How algorithms changed the way we communicate (w/ Adam Aleksic

0:02This is How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show, we are talking about how the Internet and more specifically, social media has changed the way that we think, speak and relate to one another. But we are specifically going to be looking at this through the lens of language. Our guest, Adam Aleksic, is the author of Algo Speak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. You may know Adam as Etymology Nerd Online, and Adam spends a lot of time thinking about how words shift and evolve. To me, this is very much not just an intellectual exercise. It's interesting intellectually, but it's so much more than that.

0:36This is about how we communicate with each other. How do we tell other people what we're thinking and feeling and experiencing? At its heart, this is about how language shapes our reality. Here's an example that Adam gives in his 2024 talk at TEDxPen. It's about why several years ago, conversations about topics like death, mortality, and suicide with young people seemed to all suddenly involve a strange new word, unalive. Adam surveyed over a thousand middle school teachers, and he heard that they were hearing the word unalive in their lunchrooms, but it was also popping up in places like essays on Hamlet or classroom discussions of Dr.

1:13Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So where did unalive come from?

1:17Adam Aleksic: Here's Adam. For such a recent word, unalive shows up in an impressive range of scenarios. But the main function appears to be euphemistic. Many kids use the word when they're uncomfortable talking about topics like death, since unalive sounds like a less scary word. And in many ways, this is nothing new. We've been euphemizing death as long as we've had language. The word decease, for example, comes from Latin dicesus, which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death, mors. Apparently, even the Stoic Romans were as queasy about death as today's middle schoolers. But there is a crucial difference between unalive and deceased And that's that we only got the word unalive because you can't say kill on TikTok They have a mysterious algorithm that removes or suppresses any post that might violate their community guidelines So people got around with that with the word unalive The middle schoolers don't know this They see the word online or hear it from friends and assume it's a word like any other And fair enough, you probably didn't know where the word deceased came from unless you're some kind of etymology nerd.

2:25Adam says that he constantly is noticing the way that the format of social media affects his expressive decisions. And I think we should all be more aware of the ways that we're being shaped. So on today's episode, we're going to get deep into the newest words in the English language and also some of the oldest. But before we do any of that, before we talk algo speak, here are some ads. And some of them may very well have been algorithmically selected for you. We'll be right back.

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5:10And we are back. We're talking with Adam Aleksic about the way that language evolves online and how that affects our understanding of the world and each other.

5:18Adam Aleksic: Hi, I'm Adam Aleksic. I'm a linguist and influencer, best known as the etymology nerd, and I'm the author of the book Algo Speak. I really love the book. I'm so glad we're getting to talk about it, and I appreciate you being here. So one of the things that I was really struck by in reading Algo Speak is how you talk again and again about how social media and algorithms and the internet have changed the way that we speak and they've changed culture. But that's actually not new, that that has been happening for hundreds of years, thousands of years even. And in many ways, it's changing things in the same way that things have always changed.

5:52So I'd love to talk a little bit about like the ways that things are the same as they've always been and the ways that things are uniquely different.

5:58Adam Aleksic: Absolutely. Right next to me right now, I have the book Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. And this is like the OG in terms of what did the move from oral speech to written speech do to our ideas and communication and thought processes and behaviors? And it seems like a lot, you know, we move from this sort of rhyme and meter, passing down knowledge in the form of proverbs and folk stories toward now we have an extension of our minds. And that's a common definition of media that is literally an extension of us. And as we've developed different forms of media, we've extended ourselves further and further into different parts of our environment.

6:34Adam Aleksic: And each progression has also revamped the way we communicate the way ideas spread. Each time a new medium comes about, there's a new way that we have of spreading ideas. And I think it's incorrect to start with social media. And I try to draw these historical examples. And that's why I think etymology is so important. But you look at what the TV did to us. You look at what the image did to us. The photograph so profoundly changed the way we structure knowledge. And so did the written word. And so if you want to understand what's happening in social media, I do think we have to look back at those earlier examples.

7:06It's interesting because I think there's always like a generational panic of like things are changing and the world is getting worse. And the kids are going to ruin everything with the way that they're talking and writing and communicating. And it feels like there's a certainly a big chunk of that and how people are afraid about the Internet and language and algo speak.

