food and the television show House of Cards. A thirty year old woman found herself on a date with an mental patient (who had gnawed his way out of his restraints and escaped from his institution) because he had also recently watched the movie Casablanca.
I asked several of the technicians who ran DateEx.gov (the poorly chosen URL of the exchange) to explain how they coded the exchanges based on the psychologists recommendations. None of them wanted to give their names. One programmer (let’s call him “Mike”) sat in my car and talked to me for an hour, so fearful was he that if someone saw him talking to me, they might eventually figure out after this article was released that he had been part of DateEx.gov.
Looking out my car window on a rainy night, Mike said, “My friends at work would all joke about how we’d program DateEx to match us with supermodels. The sad thing is, we never actually did anything like that. We were pros. I had worked at Google for a decade before coming to DateEx. Co-workers had been at Facebook, Microsoft, you name it. We had consultants from OKCupid, Match.com, and the other private dating sites. We were a dream team. And, sure, we all wanted to help the President with her big domestic initiative, but mostly we just wanted to help people be happy.”
Mike’s story largely checked out. While there was some corruption among the DateEx programmers, the system was far too complicated to easily game into getting hot dates for the programmers themselves. Corruption within the exchanges came mainly in the form of lobbying to have some factors weigh more than others in the matching algorithm.
For example, one programmer argued vociferously for the inclusion