If Henry VIII had lived in the era of optimization, he might have seen the appeal of a new app called Binder, which dismisses an unwanted lover with a swipe to the right. It’s Tinder in reverse. “Imagine if you could dump someone in the same way you start a relationship,” Jordan Laird, the app’s twenty-eight-year-old co-creator, told me. “There’s an app for literally everything. This is the last thing that doesn’t have an app.” Binder—as in “binned her”—does the dumping for you, by sending a text and leaving a voice mail, recorded by Laird’s co-conspirator, Ian Greenhill, age twenty-six. The message says, “It’s not me, it’s definitely you” or “It’s like I’m living in some sort of unwakeable nightmare.”
Binder is, thank goodness, a joke. Laird and Greenhill, who work at a branded-content firm in Edinburgh, came up with the idea as an offshoot of a campaign for a Scottish beer, and they speak of their app with the silliness of naughty boys at the pub. “It’s a hectic, busy world out there, and people just don’t have the time,” Laird teased. “They’re Ubering and Spotifying, and they’re checking in.” A day after the release, Binder had caught on. Technology writers spread the news with a combination of credulity and horror, and more than six thousand people sent breakup messages. “I hope nobody’s doing it seriously,” Greenhill said, a little contritely.
Romance, or some simulation of it, has been rendered in countless apps with impressive efficiency, by way of algorithm or sight. “I think Tinder works so well because it’s quite shallow,” Greenhill said. “It’s a simple thing. You know what you’re getting. And then you get to know the person better.”
“It’s not that different from how it is in the real world, really,” Laird said. “You’re attracted to someone in a bar, and then you go talk to them.”
Greenhill agreed. “A woman I know just got engaged to a guy she met on Tinder. When Tinder first came out it seemed quite smutty, but now it doesn’t.”
But even in an age when so much interaction, whether over laundry or love, can come about without uttering a word, an app for breakups still seems callous, beyond even the imaginations of notorious tech bros—those with little time or tolerance for uncomfortable interpersonal encounters. “You wouldn’t dump someone using images,” Greenhill said. Emojis don’t convey the right feeling: “Girl image plus boy image equals heartache, sadface? You wouldn’t use images. At least not yet.” Nor can one attain independence as if on Seamless, substituting a few taps on the phone for an inconvenient call. “I don’t think there’s the same baggage attached to ordering Chinese food,” Laird said. “The awkwardness is taken out, but I think your girlfriend would be pissed.”
Between postulations and gags—“Break up with a cake!” Greenhill suggested. “It offsets the sadness. Or take them bowling, people love bowling”—the guys mentioned that they are most often not the dumpers but the dumpees. Neither has found love online. To test Binder, Greenhill swiped away his girlfriend—they met working in a clothing store, with four walls; she was his boss—and she recognized that the voice in the cruel recorded message was his. He didn’t mean it. “She was actually quite angry,” he said.
“The conversation is needed no matter what,” he added. “You dump someone by text, by e-mail, by skywriting, you still need to sit them down.”
Laird concurred. “It’s only nice and fair and just.”
Breakups, it seems, are the last taboo of the Internet, or of startups, anyway. We laugh uncomfortably at the suggestion otherwise, while suppressing the creeping fear that, maybe, as with all things, time will change minds. “I suppose ten years ago, the idea of being dumped by tech would seem awful,” Laird said. “But these days it’s sort of like, oh, well, maybe it is the next step. Maybe in ten years, people will think it’s weird that we thought it was weird.”