7:26Adam Aleksic: Yeah, there was an infuriating New York Times article published a few days before the time of recording here. Forget the AI apocalypse. Memes have already nuked our culture. And he spends his time talking about how low can uniquely and words like Riz and 6-7 have destroyed our way of connecting with each other. This is sort of the classic argument that's been played out time and time again. And it's tired and I'm annoyed by it because language is merely our way of describing reality. There is nothing inherently wrong with the word. The word is not brain rot. There is nothing with the word that is hurting your brain.

7:58Adam Aleksic: Every single time new words happen, the adults are like, oh, this is terrible. I can't understand what's happening. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the point is that language as a tool of forming identity and a way of describing the world and structuring power, these young children are trying to come up with a way to express themselves. and it's in a new context, yes. It's in a social media context that maybe older generations don't understand as much but it is a profound and important human way of describing our reality. Language is our way of expressing our understanding of the world and there is an important conversation we had about the impact of media on our way of structuring knowledge, on our way of understanding the world.

8:38Adam Aleksic: Certainly a conversation we had about screen addictions and about declining attention spans But that conversation is stupid to have around the words, which are just our way of understanding what's happening. You talk a lot about how they're also a function of what these companies that run the big social media that run the big social media platforms have chosen to emphasize or importantly to deemphasize. And you talk about how your own creativity has felt limited in some ways because like you couldn't make the video that you wanted to make most passionately because you knew that it wouldn't get out to other people.

9:13How can we be aware of where we're being influenced? And how does that compare to the past ways in which language has been shaped? Because that feels kind of different to me, that it's like a company's priorities are shifting language and culture.

9:27Adam Aleksic: Yeah. Awareness starts with media literacy, understanding that every medium is a bottleneck for a creative expression. Good art comes out of a resolution of that bottleneck. And I think it's still possible. I've seen amazing art on TikTok. I don't think that means it's like a bad medium. But it does constrain our way of speaking to a certain style of spoken cadence, to a certain type of language that works with the metadata. And once you learn how to express yourself within that, there are many creative possibilities that open up. But it starts with media literacy. And we use literacy thinking about how we understand written language.

10:06Adam Aleksic: But you need to understand also where a video is coming from, why an algorithm is recommending a video the way it is. and why is the video showing up on your for you page? Why is this viral in the first place? All of these are questions that have answers to them and you probably should be asking them when you look at any video. You know, even if you're not on social media, these things filter out into the culture offline and they filter out into the way that people express themselves. And that is something that has been happening. You talk about how the phrase or the word okay came from like a very short-lived fad.

10:38Adam Aleksic: It was a newspaper brain rot fad in the 1800s. Yeah, I never heard that before. Can you tell that story really quickly? They were just very into doing incorrect abbreviations of things. So OK stood for all correct. O-L-L correct with a K. And it was just a meme. They had others like N-C, like just incorrect abbreviations of things. It was funny. It was their thing in Boston in the 1850s or something, maybe earlier. But somehow that had like this staying power. Oh, OK had more of a staying power. It also got tied to Martin Van Buren's presidential campaign. So he was campaigning on old Kinderhook.

11:12Adam Aleksic: So this is another thing that we see about memes and words are memes, that memes survive when they can adapt to numerous memetic contexts. And so OK, which started out as just niche Boston fad as like a joke, and we added the A-Y to the end of it. So now you can spell OK, OK, A-Y, but actually comes from the acronym here, the MIS acronym. But that's, I think, an early example of how brain rot affected our culture. Now everybody says the word OK. brain rod not being a bad thing, but a meme aesthetic of just making fun of something nonsensically repeating things. You can see that in newspapers. You can see that in TV.

11:45Adam Aleksic: And now it's taking root on social media. It's kind of just a fun way of playing with with words and ideas. And there's this way in which even like I said, even if you're not on social media at all, if you were totally offline, you would still be influenced by the way that social media is shaping language because phrases like, for example, side eye, that's coming from a development that's happening in social media that then gets filtered out into the language at large. This is a point I really try to emphasize. And there's many people who say, oh, I'm not on social media. I'm not going to be affected by this.

