The Book Blog

"Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heartbreakingly mobile."

"'Algospeak' isn't so much a story about algorithms as it is about how humans adapt to those algorithms. Unsurprisingly, we've proven ourselves to be as human as ever. We've always had memes and trends and attention-grabbing techniques. We've always evaded censorship. We've always made in-groups and out-groups. The story of mankind has always been told through the tools we create. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age caused dramatic shifts in how we lived our daily lives and reshaped our social structures. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were accompanied by significant cultural upheavals and mass urbanization. We've always molded ourselves arounds these ages and revolutions, but certain innate characteristics are always there. We come up with ingenious new ways to use our tools, for both good and bad. Then language reflexively evolves around these new tools, helping us discuss and frame our reality. Algorithms are yet another tolerable, and algospeak is a reflection of how we interact with hat tool. We have all our new trend bait and SEO keywords and euphemisms because that is how we are currently harnessing that tool and retracing our old linguistic footsteps. We have incel language and Swiftie language and generational labels as emergent outgrowths of that tool, evolving as our natural behaviors mesh with it over time. We are creative, damn it. Our language, culture, and identity are inevitably molded by our environment, but we work through those molds to keep doing silly, ingenious things with language, because we're resilient in our silliness and ingenuity. No matter what comes next, we'll continue to be the same: succeeding as well in love as we do now."

"Social media isn't monolithically good or bad. It's a mess, like any new technology. Language change has always been beyond our control and shaped by invisible factors. Your preferences don't really matter, because linguistic evolution reflects cultural moments more than the feelings of individual people. Since our cultural moment is defined by social media algorithms, it makes sense that language also reflects that."

"The idea that we can't see what's happening is naturally a little scary. In his 2024 book Filterworld, the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka identifies 'algorithmic anxiety,' or a perceived lack of control online, as an outgrowth of our generational uncertainty and mistrust about how algorithms work. Although social media platforms absolutely compound this feeling through their lack of transparency, Kyle makes the excellent point that our anxiety isn't actually about the algorithm itself, but rather about what the algorithm represents. We feel concern over censorship, surveillance, shortened attention spans, deindividualization, and harmful polarization, but these are only the negative emergent effects of human-algorithm interaction. It's right to be worried about them, but I would argue that there are absolutely positive effects too."

"English, specifically, benefits as the majority language of the internet. It's the same 'preferential attachment; process that makes trending memes even trendier: People will latch onto socially desirable languages, making them more widely used, which then makes them more socially desirable. That's why regardless of any geopolitical shifts, we will likely see English continue to determine global linguistic trends for the foreseeable future across cultures."

"Younger people, growing up bombarded with ads, distrust marketing more than ever before. We live with the algorithm, but resistance to it is embedded into our counterculture. Our memes grow more self-referential and satirical as inherent reactions against our technological reality. Whether it's 'corecore' pushing back against heightened consumerism, or 'cringe content' poking fun at the over saturation of 'brainrot' vocabulary, we can tell when something feel unnatural, and we will react against it."

"'Sigmas of Australia' might not be the new 'Friends, Romans, countrymen,' but it shows how even our governmental institutions must now adapt to the algorithm if they want to stay relevant. Politicians are incentivized to conduct at least part of their campaigns through social media, meaning that their public communication becomes subordinated to algorithmic pressures. What this portends is that our campaigning and political discourse will be increasingly shaped by what goes viral."

"If I'm a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me. The only thing those labels really change about me is that they make me easier to classify and market to. Ironically, true individuality may come out of a lack of labels and stories, because there's greater freedom of expression with a blank slate. If everybody's the 'main character,' then nobody is."

"Our blind trust in algorithms helps us believe in the categories assigned to us. Even though personalized recommendations are probabilistic -- trying to predict what we like -- we often treat them as deterministic, as if they already know what we like. Through that attitude, we become 'calcified in our digital identities,' each of which can be uniquely tagged and marketed to."

"The same problem is true with any label: It constrains true self-expression into boxes, each of which comes with its own semantic baggage."

