TikTok Is Changing How We Talk & How We Vote

13:43Adam Aleksic:If they're culturally cool or funny, then we capitalize on it broadly.

13:47Kara Swisher:And how do meme formats fit into this engagement rubric? Because they are. A lot of the early internet ones were really cloddy memes, but they worked really well. And some were phrases that were attached to memes because they always had a picture with them in some way.

13:59Adam Aleksic:Phrasal templates are very important, meme templates. There's carriers for ideas, like make X, Y again, if we're already dabbling into politics here. Like that's a phrasal template. My LinkedIn bio says making linguistics cool again. Earlier today, I was talking to someone and they said, like, make teaching engaging again. And we say that without thinking that that happened because Trump, like, popularized that phrase. It was spread as a viral meme. And now it's just this, it's a carrier for other, because it's so easily re-adaptable, remixed with other new ideas. So it keeps taking on new lives every time it gets reused.

14:35Adam Aleksic:Keep calm and carry on. Right, right. So these grammatical skeletons, X is the new Y, like, you know, that kind of stuff. They underlie our language. They've always been like that, right? But internet memes make it easier to point out and see these happen.

14:49Kara Swisher:But basic memes have pictures or videos with them or something that you could put up a picture and people know, like the crying person, Britney Spears, the guy crying. Does that fit in here in this engagement rubric, like a picture? Absolutely. Because the minute you put up a picture, people do that to respond right away.

15:05Adam Aleksic:You know, the classic, like the distracted boyfriend meme. You could overlay different images onto them. I did a video about this recently. every single sub-meme of that died out faster than the distracted boyfriend as a whole. The distracted boyfriend kept surviving year after year, even though individual memes would just come and go. Because here's the thing, memes are fads. They have lifespans. Every single word also is a meme. It has a lifespan. Some memes have shorter lifespans. I think the word yeet or the words on fleek had a shorter lifespan.

15:34Kara Swisher:Tell the people what it is. Sorry to do this to you.

15:36Adam Aleksic:Oh, yeah. Yeet is an interjection popularized by Vine for when you throw something on fleek just meant looks good or cool. Also, those are both Vine phrases, and I use Vine as an analogy. It's sort of similar. It's the first time we have like sort of video-based – it's not personalized recommendation algorithms like we see today. So we have actually the current algorithms allow you to incubate a lot more different things at once because it's not like everybody's getting shown the same feed like they were on Vine. But the point is these video platforms are very good at spreading memes. Where I was going with that is that some memes have shorter lifespans.

16:09Adam Aleksic:Some memes have longer lifespans. So the words like selfie and cancel for like cancel someone online, those were popularized around the same time as Yeet and on Fleek, and yet they still stick around. And another thing we hear is like how much do we perceive this as being a meme? because the more we perceive it as sticking out, when your grandma starts using yeet, it's no longer cool. But selfie, also it fits a lexical gap. Like if there's a need for that word in our language, and so we adopt it for that reason as well.

16:34Kara Swisher:I remember my kids saying yeet. Now that you said it, I was like, oh. It's still around in the sense of like,

16:39Adam Aleksic:we use it as a callback to that era of time. And I think that's where skibity is going to go, right? I think skibity might be on its way out. That's just a nonsense interjection. It doesn't mean anything. You could say, what's a skibity?

16:48Kara Swisher:That should stay. Go ahead, sorry.

16:50Adam Aleksic:I personally am a huge fan. If people ask me for my favorite brain rot word, I'll say skibbity.

16:55Kara Swisher:Why do some memes or words stick around and others die?

16:58Adam Aleksic:So the questions of what makes a word stick, it's really multifaceted. Readaptability is a big one. If the meme can be used in a lot of different contexts, if it's easily applied to new situations, that gives it an easy chance to jump from one use to another and keep surviving. If the meme fits a cultural need, like I said, a lexical gap, it's easy to survive. And let me go back one step and redefine meme because you said it's like pictures and videos. I said it's a word. It's not very well-defined at all. It was first brought up, the modern concept, in the 1976 Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, where he describes it as a self-replicating unit of culture.

