Because Algospeak
tbray.org36 points by zdw 3 days ago
36 points by zdw 3 days ago
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.
With enough ad and cookie blocking, it gets weird. Youtube Shorts decided for a while that I really want to watch videos of semi-automatic pipe welding tools being used by Asian women. At least twenty of those. Now that's niche.
Before that, there was a batch of rock crusher videos from India.
This week, the welding tools and rock crushers are gone, but there are many ads for cruise lines. Also, ads for cat food. I don't have a cat.
With tracking blocked, but an IP address that changes infrequently, that's apparently what the ad system does - tries batches of some random subject and see if there's any response. It can't lock onto anything effective.
For a while YouTube was trying to get me to watch shorts of factories in Pakistan making different color sheets of industrial foam. Every day a new color of foam. I still don't know what the foam is for, or if the color indicates the intended use.
I also got the attractive asian women definitely not wearing construction clothing demonstrating automated pipe welding machines.
The worst is when you accidentally click one of the manosphere/incel videos, then get a stream of them afterwards.
Now I'm getting Asian archery videos, which are really ads for elaborate compound bows with pulleys. I've been trying to tell whether they're really hitting the target or just faking it.
"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."
Real men didn't type.
Even lawyers, whose job is producing written text, rarely typed; they wrote on yellow pads. Legal secretaries turned that into clean copy. Engineers on the Apollo program were still dictating to secretaries.
Something I have not seen discussed is the highly dynamic semantics of the annoying Gen Alpha variant of BrainRot. It has this fascinating aspect of slang with meanings that can shift in combination with other terms: Skibidi, Sigma, 6-7, Ohio -- Not only do these have flexible semantics in the first place, their meaning can dynamically change in the context of other such terms... if any meaning is intended at all.
As an example, "sigma" could be used as "He's so sigma!" (positive connotations) or "What the sigma!" (negative connotations) or "Sigma skibidi Ohio!" (what the sigma?!?)
And then there are suffixes like "maxxing" which seem straightforward ("bench-maxxing") but can be used in creative combinations, like somebody used "second-story-maxxing" to mean "going upstairs." Not quite Shakespeare, but funny.
I am no linguist but this seems unprecedented. At least ChatGPT thinks there is precedence, but only gave examples of nonsense terms in literature (like "The Jabberwocky") and counter-cultural slang or art (like Dadaism) or meanings that shifted over time.
However this idea of semi-defined words and memes that get combinatorially and dynamically redefined -- or even undefined -- seems different. I think this is more than just The Algorithm, it's more a spillover of a subculture into the mainstream. It's like slang that has intentionally internalized trolling and arbitrary word-coining as part of normal discourse.
>>> However this idea of semi-defined words and memes that get combinatorially and dynamically redefined -- or even undefined -- seems different
Take a look back at Shakespeare again. Every line has this sort of semantic shapeshifting quality, where the meaning and intent can be radically changed, sometimes multiple times, after each successive line, and on top of that, the rhyme and meter are all proper and structured. Sometimes the puns and memes and 5 dimensional wordplay are really dependent on knowing the culture and current events of the time, but a whole lot of it hits on human basics.
It'd be really cool if a whole generation had that sort of wordplay and meta-meme construction kit baked into their slang, and kids are growing up in worlds where meaning and memes are radically changing in ways humans have never dealt with before. Makes sense that their language would be malleable and suited to purpose.
I had a great literature teacher who took pains to point out all the wordplay in Shakespeare's plays in the context of the culture his time. I recall a surprising amount of them being pretty naughty double-entendres! Some of our slang today can still be traced back to those.
However, their meanings were still static in nature, even if manyfold and cleverly embedded in there. E.g. when he coined new words, they had a meaning you could derive from the context. Unlike "Skibidi," which is essentially meaningless and can be stuffed anywhere randomly!
To put it another way, I would not put the kids I overhear these days anywhere near the skill-level of the Bard ;-) Brain rot is very dynamic and off-the-cuff, with a key enabler being that meaning can be entirely optional. And they riff off of each other and random memes. Almost like jazz in some sense.
I think what you said at the end makes sense. There's always been a language barrier between generations, but the gaps are growing faster. As the world gets weirder and weirder accelerated by technology, human language is evolving in ways that are surprising.
It used to annoy me that many SciFi authors would immerse you in the jargon of some unrecognizable, futuristic culture without any exposition, forcing you to figure out over time -- and sometimes guess at -- what words meant. Now I'm living it!
My son would point out that the "incel cesspool" actually absorbed a lot of its vocabulary from 4chan and other "manosphere" spaces and there are a lot of people who talk that way who are not incels.
For instance that Clavicular guy who was profiled in the New York Times claims he is having sex and it seems he was actually "dating" a female influencer when he was being interviewed by an NYT reporter.
Yes, Algospeak goes through this. It's funny to see words like mogging or looksmaxxing be common internet parlance, it's as if the terms lose their toxic power through widespread usage, just as I recall the story of the KKK having their secrets leaked via a radio program such that kids started talking about "grand wizards" for fun [0].
[0] PDF warning - https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-prese...
I read both books too and when I saw the title they're what it reminded me of and then it was confirmed when I clicked the link, so it's nice to predict something then be right.
I would definitely recommend people to read them, in the order of their publishing, as internet speak changes fast enough to have a difference between 2019 and 2025.
I know this is going to sound like an "old man yells at cloud" moment, but I cannot get over the number of people using "cause" as a replacement for "because."
Maybe it was my time spent in the book publishing industry, but it causes me pain every time I see it.
The horror: https://x.com/search?q=cause&src=typed_query&f=live
It's a contraction to 'cause just with the apostrophe elided. Everyone knows what they mean and knows that this cause is different than the other verb or noun "cause." I also sometimes use its instead of it's in text because it's too annoying to fix the autocorrected (or not) spelling on a phone keyboard, not because I don't know the difference.
You also don't seem to like quotes very much. You have used them properly when you were referring to the token "cause". However you did not when you were referring to "its" and "it's" which made your contribution much harder to read.
> I cannot get over the number of people using "cause" as a replacement for "because."
This is ... very old. I'm not sure why you would think it's not, honestly.
It's just a plain old contraction.
Not really different from "just cuz" is it? Though I suppose it is a little worse, given that it's a different word, not an obvious contraction.
It doesn't make me want to explode like "pacific" instead of "specific" does...