Exactly the point we assume the data of a system to be both consistent and complete. This is when axiomatic logic at its most naïve and dangerous.

This dangerous kind of axiomatic logic is pronounced when we assume that a user is a collection of “data points” with a consistent or complete identity. In fact, online-dating services are notoriously complicated by users’ own impossible burden of fully representing themselves in a two-dimensional personality. Social media has struggled to contemplate the self-contradiction and inconsistency of its own users—to see them as more than flat profiles that can be targeted for advertising. Speaking of users who have multiple profiles, Mark Zuckerberg famously said “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Writer Curtis Sittenfeld quipped in The New York Times: “To which my only response is, 'You’ve got to be kidding.' I mean, I’m not even the same person with all the members of my immediate family.”

Cultural critics have been raising questions about the intrinsic value of such shallow data for years. Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College was the most famous but not the only rebuttal. He suggested that “technology provides an alternative to love,” a pleasant distraction that derails our train of thought and drains our empathy. David Brooks’ 2013 column in The New York Times on “What Data Can’t Do” suggested that “network scientists can map your interactions with the six co-workers you see during 76 percent of your days, but they can’t capture your devotion to the childhood friends you see twice a year, let alone Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he met twice.” The French philosopher Alain Badiou provided the most direct challenge to social networking in his 2012 book “In Praise of Love.” He suggested online dating was a form of “safety first” love, in which love becomes a commodity or a consumer product. He went so far as to suggest that the premise of the user experience is an affront to the spirit of love. According to Badiou, to enter a relationship is not to compliment your “likes,” but to undergo a confrontation to identity, to enter a process: “Personally, I have always been interested in issues of duration and process, and not only starting points.”

Indeed, writers have long described love through its challenge to identity, its contradiction and its process. They defy readers to embrace what philosophers call “alterity,” or otherness—the possibility of being totally blindsided by new facts, to achieve an experience that was before entirely foreign. They impose a stance to reading that embraces antagonism, and incompleteness, and is sunken in process. I admit, I equate books with love. The only way to approach a book as a serious reader is to approach it as a relationship, as something dense and partially submerged. One does not go into reading with an assumption of knowledge or completeness, but with humility, with a willingness to enter into a confrontation that may change you in the process. As the writer Junot Diaz has said, “Every serious reader knows that they don’t understand half of what they read; it’s true, that’s not a joke—because that’s how real life is really like. People you love say shit and you have no idea what they mean.”