliminative gesture. More precisely, it is a form of relational cost externalization. It removes the friction of ending: no explanation must be composed, no disappointed face must be encountered, and no account of the relationship must be negotiated. The person who disappears privately recovers time, autonomy, or relief, while the unresolved labor of waiting, interpretation, and closure is transferred to the person who remains.

Yet the emerging scholarship on disconnectivity complicates a purely accusatory account. Anamarija Šiša’s study of Tinder users describes ghosting as an undesirable but normalized strategy arising from two pressures: the need for protection from harassment and vulnerability, and the desire to escape information overload in an environment demanding perpetual availability.[18] A separate experience sampling study found that young adults were more likely to disconnect in particular moments when they wanted to avoid distraction or become more present.[19] Disconnection is not the enemy of relationship. Sometimes it is a condition of presence.

The ethical distinction is therefore not between connection and disconnection. It is between a boundary and an erasure. This is why the alternative proposed here is accountable disconnection, not compulsory presence. No person owes universal access. People facing harassment, coercion, discrimination, or danger may need to mute, block, refuse, or disappear without further negotiation. But when intimacy, trust, expectation, or vulnerability has been established, the silent transfer of uncertainty to another person becomes harder to defend. Obligations are relational and proportional. We do not owe every stranger an account of ourselves. But when we have accepted another person’s time, solicited disclosure, made promises, or participated in the creation of a bond, we acquire some responsibility for how we leave it.

Temporal asymmetry is central to this model. For the person who leaves, the relation may already be over. For the person left waiting, it remains unresolved. Ghosting privatizes closure while socializing uncertainty. Research on the emotional experience of ghosting makes this asymmetry visible. Those who ghost commonly describe guilt and relief; those who are ghosted more often describe sadness and hurt.[20] Ghosting can be more destabilizing than direct rejection because it suspends the shared reality of the relationship. The abandoned person is left not only with loss but with an epistemological problem: What happened? Was the connection real? Does my experience count if the other person refuses to acknowledge it?

This is why ghosting is more than silence. It is a unilateral withdrawal from the production of mutual meaning and a reorganization of relational time in which one person exits while the other is left to complete the ending alone.

The problem extends far beyond dating. A student looks through a teacher toward a notification. A parent looks through a child toward a screen. Friends sit together while each inhabits a personalized world. No one has formally left, yet presence becomes porous. We might call this micro ghosting: the repeated disappearance of attention inside relationships that ostensibly continue.

A 2025 meta analysis of partner phubbing, the displacement of a romantic partner in favor of a device, synthesized 52 studies, 58 samples, and 19,698 participants. It found associations with lower relationship satisfaction, intimacy, responsiveness, emotional closeness, and relationship quality, as well as greater conflict and jealousy.[21] Most of this evidence is correlational, and context matters. A shared screen may create closeness; an excluding screen may erode it. The significant point is that partial attention is relationally experienced. The person has not left, but recognition has.

The same pattern enters family life. Research on parental technoference links device based interruptions to children’s problematic media use, suggesting an intergenerational loop in which distracted adults model the absorption they fear in children.[22] The lesson is not that phones destroy families. Digital communication can sustain families across distance, and distraction long predates the smartphone. The harder point is that children learn what presence feels like from adults whose attention is itself being competed for, measured, and sold.

From an anthropological perspective, attention is more than a private resource. Marcel Mauss argued that gifts create relations through obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate.[23] Time and attention function this way. To listen is to give something irrecoverable. To answer is to acknowledge a bond. To share a meal, care for a child, read a student’s work, or stay through a difficult sentence is to enter a social economy whose value cannot be reduced to price.

Yet time is not equally owned. The freedom to optimize one’s availability often rests upon care labor performed elsewhere, and expectations of responsiveness have never been evenly distributed. Arlie Hochschild shows how feeling, attention, and relational maintenance become organized by social and economic demands.[24] The answer is not to romanticize endless emotional work or compulsory politeness. It is to distribute relational labor more justly rather than eliminate it through disappearance. A clear ending may require effort, but effort is not automatically oppression. Sometimes it is the form respect takes.

The philosophical core of ghosting is recognition. bell hooks understands love not as sentiment alone but as a practice involving care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.[25] Emmanuel Levinas locates ethics in the encounter with another person whose irreducible existence interrupts the sovereignty of the self.[26] Both positions resist the fantasy that freedom means remaining untouched by the claims of others.

Digital culture has made sociality more continuous, measurable, mediated, and disposable at the same time. We are surrounded by representations of other people while often remaining alone. We are overconnected and underrelated, possessing extraordinary access without an equivalent ethics of attention. Time becomes capital, attention becomes currency, and relationship becomes an investment whose continuation must be justified by return.

