Because Algospeak

Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth. So there’s scope for plenty of books on the subject. Both books educated and entertained, one made me angry.

Because Internet (2019) · Its approach is historical and its voice fairly uninflected. It smiles and argues, but it doesn’t ROFL nor does it YELL AT YOU. The history is longer, perhaps, than most people reading this have been online (or even alive). Ms McCulloch goes back to the days of BBSes (“bulletin-board systems”) and ListServs and IRC. Some of the jargon and formulations of those days live on; you’d be surprised.

Here’s her table of contents.

The analysis is grounded in the formalisms of the author’s profession, academic linguistics. Nothing wrong with that.

Let’s look at a couple of her ideas, beginning with Chapter 1’s “Informal Writing”. A few of us, back in the late Eighties, noticed that computers in general and the then-nascent Internet in particular were driving a writing renaissance.

Before computers, a knowledge worker who had laboriously constructed essays in college quite likely wrote almost nothing for the rest of their working life. People talked face-to-face or on the phone, and dictated to secretaries. Written communication was seen as necessarily formal and disjoint from the way we spoke, or that we wrote in personal correspondence. Then, suddenly, everyone was sitting at a keyboard only seconds away from everyone else’s screen. McCulloch goes deep on this:

In the future, the era of writing between the invention of the printing press and the internet may come to be seen as an anomaly—an era when there arose a significant gap between how easy it was to be a writer versus a reader. An era when we collectively stopped paying attention to the informal, unedited side of writing and let typography become static and disembodied.

The internet didn’t create informal writing, but it did make it more common, changing some of our previously spoken interactions into near-real-time text exchanges.

From which all of this follows. It feels like a central insight. I suppose you could argue that centrality of informal text is fading in the face of short-form video. Maybe, it’s too soon to tell.

Then consider chapter 5, about emojis. Linguists obviously need to think about them because now they’re an integral part of written language. McCulloch’s insight is that they correspond almost exactly to gestures, the way we use our hands to add force to our speech. Obviously, for example, “👍”. Or when you’re talking about something completely loopy and you twirl your index finger by your ear? You meant “🤪”.

I offer the emoji story for flavor, an example of a linguist’s approach to what we’re doing to our language with our networks.

McCulloch has lots more of this stuff. I enjoyed Because Internet a lot, partly because I’m old and my memories stretch back to those BBS and IRC days and I had a front-row seat for the decades of linguistic seething and heaving. And also because I’m a Unicode geek.

Algospeak (2025) · The subtitle is “How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language”. OK, but… Social media is a fertile field for language evolution. Thing is, corporate social media discourse lives in the dire grip of the proprietors’ algorithms. And that’s where Adam Aleksic focuses. He treats all of them as a single opaque object, “The Algorithm”, which I think is fair because they all are designed with one goal: To maximize the effectiveness of human conversation at generating advertising revenue.

First, the Table of Contents.

Aleksic knows whereof he speaks: As “Etymology Nerd”, his aggregate following across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is over three million. He’s all about cool bits and pieces of linguistics, often Internet-specific usages. If I had the patience for podcasts I suppose his would be near the top of my list.

He really enjoys his work and has fun talking about some of Social Media’s more colorful linguistic extrusions; check that Table of Contents. I’m kind of old and I learned a lot about the words and emojis younger folk emit, and I think most folks, even those just out of their teens, would too. I’m on a Discord for a Major League Soccer team’s fans, and while it’s totally all-ages, I can say I am regularly less mystified than I was before I read Algospeak. For example, now I know what it means when someone tosses “💀” into a chat. Do you?

Aleksic isn’t averse to a little history himself. Looking back over the successive online-jargon volcanoes, he argues convincingly that two stand out as extra productive. First of all, the short-lived (but hot stuff at the time) Vine video platform. Second, the incel cesspool; sad but (apparently) true.

The Algorithm · Remember, it’s all about what advertisers want. And wow, do they ever want a lot of things. I’ll just touch on a few of Aleksic’s points.

First of all, they don’t want to find themselves next to downers. So if you want to talk about death or suicide or rape or racism or rage, you need to fool The Algorithm. Thus “unalive” and many other dodges. Of course, The Algorithm learns about them so you have to keep dodging. Neither side of this struggle can stay ahead for long.

Here’s another thing I didn’t know: Apparently written Chinese is particularly rich in techniques for euphemizing, making it easier for users of that language to evade, for a time, The Algorithm.

Partitioning people · Another big thing The Algorithm likes is grouping people into smaller and smaller baskets based on interests, generations, and many other criteria. This is because advertisers can aim very specific campaigns at just exactly the right cohort of people who are likely to buy what they’re selling. Here’s a quote; See how the language fills in behind advertisers’ pressure?

It doesn’t matter how much I label myself. If I’m a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me. The only thing these 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.

Algospeak, unlike Because Internet, doesn’t limit itself to written language. One of its most compelling studies concerns the vocal techniques of podcasters and YouTubers. The finding is simple: It’s hard to build and hold an audience for your show unless you sound like MrBeast. No, really.

Anyhow, they’re both good books. Because Internet educated and entertained me. Algospeak is way more intense, intentionally more like the subject it addresses. Also it made me angry. I am a lover of human language and of its patterns of growth and mutation and simplification and complexification. Linguistics is one of the disciplines I regret not having chosen.

Aleksic makes it clear that there’s an amusing narrative about how the people living and speaking in the shade of the Algorithm can never defeat it, but they can still manage to get their messages across. But they shouldn’t have to struggle!

In fact, a few million of us have found a place to talk to each other that isn’t in The Algorithm’s shadow: Decentralized social media. Specifically the Fediverse (what people mean when they say “Mastodon”) and maybe the ATmosphere (same for “Bluesky”).

I want to see how language grows in a place where new forms arrive when they’re needed, to say new things that need to be said. Not to either serve or resist The Algorithm.