12:16Adam Aleksic: Or more recently, we know that AI is affecting our language, that ChatGPT uses words like Delve more than humans do. And now humans are starting to use Delve more because we see AI using it. The response is, oh, I'm not on social media, I'm not using AI, I'm not going to start using these words. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how language works. Language is kind of like a virus. It infects hosts and then is transmitted to other carriers who have the word within them, and then they repeat it to other people. And it spreads sort of in a viral network. We call it going viral. Social media algorithms have created a replication of the natural human way of how people are connected to each other.

12:55Adam Aleksic: It has all these nodes and networks and has a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and hear informal language than ever before. This means those words can spread a lot faster than before. And it spreads first on social media and then it bleeds off of social media. So you are not online, but let's say your friend is infected by the word delve or by the word side eye. And now you hear it ambiently being used more around you. You use words when you hear other people use them, when you have an ambient understanding that this is what language is, and then you replicate it yourself.

13:30Adam Aleksic: So even if you were offline, which is great, and I think that can be commended as well, you should still take steps to be literate in what is happening online because it is affecting you regardless. The clothes you're wearing, the fashion trends are coming from TikTok. It's like that scene in Devil Wears Prada where you can actually trace back everything coming back from something previously. Or the music you're listening to in a bar with your friends. That song was popular on TikTok. You got to understand that there's a reason certain types of songs go more viral, that they're like industry plants and music companies that are paying for these bot accounts to comment on people's profiles just so they can boost up the relevance of a musician, make it feel like something's happening.

14:07Adam Aleksic: Or these fashion trends are spreading because of certain lifestyle influencers pushing products from the fashion industry. There is a reason why the closing music ends up on our for you page on the one hand i love the way that language and culture refuse to be contained and controlled i love the way that you know you can have like the french or the spanish do you can have a central language institute that declares what is french and what is not french and yet earlier than ever yeah now most of french slang is african french yeah yeah and i i love that i think that's so cool that like you know a government body in Paris can't tell people in West Africa that they can't invent new French words and that that can't still be French.

14:50I think that's incredible. And I love that, you know, like the grammar police in the United States can't change the fact that, you know, you can say like or sort of or kind of. I think that's I think that's really fun. And I find it entertaining in the like the comedian part of me who says like, you can't control us. We get to needle you by saying the thing that you think is wrong. But then I have this real wariness about companies and algorithms that are private and mysterious and not subject to public scrutiny, controlling the way that we think and speak and what topics are acceptable or unacceptable and what phrases are desirable or undesirable.

15:33I feel a real weirdness and wariness there. And I'm curious if you agree or disagree with that.

15:37Adam Aleksic: And both things can be true at once. That language can be bottom up, this effervescent phenomenon coming from people expressing themselves as they want. And this is the kind of language that feels more fun to use. And then there is top-down language. There is somebody telling you, oh, this is called an app. This is called a phone. And then we just like use these words that the industry gave to us without thinking about it, without thinking about, hey, why is this called content? Why are we talking about this being a platform, which implies that the content that's uploaded to it is neutral? Or why do we think that content is something that is contained.

16:06Adam Aleksic: These are words that were handed down to us from these institutions, and they affect how we structure our conversations around the social media ecosystem. And that's just one small example. Of course, I think it's almost a little mundane to say, or it's incorrect to say that they're overtly trying to control thought, and that's, you know, where you get into conspiracy theory fodder. The reality is more mundane, that they just want to make money off of you, and they structure reality a certain way and that way of structuring reality ends up affecting us and there's no like global conspiracy going on they want you to listen to this song it's just the way the platform was structured in the way that people are taking advantage of the the instability in our epistemic ecosystem that you can push a song rapidly through tiktok that um suddenly gets popular and maybe if people resonate that's fine too people like a song and then it becomes a natural bottom-up phenomenon, but there's a top-down element to it.

17:06Adam Aleksic: So both can be true. But I think media literacy is that act of being aware of both processes and how they are interplaying with each other, how the structure, the user interface, the medium is shaping our discourse. You also talk in the book about how marginalized groups can sometimes find policies or rules that are supposedly to protect them, weaponized against them, right? Like if you're a Black creator, and you want to talk about racism, a lot of times those keywords that you would use in talking about racism get flagged automatically, not necessarily by a human, and your video gets deprioritized, and it gets out to fewer people.