"These reductive stories are interchangeable with reductive categories. 'Categories' are just stories we tell ourselves about how we're similar or different from each other, and these stories become even simpler through self-Flanderization."

"Academics often speak about folklore in a separate context from linguistics, and as separate from media studies, but the truth is that they're all constantly meshing. BY its own nature, our language is self-referential. Our words call back to our media; our media fits into our inter discursive web of stories; and our stories in turn produce more words. This raises an interesting corollary: Since social media is building more communities with internal references, our folkloric language is developing faster thane ver before. Each community comes with its own canon of stories, and when an idea is compelling outside of that canon, it slips through to the mainstream. Meanwhile, within the in-groups, memes allow cultures to define themselves around shared folklore. This can nuance the cultures by deepening the meanings behind their identities, but it can also Flanderize them by constraining them to the oversimplified narratives they've built up. The meaning of 'Gen Z' implies far more than it once did because of memes like the 'Gen Z intern,' but it's also been reduced. Meanings create boxes, and we put ourselves into those boxes every time we believe stories about who we are."

"Identities have always been constructed out of stories."

"In 2023, researchers at the Kellogg School of Management found that the way algorithms filter content has fundamentally changed how we engage in social learning. We've always acquired new behaviors by mimicking the actions of others, but algorithms bring us content representing the most extreme behaviors of others. Again, this leads to us thinking that the extreme is more normal than it is. People are increasingly overestimating how far their views are from the other side of the political spectrum, and how distinct their identities are from others. Because a lot of social learning occurs subconsciously through imitation, we're also starting to imitate these extreme representations, which might be how certain 'generational behaviors' came so popular in the first place. Our brains have been hijacked into identifying with Flanderizations."

"This is where we get into the Flanderization of subcultures. If creators know that concise narrative-driven labels feel more compelling or are more likely to go viral, we'll exaggerate our own identities and play a real part in shaping the cultural conversation, the same way 'preppy' emerged from a Flanderization of the popular-girl aesthetic. Flanderization of identity isn't new -- some observers have argued that the beatniks simplified the true philosophy of the Beat writers -- but it's absolutely happening faster because of the internet. Since an over-the-top, exaggerated video of a 'tradwife' living a hyper-cottage core lifestyle is going to perform better than a tangentially cottage core video, that will inform our idea of what 'cottagecore' really means. Then, when people consume and identify with cottage core content, they identify closer with the extreme idea that was presented to them. Even if a creator isn't intentionally exaggerating their videos, we know that social media will still amplify more extreme persepctives by virtue of their attention-grabbing ability, inadvertently normalizing those perspectives in our subcultures. The danger, of course, is that we consign our own identities to extreme versions of themselves."

""From "In his famous aesthetic paper 'Categories of Art,' the philosophy professor Kendall Walton argues that we perceive art in certain categories, and those categories alter our perception of the art. Each aesthetic category comes with a set of 'rules' associated with the label, and we judge media based on how it conforms to those rules. With social media creating more categories, then, are we not creating more rules for ourselves? You can't just be a 'goth' anymore, with all the possible interpretations that word could hold You have to be a 'cybergoth' or a 'tradgoth' or whatever the latest trend is, each with its own unique set of constraints. Despite having more options than ever, we may see our true individuality flattened in favor of what a select group of others like, because that's what algorithms do. They don't recommend content for you; they recommend content based on others similar to you. Nor do you make your own decisions. Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they're engineered to make platforms as much money as possible. Your aesthetic preferences, your language, your very identity -- all handed down to you by the positive feedback loop of social media algorithms. I'm not saying this to fear monger. From an etymological standpoint, we absorb commercial words into our vocabulary all the time. 'Aspirin,' 'escalator,' and 'Kleenex' all started out as brand names that we've normalized as part of our language. Language does, however, reflect culture, and it's important to pay attention to it if we want to understand our culture. Right now, it's telling us that algorithms are tangibly impacting our lifestyles, and we should be clear-eyed about the fact that those algorithms reflect social media's business priorities."