17:34Adam Aleksic:And a lot of his ideas are, you know, it's sketched out an interesting concept. I don't think most people really agree with his sort of evolutionary scheme of how words and ideas spread. But there's definitely something to a unit of culture that people adapt across moments in time and how these stick around. And they are constantly remixed as well. I think that's another thing.

17:56Kara Swisher:Not unlike clothing and things like that, which is interesting to think about.

17:59Adam Aleksic:Absolutely.

18:01Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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20:15Kara Swisher:So let's talk about the business of language. After all, the social media algorithms are engineered to create engagement or addiction, however you want to look at it, in order to sell advertising. It's a very clear way this works. So we'll start with our expert question. Every episode, we get an expert to send it as a question for our guests. So let's hear yours. My name is Brooke Hammerling. I'm a communications advisor and a writer, podcaster of a weekly newsletter and podcast called Pop Culture Mondays. and it is to help the olds understand what the youngs are talking about, what's breaking and unraveling in the social worlds like TikTok.

20:48Kara Swisher:My big question for Adam is the ownership of a word. We live in a world now where people seem to take ownership of things that they have in their minds coined. A great example is Pat Riley was able to trademark the term three-peat. what is the value of a word and can somebody actually own it? So for example, the terms that are really popular today, like riz, cap, no cap, Delulu, there is an actual woman who made the term Delulu really famous on TikTok. Does she have a chance of trademarking that and making sure that that is her word that she owns? Okay.

21:30Adam Aleksic:I'm really glad that question was asked. I actually talk about Delulu in my book. I talk about word ownership. So let's go back to the word on fleek. That was coined by Kayla Newman, a user who went by Peaches Monroe, and she was in a car and she called her eyebrows on fleek. The video went super viral. It got used by a lot of news outlets. Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj used the word. Nicki Minaj got into a fight with another rapper over that rapper made t-shirts with the phrase pretty on fleek and Nicki Minaj claimed that was hers and she should get royalties. And it was so out of her hands. Two years later, Kayla Newman trademarks the word fleek.

22:08Adam Aleksic:And by then it was dead. The meme was gone. Unfortunately, intellectual property laws can't catch up. And also there's a difference between a copyright trademark. Like you need to have like a business associated with it. You need to have like proof. So intellectual property wise, it's very, very difficult to own a word, right? So I think since the on fleek era, there's been more of an attitude of let's give credit to creators so jules lebron this creator who came up with the word demure mindful cutesy she had this viral moment last summer she was able to fund her transition she was able to afford a lot of new stuff because uh people gave her more recognition i think that's a it was people were still figuring out the norms of the internet back in the day but i think there's more of a cultural attitude now toward giving credit um so you can't

22:56Kara Swisher:actually own the word well it's out of your hands it's out of your hands is there any word you think

23:00Adam Aleksic:that could be owned someone really did in the in the trademark sense if it's like a business but once if it's like a viral internet sensation you can't get it's it's just out of your hands you can't there's more in place now for creators to capitalize on that because there's been growth in the creator economy there's like lawyers who immediately reached out to help jules lebron with the word uh demure so like there's more of a movement toward that right that being said you can't ever own a word. And words will change too. There's a sense of like group ownership as well over some words. So a lot of the ballroom words, the slay, serve, queen, these are just, you know, slang words that middle schoolers now are using, but they came from the ballroom scene in the 1980s, this queer black Latino space.

23:43Adam Aleksic:And many people feel like the middle schoolers shouldn't be using those words, but I'm sorry, it's out of their hands. Like at this point, you can't stop the words from changing.

23:51Kara Swisher:So you write that social media algorithms use language to create new identities for users, which could then be commoditized by the platforms. I'll pull up a quote from the book and have you read it.

24:01Adam Aleksic:Language plays a circular role in identity formation. If you choose to use a certain word, you are accepting that you belong to the group using that word. In the social media era, the algorithm will recognize that, push you deeper into that group, and give you more access to more niche language.

24:13Kara Swisher:So why do you social media platforms have the financial incentive in creating new identities?