Yet human relationships are valuable precisely where they resist this calculus. Friendship is not efficient. Teaching is not a clean exchange of information. Parenting cannot be optimized into frictionlessness. Love is not the successful selection of the best available option. These practices acquire meaning through duration, repetition, attention, repair, and the willingness to remain when the immediate return is uncertain.

As an artist, educator, parent, and cultural producer, I return to the practice of slow looking. To stand before an artwork is to resist the command to move on. It is to allow form, material, history, and ambiguity to exceed the first glance. Slow looking does not guarantee understanding, but it creates the conditions in which something other than appetite can emerge. The same may be true of human beings.

The opposite of ghosting is not permanent connectivity. It is accountable disconnection: the capacity to set a boundary without erasing another person, to end without pretending nothing occurred, and to recognize that time given creates relation even when the relation cannot continue. Accountable disconnection joins freedom of exit to responsibility for the costs that exit creates.

We do not need a nostalgic return to a predigital world. People have always abandoned one another, and older communities could be restrictive, punitive, and cruel. What we need is an ethics adequate to the scale, velocity, and extractive power of the systems we have built. The model proposed here identifies the terrain: designed optionality produces an aesthetics of replaceability, enables relational cost externalization, creates temporal asymmetry, and turns an ethical departure into an act of erasure. Digital literacy must therefore include relational literacy: how to decline, leave, listen, tolerate discomfort, distinguish self protection from convenience, and recognize when another consciousness has become content.

The luxury boutique promises that every object can be replaced. The feed extends that promise to nearly everything we can see. But a person is not an image in a sequence, a profile in an inventory, a source of behavioral surplus, or an inefficient claim upon our time. To answer another human being is not always to continue the relationship. Sometimes it is simply to acknowledge that a relationship existed.

In an age organized around infinite choice, that acknowledgment may be one of the last remaining forms of freedom.

Notes

1. Michelle Faverio and Olivia Sidoti, “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/12/12/teens-social-media-and-technology-2024/.

2. José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 31–48.

3. Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 40–41.

4. Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

5. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

6. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

7. Taina Bucher, If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

8. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

9. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

10. Daniel Miller, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang, How the World Changed Social Media (London: UCL Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781910634493.

11. Ignacio Siles, Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).

12. Amy Orben, Adrian Meier, Tim Dalgleish, and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “Mechanisms Linking Social Media Use to Adolescent Mental Health Vulnerability,” Nature Reviews Psychology 3 (2024): 407–423, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00307-y.

13. American Psychological Association, “Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence,” May 2023, https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use.

14. Carolina Bandinelli and Alessandro Gandini, “Dating Apps: The Uncertainty of Marketised Love,” Cultural Sociology 16, no. 3 (2022): 423–441, https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211051559.

15. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

16. Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd, “Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload,” Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 3 (2010): 409–425, https://doi.org/10.1086/651235.

17. Tila M. Pronk and Jaap J. A. Denissen, “A Rejection Mind-Set: Choice Overload in Online Dating,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 11, no. 3 (2020): 388–396, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619866189.

18. Anamarija Šiša, “Ghosting on Tinder: Examining Disconnectivity in Online Dating,” Media and Communication 12 (2024), https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8563.

19. Julius Klingelhoefer, Alicia Gilbert, and Adrian Meier, “Momentary Motivations for Digital Disconnection: An Experience Sampling Study,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 29, no. 5 (2024): zmae013, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmae013.

20. Gili Freedman, Darcey N. Powell, Benjamin Le, and Kipling D. Williams, “Emotional Experiences of Ghosting,” Journal of Social Psychology 164, no. 3 (2024): 367–386, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2081528.

21. Nie Ni, Seyedali Ahrari, Zeinab Zaremohzzabieh, Mansoureh Zarean, and Samsilah Roslan, “A Meta-Analytic Study of Partner Phubbing and Its Antecedents and Consequences,” Frontiers in Psychology 16 (2025): 1561159, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1561159.

22. Jinghui Zhang, Qing Zhang, Bowen Xiao, Yuxuan Cao, Yu Chen, and Yan Li, “Parental Technoference and Child Problematic Media Use: Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 27 (2025): e57636, https://doi.org/10.2196/57636.

23. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Expanded Edition, trans. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago: HAU Books, 2016), originally published 1925.

24. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), originally published 1983.

25. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000).

26. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

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Pronk, Tila M., and Jaap J. A. Denissen. “A Rejection Mind-Set: Choice Overload in Online Dating.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 11, no. 3 (2020): 388–396. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619866189.

Scheibehenne, Benjamin, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd. “Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload.” Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 3 (2010): 409–425. https://doi.org/10.1086/651235.

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