A book promising to explain the cynical, attention-grabbing tricks of social media while casting an adoring eye on the linguistic novelties of Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, X, and so on, aims to perform a worthy public service. It looks to expose the hidden dynamics of online culture while giving benighted readers a chance to know the linguistic progeny of young influencers. That is before, in all likelihood, taking a hard pass on their slangmaxxing.
Still, if you want to learn what it means to call someone a sussy baka or what a skibidi is, then Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic is a good place to start. It just may not be a good place to end up. Though an impressive primer of onlinespeak, it frequently engages in the same sleight of hand it criticizes, and fails to criticize when you wish it would. It is emphatically not a challenge to the groupthink implicated in online trends. It is, finally, as much a creature of the algorithm as an independent witness of its manipulations.
Aleksic, a social media personage in his own right, is the creator of short-form videos about language, which he posts under the name “Etymology Nerd.” But his book seems intended for a different audience, an older one, including people who may be surprised to read that “short-form video is simply the most addictive medium we have.”
The novelist Willa Cather once published a handful of essays under the title Not Under Forty, saying, “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” This was just after World War I. A new international order was emerging. The last traces of Victorianism had all but vanished and Babbittism was on the rise. The ’20s began to roar and nothing would ever be the same again, but only those old enough to have seen the before times could grasp all that had been lost.
Aleksic writes not about a passing world but the dawn of a new one, and if you are of a certain age you are likely to feel a Catherian mood come on as you take in the ways and words of our brave young content creators. Depressed and impressed by turns, but rarely bored.
The early chapters of Algospeak outline how online censorship gave rise to fascinating workarounds to slip past the algorithmic monitor. Suicide being a verboten topic on TikTok because of the censorship policies of the Chinese government, the kids adopted the verb unalive, earlier seen in an Ultimate Spider-Man episode. But it didn’t stay online. At Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, an exhibit devoted to Kurt Cobain explained that the late Nirvana frontman “un-alived himself at 27.” According to Aleksic, “In some cases, students are even learning the word ‘unalive’ before the word ‘suicide.'”
Word news shares equal billing with social media news. Aleksic explains how short-form video is yet another homogenizing force leveling regional accents and that it has given rise to its own accent, speech mannerisms, and rhetorical style. A heavy use of the second-person pronoun “you” and a tendency to emphasize multiple words in a given sentence are two of the more conspicuous features of video-influencer speech. A slang-tropic leaning into vogue terms is rewarded by the algorithm, as is novelty and exaggeration—so that’s what you get. Subtlety not so much. Uptalking is common, as is a certain restless delivery because, hmm, pauses are counterproductive. Pandering to the algorithm is, meanwhile, pretty much universal.
Aleksic never fails to emphasize the newness of it all: how our new media “has given rise to entirely new accents, dialects, grammatical rules, and morphological processes.” But with some of his examples, one can think of older, analog precedents that call into question the absolute novelty of his linguistic specimens.
In an otherwise excellent chapter on incels, Aleksic writes about the phenomenon of being indoctrinated or blackpilled into the view that one’s romantic prospects are distorted by lookism, “discrimination based on one’s looks.” But lookism, the word, has been around long enough to be an old standard in the feminist songbook. Furthermore, it seems extraordinary that this fussy self-righteous term from the 1970s has migrated all the way from the lips of politically correct women’s libbers to the politically incorrect screeds of anti-feminist incels, but this point seems lost on Aleksic. Then again, it’s not the kind of point the algorithm rewards. It just happens to be true.
One of the more irritating tics of Aleksic’s writing mirrors what he at one point calls the “curiosity gap” that a good title can instill in the minds of would-be video consumers. It might also be called the desire to know more, which is certainly what I felt any time Aleksic introduced a slang term I did not recognize. But on several occasions, Aleksic would postpone for pages the moment when he finally defined the term at hand. Surely the incels have an incredibly ugly term for this kind of teasing.
Last, something must be said about the point of view of Algospeak. Although rich in information that is especially interesting to those of us who are not very online, the book has a rather glib, off-the-shelf liberal point of view that is wanting not because it is liberal but because it is a simplistic retail product of the right education and the right milieu. It goes nicely with the other products issued from the nerdy nice guy brand of this particular author. Yet it does not involve him in the awkward work of standing apart from all the cultural production he describes to question its actual value, even as he concedes many of its shortcomings.
A book on this subject might have been the perfect opportunity—and certainly the perfect medium—for more of a reckoning with those glib habits of mind the algorithm rewards. Instead, we have a rather good book on language and social media that still owes too much to the algorithm to shake loose its chains and indulge the slower rhythms of reflection.
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
by Adam Aleksic
Alfred A. Knopf, 246 pp., $29
David Skinner writes about language and culture. He is the former editor of Humanities magazine.