24:18Adam Aleksic:Yeah, that's a really good question. So they run on natural human behaviors. We naturally want to pay attention to things and they naturally create the incentive structures for influencers to try to grab your attention because they reward retention rate, how long viewers watch the video. So attention is just an example there of what they're rewarding. And I think our language is revolving around what gets attention. Humans also have a natural tendency to want to belong to groups. That's why people on the early internet sought out other people with similar interests. That's right. Very first. And algorithms really play into that by making you feel like you're part of a group.

24:51Adam Aleksic:They'll push you further into the K-pop community and you'll start using words like Delulu and they have so many like Korean loan words in that community. I'm not in this filter bubble at all. We're all separated into different consumptive kind of niches. What's really interesting here is that these are now demographics. In the past, a demographic statistic could be something like race, age, gender. Now it's whether you're pastel goth or whether you're a cottagecore, whether you're a K-pop fan. These are all now labels that are used to represent you because what the algorithm is doing is they build a very nuanced picture of who you are.

25:21Adam Aleksic:This is never actually who you are. It's a shadow representation using limited information, but it's fairly good. And they'll take all this information, which videos you've liked, how your thumb rests on your screen, what Wi-Fi network you're connected to, what other phones are connected on that Wi-Fi network, all the usual stuff about cross-app tracking and demographic information that they can. They turn that into a numerical representation and embedding of who you are as a person. Each video, as it's uploaded, undergoes a computer vision algorithm, a natural language processing algorithm. that gets turned into a numerical representation of what the video is about.

25:51Adam Aleksic:And then these numerical representations get paired with each other. And that's how they know to send certain videos to certain users. These algorithms are predictive. They try to guess which videos are going to get the most attention by users. Because again, the whole logic is attention. How do we get people's attention so we can commodify it so we can sell more of your data? So because in-group behavior is something that is good for getting attention, you want to feel like you're part of a group and the algorithm is set up to reward that behavior. It creates communities. It creates micro-communities.

26:20Kara Swisher:Right. Or it creates someone who goes across communities, right, for example. Because when you're saying there's demographics, you know, sex, age, etc., there's also demographics of people who like to watch hardware hacks like myself, you know what I mean, or something like that. Right. And because everyone's individually moving, they can then group them together in some

26:39Adam Aleksic:Yeah, it's predictive because you're still in this cluster of people who like hardware hacks, And it knows from other users' similar behavior that you might like this video if it contains the numerical representation of a hardware hack. But where we get into identity formation is very interesting. Because now that the algorithm incentivizes these labels to be coined, and the same way I coined the phrase boomer ellipses, creators go out of their way to either coin or popularize phrases as trend bait because they want to tap into this perceived algorithmic space. They want to find ways to communicate to that imaginary representation of what a cluster of people is.

27:12Adam Aleksic:and so they find words like pastel goth, cottagecore. There is a latent kind of desire for that word. The word is popularized by creators. Algorithm pushes it further. It becomes more of a thing. Now, as a pastel goth, in the past, let's say in the 80s, 70s, if you were a goth, that was counterculture, right? It was a broad label. You could be a lot of different things if you were a goth. Now you have to be a cyber goth or a trad goth or a retro goth or a pastel goth. And now that you're in this smaller, perhaps, category, circularly forming your identity around this, because every time you get a pastel goth video, You're like, ooh, the algorithm really knows me, forgetting that the algorithm gave you that identity.

27:44Adam Aleksic:Now, you circularly identify with a smaller category of what you can be, which potentially limits your true self-expression. Because if you were just a broad goth, that contains way of a wider semantic range.

27:56Kara Swisher:A myriad of goths, multitude of goths. Yeah, no, it's interesting. All groups do this. I went to a neo-Nazi rally in Germany I was covering once. And the amount of different Nazis was really interesting. and I was fascinated by it. They all had different costumes, but I was thinking, oh, they're not, they were together, so they got to interact with each other. But now on TikTok, of course, you can sell, they can sell you pastel goth clothes, by the way, so that they do see an opportunity.

