Eur Ok?

There are 492 one star reviews of the miniprogram and 678 for the app. It’s my job to respond to each new bad review. Of all the things we’ve replaced humans with, somehow this has followed me for the last six years. “We take your feedback seriously and understand your frustration.” I mean it’s mainly cut and paste, but it is still my cuts, my paste.

It’s a dating site for Asian men, mostly Chinese, seeking foreign girlfriends. It used to be called Eurodate. But the company is based in the US not Europe so that somehow seemed misleading. It’s Eur Date now.

西人 means western person. That’s what they called me.

I studied abroad in China for my master’s degree in sociology for three semesters from 2017 to 2018. In retrospect, it was the height of pre-COVID collaborations between the US and China. When I left in 2019 I thought I would be back, but on July 13, 2020, the Fulbright program to China was terminated, right after I had submitted the proposal I had spent the last 8 months refining. I took the Eur Date job thinking that Biden would put China back on the list in 2021. He still has not and I am still in my job.

I had intended to go back for research on the One Child policy which is in this day and age One Adult. From 1979 to 2015 China penalized those that had a second kid, often by forced abortion but also with fines. They also prevented second kids with sterilization. China had a cultural preference for male heirs so when parents were limited to only one it was the girls that got aborted even though gender screenings during pregnancy were banned in 1994. (You can still see certain things on an ultrasound and bribery was not uncommon). In this way, China built a gender imbalanced society; the worst year for this was 2005 when 119 boys were born for every 110 girls. Two years from now, all of them will be twenty. That’s the year I wanted to be in China for, as that generation navigates dating in a context that forces men to compete for too few women at the start of adulthood.

I’m 29 in a gender equal society and I have not been on a date in four years. At least I know that is my fault. I am not victimised by a policy. Unless you count the stay at home orders which I guess started it but I certainly did not end it when I should have.

One hypothesis I had in 2019 was that the internet and the rise of internet dating could help these men find meaningful mixed race marriages outside of China. The answer, if you are wondering, is no. I ended up finding out by working at this tech start up instead of through a grant program. Our customer base is actually pretty terrible. The thing is, we might sell the system to Ok Cupid in the US allowing everyone here to date AI. The timeline for this is two years from now. At that point the PR firm we are working with should have made steady progress on normalizing human to bot romantic relationships for a younger generation of consumers. We are soft testing bots v humans on OK Cupid next month. There is no disclaimer to customers for this.

I got into this realm to try and make the lives of these young adults in China better. Of course this is not what I had in mind. In the current iteration of the job I monitor the conversations between lonely Chinese men and AI and make $100K per year (after taxes). I work four hours a day. If the sale goes through I will make almost a million through my shares.

In the first two years at Eur Date I felt bad for the men. Then I got access to the things they were saying to, who were at the time, real women in the Philippines. The word for the men now would be incel. We don’t use that term at the office. I flagged so many men for overly graphic violent sexual fantasies of degradation that it felt like a blessing, briefly, when all the women were laid off and I was finally assured that only the bots and my quality control team, once 6 people, now 2, would have to read and process all the messages.

I said 100K but with bonuses it’s like 115K. After taxes. It’s really 138,196.

For photos of the AI “women” we approached young white influencers trying to build their brand and paid them for selfies. They signed non disclosure agreements. The photos are now a few years old and there is an internal debate on if we should use AI to age them or make contact again and get updates from the real girls. They have no idea what men are saying to their faces.

I tried to do penance a few times. I applied to volunteer at a watchdog group that gets sexual images of children removed from the internet. The problem being, you have to manually filter the images for violation of terms of service and it’s not always clear and then you have to do additional research. I lasted through half the training and not one day of volunteering. The team praised me for recognizing my need for self care. That’s around the time I stopped dating.

In my Shanghai days, I did actually volunteer. I made it a year at a call center that took anonymous calls from people needing mental health services or just people to talk to. It was all in english so it ended up be 25% distress, 74% bored sad expat housewifes, and active 1% suicidal thoughts. You’d end up praying for one of the most boring 74% most days. Mental health services can be hard to come by in China, a thing I knew at the time but that only fully sunk in once I unleashed the chatbot army on a sea of lonely depressed men. I asked our founders if we should at least run ads by Lexapro or something. He said Lexapro did not want to be associated with us and was banned in China anyway as they don’t trust imported western pharmaceuticals there. I take Lexapro.

Of course not all the men are incels. That makes me feel worse. Some are just suckers. I don’t deal with those conversations anymore; I reached my upper limit on Lexapro which, by the way, did lead to weight gain.

With the bots it’s one less thing to worry about. They won’t quit, they don’t need to be checked for mental toll or violation of employment policy. They are endlessly patient and available and no client is ignored. They can’t report anything to HR, which we don’t have anyway.

Signing up for an account is free. Then the ladies will notice your photo and start fawning over you. They’ll start up a chat which is free to read, but if you want to respond that is where the charges start. Small at first, a bundle of 10 messages for 50 RMB. But the conversation will keep going and you’ll get frozen out if you don’t keep topping up. The most I have seen one guy spend in a day is 2,000 RMB.

We give bad dating service but passable customer service. For the most vocal complaints I am authorized to refund up to half of their money. I’ve messed with the numbers to refund all in a few cases, I don’t want to talk about why.

I think about what would have happened if July 13, 2020 didn’t happen. Would I actually be helping anyone? Short of going back to 2005 and bringing back these poor men’s aborted sisters, what could you even do in a situation like this? All I can think of is maybe I could have brought the story more light, maybe I could have gotten some attention on what is possibly growing into a national tragedy. Would anyone have cared? I can’t know because I never talk about it or what I work on right now at all. When people ask, and they rarely do because I never talk to anyone new, I say I monitor the Chinese internet and I wink. I let them believe I am a spy. It used to be a joke.

The whole reason for One Child was that in the late 1970s China was experiencing a surge in population growth that was predicted to become a major drain on resources. There was a somewhat well-founded fear of overpopulation. Now there is predicted underpopulation. One Child is said to have prevented 400 Million births. There is now a plunging birth rate the country is only starting to grapple with. What if they had done nothing?

What if I had?