reading Alchemised and Algospeak at the same time is crazy because I really thought I could have told you which one would piss me off more but alas. it's Algospeak. SenLinYu may be a fanfic writer who scrubbed off the serial numbers to go trabpub but Adam Aleksic insists on calling himself an influencer and it turns out I do respect that less.
update yeah he said that. I'm gonna kill this dude
I guess if nothing else this did drill pretty directly to the most grating thing about his book (as someone not familiar with any of his tiktok work), which is his tendency to point out linguistic trends he's noticed with absolutely no political analysis attached at all
so anyway that's a DNF for Algospeak l m a o
the thing is that it felt so half-baked from the jump because Aleksic would be saying things like "yeah influencers who have or can approximate American or British accents (as long as they're the most "correct" and palatable American or British accents) do way better than any other content, so a lot of people stop using their native accents and try to sound more Western" and you the reader think okay well that's horrifying but Aleksic as the author just goes "isn't that interesting? well anyway, moving on!" like yeah man it is interesting, in a really awful way. would you like to comment on it at all?
for the record Aleksic was already on thin ice with me from the first page of Algospeak because he decided to start as incendiary as possible by talking about the word "unalive" and making the case that it's just the inevitable result of The Youth making up new words and anyone upset about it is being needlessly reactionary. the broader implications of The Youth growing up accustomed to censoring conversations about "sensitive topics" so severely that it bleeds into their real life communication was not interesting to him
and for the record yes I did note that he added that he personally doesn't think anyone should be using the r slur but that's kind of a wiener caveat to add when you've already lent alleged academic credence to the notion that it's basically inevitable that it will become mainstream because nobody even remembers that it's supposed to be ableist anyway. Adam Aleksic is a few years younger than me, so maybe he missed the PSA series where people were reminded that using "gay" in a derogatory manner is bad even if you're not specifically insulting a gay person, but it really doesn't seem like that hard of a concept to grasp.