28:22Adam Aleksic:Right, it's one click away on the TikTok shop conveniently.

28:25Kara Swisher:Sure, which is the point of kids. Kids, in case you're interested, they want to sell you shit. It always works for the house. Just remember that. Algorithms haven't just led to the creation of new words and identities, it led to new accents. You described three of them in your book. You mentioned them earlier. um the entertainment influencer accent lifestyle influencer accent and educational influencer accent so explain the characteristics of these accents how they developed and say a sentence or two in each ones or ones so we can hear the differences let's start with the entertainment influencer if you want to add one in please do right influencers always communicate for their

28:58Adam Aleksic:perceived audience for the algorithm as well again there's a few layers of performativity happening here and identify like different types of influencer accents based on this audience they're accommodating for. The entertainment influencer accent is sort of downstream of Mr. Beast. And there's this term beastification that's been going around. And there's a lot of influencers who are trying to mimic this, but it's basically just making like every word really pop. Like, I just bought this private island. I'm giving away a million dollars. Like they make, but if you look at any real interview of Mr.

29:23Adam Aleksic:Beast talk, he doesn't talk like that, right? And it's very intentional. It's very deliberate. Last year, an employee of Mr. Beast leaked a 36 page onboarding memo elaborating his exact strategies for going viral. He's extremely deliberate with it. He talks about retention every single page of that memo. He's very methodical with it. He's extremely analytical. He's good at gaming the algorithm. He didn't get there by coincidence. So Mr. Beast figured out this accent that really, really works. I'm talking to a different audience. I'm not talking to brain-rotted 14-year-olds. I'm talking to somewhat brain-rotted nerdy people.

29:50Adam Aleksic:You know, you got to be a little bit brain-rotted. And I'm using this not sort of in a joking way, you know. But I will talk really quickly. I'll stress more words to grab your attention because that's what works for my audience. It does. And you see a lot of influencers kind of also talk like that. also you got to keep in mind that successful strategies self-replicate sometimes people just start speaking a certain way because they assume that's the correct way to speak online there's also a huge survivorship bias and what gets shown on your for you page the videos that end up on your for you page are ones that are predisposed to go more viral now we get back

30:18Kara Swisher:into like what makes something culturally click so i want lifestyle influencer accent i know this

30:24Adam Aleksic:one but go ahead hey guys welcome to this podcast we're talking about accents you notice the rising tones that kind of like keeps the viewer hooked because it sounds like something's always coming next. It fills dead air. They elongate their vowels. It fills that air. A dead air is really bad, especially when they're working on an extemporaneous capacity. They need to fill that dead air. And the sort of lifestyle influencer accent has evolved kind of out of all these evolved sort of out of previous accents, maybe not entertainment, but like my accent is based on early founders like the Green Brothers and Vsauce and stuff like that.

30:56Adam Aleksic:I don't think I was consciously imitating them. But I sort of, I started out speaking slowly and there's a subconscious cue taking as well. And I was interviewing a lot of creators about how'd you end up with this accident. Some say, you know, I did this consciously looking at retention. Other people said I did this subconsciously just looking at what other people did. And a lot of us just, there's some level of taking our cues from other people. There's some level of maybe we just get behaviorally conditioned by the algorithm as well. So there's a few layers of that.

31:17Kara Swisher:Do a sports one, or is there one that's for sports? Is there one for?

31:21Adam Aleksic:What I like to compare this to is really not that different from the broadcast voice. This just in. We've always been talking like this. Because you're accommodating for a certain audience for a certain medium. I'm a strong believer that the medium is the message. Each new medium, and I think algorithms are that new medium, will affect how we communicate online.

31:39Kara Swisher:Yeah. Social media algorithms don't just affect new words and how accents. They also shape which ideas get attention. Because in order to go viral, videos generally need to communicate the most extreme and reductive version of a concept in the most confident and emotionally engaging way possible. Talk about the downstream effects. Because they're always confident. The expression I always use is frequently wrong, but never in doubt. A lot of the Maha ones are like that. Like, drive me, I'm like, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But they sound, I almost believe them, even though I know better. So talk a little bit about, and it's very dangerous in those cases, many of the times, you know.