17:46Or LGBTQ plus creators have seen tons of examples of where they're not necessarily getting out to everyone in the same way, because there's an idea that what they're talking about is, you know, quote unquote, inappropriate. I thought that was a fascinating chapter.

18:01Adam Aleksic: Yeah, it kind of circles back. And this is a constant issue that if you are a marginalized group and you try to talk about something, then you might be using words that are flagged as sensitive words and you can't talk about your identity. Like, I think it should be the right of a black person who's the N word in social media because, you know, that's that's their word. But that word will be censored by the algorithm. I mean, a really funny example, I thought of this was lesbian creators found that if they typed out the word lesbian, their content was was not getting out to as many people. So they started replacing the S with the money sign where it was immediately clear to anyone seeing it like that's still the word lesbian.

18:39It just has a symbol in the middle. And then the text to speech feature on many of these networks was reading it as low money sign, low money, dollar bean.

18:48Adam Aleksic: Yeah, dollar bean. That was the text to speech on TikTok in like 2021. even, they kind of moved on from that. Now, like, I think better examples of what I call algo speak, so that's an example of algo speak, trying to subvert and avoid the algorithm, are ones that don't even seem that obvious. Since then, the slang phrase WLW for woman loving woman has been kind of the new way to describe being lesbian. And that also served the function of circumventing the algorithm. And yet at the same time, it felt less obtrusive. And this is sort of the thing about language that we like to use it when it feels like this natural thing.

19:23Adam Aleksic: And everybody knew it was kind of tongue in cheek to say, la dollar bean, people were doing it as a joke. WLW, meanwhile, is an actual phrase taking root in society, both because it got popular through algorithmic censorship and because it's just a phrase people use. And now it's an algorithmic keyword. Every single word you use is also metadata for the algorithm. So all these things kind of circle back and it's a positive feedback loop all the time. You also talk about how in And China, even talking about censorship itself, was censored. And so it became kind of this poetic, different visual metaphors that sounded like the word for censorship.

20:00Adam Aleksic: Yeah, we started with the word for censorship being censored. So people started using the word harmony in allusion to the Chinese government's goal of creating a harmonious society. And then that word started being censored. And then people moved to the word river crab, which sounded like the word for harmony. And then that word started being censored. So people move to the phrase aquatic product because that sounds kind of like river crab. So this is why I describe in the book the process of censorship kind of like linguistic whack-a-mole. There is a word that is being used. The hammer comes down, hammer being the algorithm, and a new word springs up.

20:31Adam Aleksic: And we're going to keep playing that game. And the more the algorithm tries to police our language, the more language is going to evolve faster. And there's always speculation about the algorithm, too, because it's this opaque, ineffable process. You want to hypercorrect, if anything. So people will self-censor themselves before they even know whether or not the algorithm is actually censoring their videos. And that's a whole other process going on. But there are all these incentives for language to be produced quicker than ever. And the algorithm there creates an incentive for us to use language faster.

21:05In just a moment, we're going to produce even more language for you. But first, a quick break.

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24:58Adam Aleksic: We'll always find a new way, and you can keep on hopping in a new direction, and then we'll find a new direction. We'll rhizomatically expand in an unexpected way that it'll take a while for the algorithms to catch up. They're getting better, but we remain creative. And I think while we can agree that constraints feel bad, it is within constraints that you see this human expression flourish. Language itself is a constraint on us expressing our reality. And every word is sort of a beautiful, poetic way of describing what's going on. And you add more constraints to language like the algorithm, we still find ways to say things.

25:36Adam Aleksic: We are, that is a human drive. It's not like you can't think a thought. That would be this idea of linguistic determinism that, oh, like in 1984, you have Newspeak and you can't think about how the government is bad. That's silly. I mean, I'm less concerned about that 1984 reality and more concerned about the brave new world reality where we're amusing ourselves to death or engaging ourselves to death or we're just being lost in the entertainment while not thinking critically. And as long as we can remain aware that we're being fed this drug, which is addling our ability to critically perceive the world, then we can still engage properly in society.

26:14So how can thinking about language and being mindful of the words that we use and where they're coming from, how can that allow us to engage critically in society?

