Mike: Hello, Farhad! How was your week? Mine has been stressful. I’m going on vacation and just booked my dog a sitter on the Internet. What a time to be alive!

Farhad: Poor Bruna! I can’t believe you’re not taking her with you.

Mike: Yes, well. She weighs 80 pounds, and an extra airplane seat to Hawaii would have cost a lot.

So, it’s been a weird week in tech. First, Jack Dorsey and a bunch of Twitter board members bought a bunch of stock to prove they love the company. Then, Google basically blew up its entire organizational structure, and the tech world went crazy. Now, Google is owned by some parent company called Alphabet and has a new chief executive. I still don’t really understand it, but I don’t think anyone else does, either, so that makes me feel better.

Farhad: Wait, I understand it! I wrote a whole column about it. Read my hot take, Mike.

Mike: Oh, um, I will later on the airplane. I promise. And this weekend, two of our talented colleagues wrote a deep dive into Amazon’s insanely stressful and demanding work culture, which I highly recommend reading.

Beyond all that, something else really blew up this week: Tinder. Specifically, whoever handles Tinder’s Twitter account.

The company unleashed a tweetstorm of epic proportions on Tuesday evening, a response to an article in Vanity Fair last week that suggested that Tinder, among many other apps and sociological issues, is perhaps partly responsible for what the writer called a “hookup culture.” Tinder was incensed and questioned the author’s journalistic integrity.

Of course, nobody looks good after going crazy on Twitter — especially brands — and backlash against Tinder immediately ensued. Then a backlash against the Vanity Fair article. Then, Tinder booted its chief and brought back the old one. It was high drama, as far as Twitter drama goes.

Farhad: I’ve got to say, though: Tinder had a point about the Vanity Fair story. Not only did it adopt a tone of high moral panic about dating apps — it compared their effects to the melting of the polar ice caps and the “Sixth Extinction” — but as New York Magazine’s Jesse Singal pointed out, the article was even factually suspect. Sociological research suggests that millennials like yourself appear to have fewer sexual partners than previous generations. (Sorry!) If it’s really the case that Tinder and other apps are killing true love in favor of one-night stands, there’s little evidence for it.

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Mike: How does one even kill true love, anyway? It’s this presupposition that a potential increase in sex — or a short-term relationship based on sex — precludes the idea of finding “love” sooner or later, which I think is bogus.

Also, talking about sex with you is about as pleasant as getting the birds and bees talk from my dad. But I have a way to make this technological. Hear me out.

Tinder is, in some ways, simply another marketplace facilitated by the Internet, just as we’ve had the eBays, Craigslists and Airbnbs of the world. Take the moralizing stance out of an increase in matches and think about it: The Internet eases the connectivity of supply (the undersexed) to demand (the sex-seeking). That’s a good thing, no?

Farhad: It’s a great thing. I mean, I’ve heard. (Hi, honey!)

But I also think these apps are more than a simple marketplace for sex. Tinder argued this poorly on Twitter, but we’re deep into the age of online dating now, and just about everyone knows someone (or is someone) who has made a lasting relationship through one of these services.

Mike: True. I have a friend who unabashedly admits he met his wife on Tinder, which is still funny to me. And yes, “sex” simplifies the marketplace. It’s a way to better connect with others for even a fleeting moment in this big, scary world. I like that concept, even if a significant number of the dudes on the service are, in fact, oversexed bros.

Farhad: It will take some time — probably generations — to determine whether these relationships will last, and whether, in a larger sense, online dating has been good for humanity, which seems to be what Vanity Fair was trying to figure out.

But that’s probably the wrong lens, anyway. For now, when assessing grand topics like How Tinder Has Changed Human Evolution Forever, it’s probably good to remember that the way we meet other people has never been really great, and so even marginal improvements like online dating are probably going to still feel pretty terrible for a lot of people. That’s life!

Mike: Well, I’m glad at least we settled that life is terrible. See you in a week when I get back from vacay!