32:14Kara Swisher:Please chug, you know, apple cider vinegar. Please don't.

32:18Adam Aleksic:Right.

32:18Kara Swisher:That kind of thing. So talk about the downstream effects on our culture.

32:21Adam Aleksic:So, right, algorithms reward extreme behavior. And also the chug vinegar thing, for example, that will generate a lot of comments from people saying, hey, don't chug vinegar. At the same time, those comments are engagement. Engagement pushes videos further in the algorithm. There's comments of like things that drive confusion, things that are on the boundary of irony and authenticity. We tend to see those ideas spread really easily because they get that extra boost of engagement, which is like really paradoxical. Rage bait, unfortunately, incredibly good for grabbing people's attention. and something that infuriates you, you keep hate watching out of spite or you comment out of anger.

32:56Adam Aleksic:And that pushes this stuff further. So unfortunately, when we say that platforms are rewarding things that grab your attention, that's not necessarily things you want to see. The videos you want to see and the videos you actually get have a disconnect and people constantly feel this. And there's like a lot of studies on how people try to go out of their way, spend so much time training their algorithm to show them videos that they'd rather see. Because unfortunately, your base instinctual reaction to a video is not what your higher order self is actually wanting to.

33:24Kara Swisher:No, right, right. And ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump. I always said he was the greatest internet troll in history.

33:29Adam Aleksic:I have a lot of thoughts on how Donald Trump is uniquely suited to the algorithmic medium. If we're talking medium is the message.

33:36Kara Swisher:Well, please go ahead, tell me.

33:39Adam Aleksic:Well, you know, it's historically been thought that different mediums affect candidates' electability. Like, it's believable that Kennedy outperformed Nixon in the 1960 election simply because Kennedy was more photogenic on TV and this was when TV was introduced and Nixon was more of a radio candidate or whatever. It seems probably true that more attractive candidates have a better chance of getting elected because of television. In the same way, more memeable candidates probably have a greater chance of getting elected in the algorithmic era. The fact that Donald Trump's phrases make X, Y again, this has been the worst X in the history of Y perhaps ever.

34:09Adam Aleksic:The fact that these phrases can be so easily remixed and so easily adaptable, he talks differently in a way that is algorithmically compelling because it's one, it's extreme, Two, it's like readaptable. All of these memetic qualities that make something stick, perhaps normalize his ideas, perhaps like cause him to dominate. In the same way he dominates the news cycle fairly well, he also dominates the internet cycle through his memeable character. And I think that if it wasn't for the algorithms, I don't think like he maybe would have been reelected.

34:39Kara Swisher:Yeah, I would agree. One of the things that I said this on a show the other day, I go, he's so good at it and he's so appealing and this and that. I got so much pushback. I'm like, it's factual. Like, whether you like it or not, I didn't say I liked him. I said he's excellent at it, and people don't want to give him that credit.

34:55Adam Aleksic:Intentionally or not, you know, there could still be a survivorship bias, but I think he probably knows what he's doing.

35:00Kara Swisher:No, I think he does it naturally. I think some people are intuitively good. I think Kennedy was intuitively good at TV. I think Roosevelt was intuitively good at radio. You could go back. Hitler was excellent at radio, by the way, FYI, and speaking in groups. And Trump is very good in public settings with rallies, and he's very good in this. And I'm not giving him credit. I'm just saying you can't—I did a column once where I compared him and AOC, and I said they both have the same qualities. And I was comparing their qualities, and people lost their minds. I'm like, but just look at it. You need to be this to be in politics going forward.

35:32Adam Aleksic:There's a bimodal representation of what political views we're getting right now, which I find highly concerning, right? AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene have more extreme beliefs, so they're more likely to get pushed by the algorithm. The congressman I grew up with in Albany's 20th congressional district, Paul Tonko, he's boring. No, but like if he says anything, it's just the mainline democratic kind of idea. He's not interesting. His ideas are never going to go viral because they're not algorithmically catchy.

