San francisco and the new economy of desire

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary reflections about a research conduced during seven months in San Francisco, USA, which is also associated to one developed in São Paulo, Brazil, since 2007. It aims to synthetize how the use of sites and apps in the search for love and sexual partners constitutes a technological and comportamental phenomenon associated with deep economic, work and urban transformations. Therefore, it reconstitutes historically these connections and analyses them sociologically in one of the cities where they are more visible. The objective is to bring historical, ethnographic, theoretical and conceptual elements to understand the new socio-technical reality, in which we live, the same that has transformed the sphere of eroticism, of sexuality and of the morality related to them.