#aleksic

"'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."