35:56Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

36:05Adam Aleksic:This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions.

36:25Kara Swisher:Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

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37:35Kara Swisher:So one of the things that you write, quote, we've been conditioned to consume information only if it's somehow funny or relatable. Talk about Zoran Mandami. Incredibly relatable, incredibly funny, incredibly, I would say, substantive. Also, he manages to really get some very substantive messages out there. Talk about him in particular and how it's changed the idea of being funny, relatable, or just you break through. And then you compare it to what Cuomo put out the other day. And I just wanted, I was like, no stop. I almost, I don't even know his number. I know his brother. I was like, please get him to stop.

38:08Adam Aleksic:What is he even doing? Yeah.

38:09Kara Swisher:Stop. Stop making videos, at least. You can run all you want, but videos are not your forte.

38:15Adam Aleksic:As someone who lives in New York right now, you can really feel the actual energy. So there's a few things going on here. One, there's that meme as carrier idea, that these videos are carriers for his actual message. And he was actually very good at being intentional with both playing into this format of the algorithm and at the same time holding something within it, this actual message about affordable housing. He was very consistent with that. He was very good with that. The other thing is authenticity. And this is just a classic buzzword in the creator economy that people want authenticity.

38:42Adam Aleksic:Mondani seems like a real guy. Every time like some new clip surfaces of him, it's just like, this guy's like down to earth relatable. Like he seems like a good dude. And I think we're so tired of, we all know that the politicians are performing for algorithms. And how do you give off that vibe of authenticity? I don't know. That's sort of like also maybe a memetic thing, just like what naturally feels right.

39:07Kara Swisher:Or they're authentic in a way that's unattractive, like Joni Ernst and the dead thing with the thing. I was like, oh, my God.

39:14Adam Aleksic:I'm certainly not attracted to Joni Ernst.

39:15Kara Swisher:Well, I know, but she actually stressed it to me. I was like, okay, you really are a terrible person. Like, you managed to authentically get through that you're a jackass. Like, it was really interesting how she did that. Mandani's a particularly gifted communicator, absolutely, in the online space. And you watch his—they're not tricks. I don't want to call them tricks because Trump has them, too. in the way he uses all caps versus Mandani, who is, does, I think his smile is part of it. Yeah.

39:44Adam Aleksic:Even the visual kind of language, like walking out of the beach with a suit on, like all that, like he knows that that will generate comments probably, or at least his media team knows. I think he probably knows. He seems very savvy. He knows that people are now going to be commenting about the suit dripping with water and that's going to push it further in the algorithm.

40:01Kara Swisher:Right. So a lot of Americans see progressives as language police, in part because the right has done a good job framing content moderation as censorship. I think this is much more complex, as I'm sure you do. The voters seem to have punished them for him. As Brock Colyar reported in New York Magazine, a former Bernie voter told him that Trump inauguration party that he, quote, wanted the freedom to say faggot and retarded. I'm sorry to say those, but I just did. Why do taboo words hold so much appeal to some people? And how have social media platforms reacted, especially with Donald Trump and the cultural change he's brought with them?

40:35Adam Aleksic:Right. Well, I want to start with breaking down like progressive versus like woke. So Mamdani is like the new kind of progressive, maybe that the left should be modeling off of where doesn't feel like he's policing you, right? He's just he's rating out good energy. And I think the traditional woke ivory tower academia radiates out bad energy. They're saying if you're if you're not with us, you're racist. And that that feels really bad to hear. And so you start thinking, I don't like these guys. They're making me feel bad about myself versus if you just send out positive vibes. So it's sending out negative vibes or it's sending out positive vibes for the left.

41:08Adam Aleksic:And that's how I think the left should be communicating more by sending out positive vibes. The right, funnily enough, like you think, oh, wow, they're intolerant or something. Their language is more inclusive. They are more willing to use all kinds of language. They're not telling you, oh, you can or cannot say this. The left will tell you that. The left will be exclusive with language. And it's that attitude of inclusivity that allows them to Trojan horse through ideas, use those memes as carriers.

