Every day since reading it, I’ve found myself thinking about Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak. And of course I have—we’re surrounded by exactly the thing he so carefully examines: social media algorithms and how they impact the way we (and especially Gen Z) communicate. Which is to say, among other things, it’s about memes.
Aleksic writes from a unique perspective: Gen Z, Harvard alum linguist, and remarkably successful influencer (@etymologynerd for those interested). His short-form videos move at a clip, with citations popping up in the corner of the screen every now and again, and mostly focus on explaining a recent linguistic phenomenon—whether that’s predicting that “Amanda” will be the next “Karen” or the emergence of Gulf Pidgin Arabic being spoken between migrant workers in the Gulf states (“Imagine if Arabic and Hindi had a baby”). Despite the many differences between the two mediums, the feeling of reading Algospeak isn’t all that different from watching his TikToks (in a good way). This is, I think, thanks to a few different aspects of Aleksic’s work that remain consistent regardless of medium.
First, it seems to me that some of the primary hooks of his content stay the same. His Gen Z/ influencer/ academic angle lends itself to a sense of Inside Baseball. As a Gen Z academic I felt this mostly in the influencer side of things, but I imagine the feeling is similar for those older than me and those outside academia. The other hook is just that it’s funny to see memes examined with academic rigor. One of his most viewed videos is about the etymology of “sigma.” In the book, the table of contents is probably the clearest, or at least first, example of this. Where “algospeak” is a fairly clear portmanteau of two familiar words (algorithm and speak), Chapter 2 is titled “Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler,” and Chapter 6, a favorite of mine, is “Wordpilled Slangmaxxing.”
But, thankfully, both the book and Aleksic’s videos are made up of more than amusing cognitive dissonance. There’s genuine insight at every turn. The two chapters mentioned above are respectively about social media’s acceleration of linguistic innovation and the impact incels have had on internet lingo. Seeing “She X on my Y till I Z” referenced in a hardcover book is funny, but it’s specifically brought up as an example of a “phrasal template’s” flexibility lending itself to greater longevity than other bits of language. Thus, the second throughline: though well aware of the whimsy of it all, he never crosses over to dismissal. He insists on taking internet culture seriously enough to deem it worth examining.
This sense of good faith is emblematic of the balanced and critical analysis present throughout the book (“The question ‘do algorithms radicalize people?’ is the wrong question; neither humans nor machines are that simple.”). There’s the constant tension between, on the one hand, the way the processes or steps of linguistic evolution are staying fairly consistent with what’s been the case for centuries (if not millennia), and, on the other, the ways social media algorithms have completely changed the game, not least of which is the unprecedented acceleration of those pre-existing processes. Algorithms both drive and restrict the evolution of language, often in one and the same stroke. Along the same lines, he presents a thorough critique of social media companies for their censorship and commodification of identity without ever losing sight of the many legitimate benefits that come with the internet, and even with social media. He refuses to dismiss algospeak as “incorrect” and expresses clear frustration with the use of “brainrot” to describe slang—and, using as an example the conflict between France’s Académie Française and the increasing use of Arabic slang in France, even goes so far as to argue for the decolonial potential in social media as a platform that strips the agency from the prescriptive powers that be.
Despite the undeniably academic tilt to the book, I never felt lost in linguistics jargon. Aleksic is careful to define field-specific terms he uses, and explains in depth more recent (and I believe original) concepts like the “engagement treadmill.” (Not to mention, the whole book operates as a way to explain jargon like “sigma” and “skibbidi” and “goblincore” to ‘nonexperts’ like my parents).
I was half-joking above, but it’s true that one of the driving forces behind the whole book is Aleksic’s belief that, “we can, in fact, work backward to figure out why this happened.” This historical sensibility is part of what makes Algospeak capital I Important. The humanities student in me appreciates and shares the resistance to looking at the ever complicated world we live in and declaring that complication is evidence of inexplicability. The book manages to get at all the things about social media that make me itchy, the commodification, the flattening, the enshitification of it all, while articulating very clearly why we should care.
“I’m not saying this to fearmonger […] it’s important to pay attention to [language] 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.” (182-3)
And at the same time, it holds onto what is a staunchly anti-pessimistic view. Calling back to a discussion of Chaucer a few pages beforehand, it ends on a positive note:
“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.” (218)