26:24Adam Aleksic: I like the etymology of the word etymology. In Greek, etumos means truth. Etymology is the study of truth. When you look at where a word comes from, you find out something real about who we are, about society. And I constantly find that if I trace back a word, yeah, sure, I can find out something about the ancient Romans, but I also find out a new angle of how we understand ourselves, how we understand our environment that we're in. And modern etymology I find particularly compelling, and I try to focus on social media slang and this kind of stuff because there's always a reason why this word is trending right now.

26:56Adam Aleksic: The word might be popular because another word was being censored. The word might be popular because there's this internet meme, and the meme might be popular because it's responding to some social pressure. They're never arbitrary. Memes are responding to the tempo of society, and they, I think, are very important things to look at as well. What would you say to a regular person? How can we all be more mindful of how language shapes our daily lives? I think one of the most powerful human instincts is to ask why, you know, why did this happen? Why is this word here? Or where did it come from? The questions like that, why is this video on my For You page?

27:35Adam Aleksic: Why are we all saying this? Why are we all thinking this? And you ask that and you get to the core of what's going on and you understand who we are as a society, who we are as human beings and what's going on with the platforms. You know, we've talked about this kind of in the general sense, but I think one of the interesting parts, too, is how small communities or niche groups then develop their own language, which then can or customs or dialects that then can get exported out. So, you know, we're on a podcast. I feel like podcasting has its own very unique and specific phrasing, etymology, and also way of delivering things.

28:17Can you talk a little bit about like what the podcast algorithm and what the podcast, what is like the podcast dialect in your mind? Because I feel like it has some really clear things.

28:29Adam Aleksic: So I've talked in my book about influencer accents, and there's three big ones. Like there's the lifestyle influencer, which is the, hey, guys, come with me to the store. That's the like classic parodied one. There's my style, the educational influencer accent, where I stress more words. And there's the Mr. B style entertainment accent, where he'll say crazy things. I'm giving away a million dollars, right? I think podcasts are more relaxed. The premise, at least, is that this is an informal conversation. so there is less of a podcast accent and yet it's still I'm trying to maybe enunciate and think more clearly than I do in conversations there's a awareness of this invisible audience that's watching later that does sort of shape our communication when you look at podcast I like to look at the etymology again iPod plus broadcast and so there is different styles of communication here.

29:18Adam Aleksic: When you're on the algorithm, it's a viral communication where your message will not succeed unless it grabs attention immediately with the first few users, and only that is recommended to additional users. And so it's replicating that viral structure of how ideas spread. Broadcast is a different thing entirely, coming from the idea of broadcast seeding in agriculture and then applied to the television and later applied to the podcast. A broadcast is when a bunch of people are listening to this right now. But it's not really going to spread beyond those initial listeners. Now, you could recommend that, I suppose, to another person, hey, I heard this great podcast, and then that would be viral communication.

29:56Adam Aleksic: But the vast majority of these listeners are directly listening to this podcast, which means we have a less of an incentive to try to play into the structure of virality. Social media has a far greater incentive to do so. You talked about how even communities where I wouldn't necessarily have expected it, right, like among the deaf community, hand gestures, making like making sign language because so much of communication is now through phone screens. It's encouraged people to raise their their hands up more so that they're closer to the face rather than down with the body, because it's harder to see like something that's at your waist when you're filming a video.

30:31That was such a fascinating idea to me.

30:32Adam Aleksic: We know that kids are signing in a tighter signing space than before, simply because the stuff they see on social media is within the constraints of the video camera. And some signs that would have appeared off camera have been modified to appear on camera instead. I'm also interested in beyond sign language, just like normal gestures. Influencers always keep their hands on the screen. It's face and hands. It's so important that you can show things with your hands. So if you start paying attention to videos and how people are using their hands in videos, it's always a very interesting... Yeah, I get the book.

31:04Adam Aleksic: I'll go speak. I'm raising up Adam's book so that it is next to my face and I'm using my hand to highlight it right there. I mean, you talk about how sometimes you found yourself like when you're with friends slipping into your influencer accent or like your online accent. How often do you find yourself bleeding kind of between like I'm regular Adam and I'm online Adam? I don't see it as a great concern. We as humans have a remarkable ability to code switch. So that's apply different accents to different situations. The TV broadcaster doesn't go home to their breakfast table and start talking to their kids in the TV broadcaster accent.