41:34Kara Swisher:That said, you then get permission to just be an asshole. Like, I had someone say a similar thing to me, like, now we can say these words. You know, now we get to say this, this, and this. And I said, you know what? You're right, but you're still an asshole. And then he, like, shut up. And I thought, well, fine, go ahead and say them. But it means I think you're an asshole. So here we are. As I noted, I do think President Trump is a genius at creating or co-opting language that not only builds identity, it's a recruitment tool. It communicates an entire worldview. and he uses terms like globalists, deep state, swamp, fake news, liberal elites, America first.

42:08Adam Aleksic:Sounds like SEO language, honestly.

42:10Kara Swisher:Especially fake news and deep state. I think he really pushed. Those were around. But he also absorbs other subcultures, crypto bros, incels, QAnon followers.

42:19Adam Aleksic:And there's a whole like dog whistling kind of like grab a hole, yeah.

42:22Kara Swisher:Why haven't Democrats been able to do the same successfully? And if you were advising them, what would you tell them to do differently? I know they have groups together to discuss how to talk to young men, which makes me cringe, if I want to use a term, it's cringe. What would you tell them to do differently?

42:37Adam Aleksic:Start thinking about how to Trojan horse through ideas. There's always going to be a group that doesn't want to hear your ideas. You need to push it through by packaging it inside a carrier meme that is more funny or more compelling. Look at the Manosphere. Look at their language like Sigma, which is now sort of a viral phrase middle schoolers will use it. Explain what it is. Yeah, sigma refers to like, it's complicated in the manosphere. It refers to an idealized man outside the sociosexual hierarchy of alphas and betas. But practically, it can be like a synonym for like dominant man. And that's how it spread.

43:10Adam Aleksic:It spread through sigma wolf memes, which were just funny. It spread through carrier sentences like what the sigma, which just sounds absurd in a way that middle schoolers are ready to adopt. Not just middle schoolers, but it sort of became a brain rot word. And they package these words through funny concepts. But with it, they carry their hierarchy of looking at the world, their lens of perceiving all dynamics between people as power structures. And that's – I think some degree of it is lost when you package it, of course. Like I don't think middle schoolers are really thinking about incels when they say, what, the sigma?

43:45Adam Aleksic:I think they're just using that word to relate with each other. But a lot of people find incels really repulsive and wouldn't want to use their language. So how did their language hit the mainstream? They're extremely good at weaponizing memes. Some of it was taken inadvertently. Some people use that language to make fun of incels, and there is that boundary between irony and authenticity that generates more comments that I was talking about. But in many cases, there's 4chan trolls and radical incels intentionally repackaging their ideas as memes to spread them further. And a lot of meme templates, there's this Giga Chat or Crying Wojak memes that kind of push their ideology, the Chad Stride versus Virgin Walk.

44:26Adam Aleksic:You don't have to really know what that is, but it's like a sort of a categorization of people that's pushed. And with it, their way of thinking is pushed, but people see it as a funny meme, a way of labeling the world. But now you're also -

44:37Kara Swisher:Right, and so they don't realize they may suddenly be recycling Nazi ideas, right? For example.

44:42Adam Aleksic:And so my advice for progressives is, well, one, don't do exclusive feeling stuff. Package things through good vibes. Maybe listen to some more Stevie Wonder. I've been listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder recently, and I'm going somewhere with this. This man, you listen to his album, Songs in the Key of Life. Greatest album. It's amazing. He spreads such joy in that song, not only in his words, but in the melodies. He talks about things that are very important to him. He talks about hardship and pain and loss and kind of poverty and discrimination, but he always turns it into this funky, upbeat 70s groove, and it's just catchy, it's vibey, you want to dance to it.

45:21Adam Aleksic:And then maybe you connect with the song more and you actually take heed of his message that he's trying to spread out in this. But the songs always feel positive. They always feel like anybody could dance to this song. I don't care if you're a Republican. I don't care if you're a Democrat. Let's vibe to some Stevie Wonder.

45:32Kara Swisher:So going back to the previous question, now how have social media platforms reacted to the election of Donald Trump and cultural change he's brought with him, which is astonishing given how old he is. Have they changed how they weight their algorithms?