31:44Adam Aleksic: And influencers, you know, don't really do that either. When I launch into a long-winded explanation with one of my friends, I will probably use my long-winded explanation voice. And even right now talking in the podcast, like there's a style of speaking that's maybe influenced by my accent on social media. When I am speaking with my friends, I want it to be a conversation that's friendly. It doesn't sound like I'm just yapping at you. You know, I wanted to, you know. So I think a good communicator knows how to effectively use different forms of media to their advantage. And again, that comes back down to media literacy.

32:18Adam Aleksic: We really need to understand what's happening in each medium before we can responsibly communicate. How much do you think we should each be aware of this in our everyday interactions versus we should later on kind of intellectually as an interesting thing, think about it? A good conversation happens when you're just vibing it out and you're not overthinking it. You have to just go in the moment. But later on, you can reflect. And I like to think there's two modes to human existence. There's the feeling part and there's the thinking part. And feeling is when you're just doing something. You just sometimes got to do things.

32:52Adam Aleksic: And then thinking is later you can reflect. And there's certain forms of media where we cycle through feeling and thinking more frequently. So when you read, you have to feel to read. You can't abstractly look at letters like they're hieroglyphics. Otherwise, you can't get any reading done. You have to kind of get in the zone and read a paragraph. And then when you finish the paragraph, you can stop and reflect. There's nothing drawing you back into the medium. So the book allows for you to move between feeling and thinking. Social media, however, doesn't really have much time to pause on the thinking part.

33:23Adam Aleksic: You are constantly in the feeling thing. As soon as you get your attention drifting a little bit, there's something drawing you back in. So we need to figure out ways to structure thinking time into social media. And I do not want to make this just on the consumer side either. That's like saying the only problem with fossil fuels is your carbon footprint. Of course, there are companies that are out here causing way more damage than the individual, and we should also be holding those accountable. But if you on your own level of your life want to exercise a greater sense of meaning when you scroll on social media, I think it is possible.

33:58Adam Aleksic: We often get lost in that scroll of mindlessly feeling without thinking. How can we mindfully feel? And both are good. You know, feeling is good. Thinking is good. But if you were in a cycle of both and you examine your own life and how you engage with things, that seems like a very good thing to me. I'm curious, just as a thought experiment, if I gave you a magic wand and you had control of shifting things in social media, you did have the power at the top. What would you change, if anything? I would get rid of engagement optimization algorithms. I think engagement is one of the worst things ever for society.

34:34Adam Aleksic: It merely measures how long you look at a video or how likely you are to click a like button, not even how much you like a video, how likely you are to click this button if we're being realistic. And then it allows for things like rage bait and click bait and goon bait and all these things you didn't actually want on your feet if you were thinking about it consciously. So I would include some ability to reflect, like maybe a, hey, how much did you like this video? Like, go back to rating things five stars. And if you didn't rate a video five stars, don't get more videos like that. Honestly, that sort of style, the engagement optimization is better at figuring out these subconscious revealed preferences, but those are different from our stated preferences, what we actually want when we engage with social media.

35:14Adam Aleksic: And the current structure is very good for the platforms making money, but it's not very good for us engaging with the world in a way where our stated preferences align with what we see in a way that encourages us to be better human beings. Um, so some kind of mechanism where we're no longer on engagement optimization. Um, and also something where it's not pretending to be real. I think a tendency on social media, for example, you have the for you page. The implication is literally this is for you. No, it's not. It's for the algorithm's incorrect approximation of who you are. And then you take that as reality.

35:48Adam Aleksic: You're like, oh, this is personalized to me. This is for me. This influencer is talking to me like it's an informal video. All these things make it feel like something's for you. When you look at a chat bot even, like why is it structured like a messaging conversation, which we've been trained to think is like the way you talk to normal humans over chat? Why does it use first person pronouns? All these things are designed to trick you into thinking that you are engaging with some form of reality when you're looking at this hyper filtered thing that's pretending to be the full picture when it's not.

36:16Adam Aleksic: At the end of the day, language is a social phenomenon. And the thing that matters to me about language is how humans interact with each other. When you look at the origin of a word properly, you can understand, oh, this is how society was structured. This is how people engage with other people in the world. And then you get a better picture of who we are as a whole. And that is a thing that I think is important. This idea, understanding of who you are that is revealed within the word a little bit. Little pieces at a time. All sort of gesture at this greater reality. And if you properly, objectively look at things, you can kind of start to fit together.

36:54Adam Aleksic: Oh, this is what I think is happening. What are other words that you're really interested in right now? I published a list at the start of the year about words I'm watching right now. I see vague posting taking off a lot, particularly on Twitter, but it's starting to bleed over into other platforms. Vague posting is when somebody like doesn't say the full thing, which makes you comment. Oh, what is this referring to? And it's another type of engagement bait. And it's good to have more words for engagement bait. like uh i used the word goon bait earlier that's a new word the the stuff that kind of tricks you into engaging with pornographic content despite you not wanting to because the social media is trying to cram that down people's throats um it's all these things the vague posting and the rage bait and the clickbait and the goon bait are all like these differences between our stated preferences and revealed preferences again and they come down to that underlying structure of social media where it's playing with your your raw primal emotions before you get into the thinking mindful emotions.

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40:20I see that you are or I've heard that you're writing a new book about how technology affects our vibes. Talk to me about why you wanted to go deeper and what you're finding as you start investigating.

40:31Adam Aleksic: yeah um the more i look into it the more it seems like every single desire or emotion we have is just shaped by our media or at least our environments which is indirectly shaped by our media like it's it's a timeless thing um one example i like to use of our vibes changing and i think um if you look at the porn hub statistics for the year 2024 the usage of the word trad wife was one of their most used words and it shot up 72 percent from the previous year that word was coined in 2019. How is this one of their most used words now? How did this suddenly take root? And it's partially due to the, you know, rising popularity of trad wife influencers on TikTok, but also the fact that there is like these sexualities marketed to people that there's a, this is people's subconscious desires that they don't think are really being perceived.

41:20Adam Aleksic: And yet they are part of this greater network of algorithmic clusters looking at data about you and sorting you into the tribe of people who should get more trad wife videos because other people have engaged with this and then you get more goon bait on your feed and then that sort of leads into a restructuring of our ideas about male to female interactions or the trad wife is this the idea is traditional wife and it plays into the aesthetic of a 1950s trad wife but again not really what a housewife in the 1950s was because any trad wife influencer you see on social media is actually a content creator who is running a business.

41:54Adam Aleksic: And so they're also performing this exaggerated persona of a trad wife, which gets more comments. So what you end up engaging with is this hyper feminized image of patriarchy that ends up actually bleeding over into people's sexual preferences. And I find that really kind of alarming. And while the words themselves are not concerning, I think the broader view of reality is what the words are pointing at. and I do see our very reality being reshaped in real time. If the fact that we're saying the word delve more shows that AI is influencing our thoughts and behaviors, then what else is going on?

42:32Adam Aleksic: Because AI has social biases and political biases that are coded into these engines as well, accidentally. And so probably those are bleeding over. The algorithm is probably showing us a biased, filtered version of reality that's affecting our understandings about politics, about each other, about all these things. And unless we stop and think about the medium and we think about our own emotions in relation to that medium, we're going to be stuck just adopting their image of reality. And even if you're not on social media, again, you're downstream of it. Maybe this is just my own personal bias, but it feels like it's impossible to talk about language and culture and not have some part of that story be about our own relationship to aging and no longer being like the youngest, coolest generation.

43:14And you're younger than me, but you're no longer in college. And so I wonder what your relationship to like the beating, pulsing heart of pop culture and being as you feel yourself age further and further away from that. How does that affect the way that you think about your academic work and your study?

43:30Adam Aleksic: College isn't even where the culture is happening. I mean, the real language change is happening with middle schoolers. They're the ones who are really figuring out their identity and figuring out how they want to differentiate themselves from adults. And they're the most malleable in their impression of the world and most willing to adopt new language, new ideas, new vocabulary. I think if you want to understand where ideas spread, really, you have to start with the middle schoolers. Thankfully, I have a few friends who are middle school teachers. I've sat in on their classes. I've gotten to talk to some of these middle schoolers, and that kind of keeps me grounded.

43:59And you did a survey of like thousands of middle schoolers for the book, right?

44:02Adam Aleksic: Yeah, I've surveyed teachers. There are accounts on TikTok that are surprisingly helpful. Like there's this guy, Mr. Lindsay, I really like. There's other middle school teachers who just talk about what their students are saying. I think these are really important. You have to understand what's going on with the kids. But you also can't be like a blanket statement. I think there's some problems with like the immediate knee jerk reaction to the social media bans that are kind of rolling out in places because that implements like age verification stuff that is actually very helpful for the big platforms to consolidate their power.

44:32Adam Aleksic: and the better thing to do with children is not to make this this forbidden fruit where it's like, oh, they'll just use VPNs or they'll suddenly encounter at age 16 with no prior knowledge. I think it's to guide them and to teach them, oh, this is what's happening on social media. I think the proper step for children is in your 10th grade English class, along with poetry scansion, you should have a unit on how to look at TikTok. We should teach our kids media literacy, which is far more important than doing that Luddite reaction of, we should get offline entirely because then you're not training them to live in this world which is, in fact, affecting them no matter what.

45:08Adam Aleksic: And so that same approach with children, I think, should be taken with older generations who are less literate in the medium. If anything, the middle schoolers are more literate in TikTok than Gen X or above. So older people should also be taking these steps. And yeah, I think that's a general societal thing that we should pay attention and engage with literacy. Keep a pulse check on what everybody else is thinking. The college students are up to some shenanigans as well. And I do pay attention to what they're saying. But we should take readings of society, try to build as whole of a picture of the world as we can, expand our being in the world so we understand how other people are being, you know?

45:46This is my last question. It's probably the biggest one. It may be impossible to answer, But how can we have more agency over our understanding of reality so that we're not just accepting what is fed to us by people making a bunch of value judgments that we perhaps don't agree with and in fact find really troubling?

46:04Adam Aleksic: Yeah, I've spent a lot of time, I think, meaningfully engaging with the extreme end of this answer, which is get offline entirely and try to live a life that is independent of social media and all these things. which is funny for me to say that, I guess, as an influencer, but I spent the last two years immersed in the New York City neo-luddite movement, and these are people who do not, you know, use their phones. They'll answer email like once a week, and they have phone-free parties, and there's a certain element of privilege to not being able to have your phone, I suppose, but I do think these people are seriously grappling with this question, and they have thought deeply about how they're being affected by social media, and their solution is to just be offline entirely.

46:47Adam Aleksic: I like them. I empathize with them deeply because I think we're trying to deal with the same problem here. But at the same time, I feel like you are being affected in the way that I see ideas spread. And I'd rather know how I'm being affected. So start by touching grass. That's a very good thing. We should engage with nature and with each other and do more in person things. And there's such beauty to that. I will defend the Luddites. I think they're doing a really, really good thing. But to just do that is not taking in the whole picture. So, we should hang out with each other more in person. We should touch grass.

47:24Adam Aleksic: We should engage with nature. We should, you know, do all these things that are real in-person things because that is the most meaningful stuff we can do. But at the same time, we should take measurable steps to understand how we're being affected by social media. That is an incumbent responsibility upon you to educate yourself to read up on what how algorithms work, how LLMs work, how ideas spread. It's a social responsibility to me to think about this and communicate it. Well, Adam, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the show. The book, I'll Go Speak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language is out now, and I really, really recommend it.

48:04Thanks for being here.

48:05Adam Aleksic: Thank you for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Adam Aleksic. You can find him on social media at Etymology Nerd. His book is called Algo Speak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, and it is out now. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new book, Humor Me, How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy, is out now too. You can find out more about my live show dates and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a pod-maxed team of Sigmas.

48:37On the TED side, you should see the aura. on Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Leigh Nilat, Tansika Sungmanivong, Antonio Leigh, and Joseph Debrine. Ryan Lash ate when he made this video, and Mateus Salas made sure that our facts were not cooked. On the PRX side, the producers helping me avoid my flop era are Morgan Flannery, Noragil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Without you, I would simply be Delulu. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it, or someone who would be absolutely appalled by the unbelievable cringe of every single word I have said during these credits.

49:13We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human, and I promise it's going to hit different.

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