45:44Adam Aleksic:Yes, this is very important and such a wonderful question that you asked. immediately in the wake of the 2025 election. I mean, we saw that, you know, picture of all the CEOs lined up behind Trump and we saw that meta loosened their content guardrails. They now allow for a lot more AI content. They now allow for a lot more like, they took away all their kind of woke stuff. So there's some really racist AI slop on Instagram right now. I did a piece recently about, there was a reel with 30 million views about a swarm of shirtless black men running towards a KFC and eating fried chicken. And the underlying audio was the N-word repeatedly.

46:17Adam Aleksic:That's not something you would have seen under Joe Biden, right? And so the election of Donald Trump, the platforms are, you know, they're going to mold themselves to the political regime as well. I'm sure if there was a huge left-wing backlash, they'd go back to doing the DEI stuff or whatever.

46:32Kara Swisher:Yes, that's what I used to joke. If Kamala had won, Mark Zuckerberg would be using the terms they, them. But go ahead.

46:37Adam Aleksic:Literally, I think that's it. But the platforms reflect the current political situation. They're at the end of the day, they're just trying to make money. And those racist AI slob videos do make money for them. In fact, they make more money. The more they push the AI slop, the less money they have to give out to real creators. And I interviewed some of those racist AI creators. And I try to, you know, like, you know, be impartial and ask them, hey, why are you making these videos? What's the underlying motivation? And you know what all of them said? They said, I'm doing it for views. I'm doing it for likes.

47:02Adam Aleksic:I'm doing it for followers. They didn't say I'm racist, you know. And, you know, they are on some level, but I don't think they're doing this out of genuine malice. They're doing this because, and a lot of these are AI hustle people as well. They're trying to get people to do their AI stuff. and there's a banality of evil here, banality of the algorithm that you create an institution and people will fit themselves into that institution looking for reward, looking for just complacently perpetuating the bullshit that these platforms set up to be there. And there are changes in waiting, definitely.

47:32Adam Aleksic:Like we see that. Why did Grok go racist on Twitter? There is some, we don't actually know what happens with algorithms. I do want to caveat that even engineers don't know. They call it a black box because once you program it, it has so many parameters, you don't know what's happening. You put in an input, spits out an output. You're like, I don't know how that got there. You have a general idea, though. They clearly tweak something because Elon Musk asked them to tweak something. And then Grok goes, racist goes, like, pro-South African farmer or whatever.

47:59Kara Swisher:I wonder who's like that. They were training on his stuff. That's what I heard. That's what they were doing.

48:06Adam Aleksic:Okay, so you have something going on with the inputs. You have something going on with the reinforcement, learning the training data. And then you have this crazy output.

48:12Kara Swisher:Well, let me just say, this is why I have dubbed Mark Zuckerberg the most dangerous person in the world, because he doesn't care. Any way he can make money, he does.

48:20Adam Aleksic:He's here to increase net worth.

48:21Kara Swisher:Exactly. So we know people are changing the way they write to avoid the perception that their work is actually created by AI. At the same time, a lot of people are going to use AI to do their writing for them, including the influencers. Generative video will become increasingly good, and it is becoming. All the memes about horses jumping off of diving boards or zebras, fantastic.

48:41Adam Aleksic:I've seen those, yeah.

48:42Kara Swisher:And there was one the other day that was so good. I was like, this is fantastic.

48:45Adam Aleksic:There's full text. There's five fingers. Like, we're in the era where we can't really tell what's real, what's not real.

48:49Kara Swisher:You know, what was interesting, when they were bad, someone was like, oh, see, they're bad. I'm like, they're not going to stay bad. They're like, just go look at the early internet. So, I mean, if you look at the early internet, you wouldn't recognize. It was so bad. And now it's not, you know. So, will we get to a place where AI-generated influencers become poplars? And if yes, what does that do to our language?

49:07Adam Aleksic:So, okay, we know that they want this. We know that Meta is experimenting with AI-generated comments, AI-generated profiles. They're actively incentivizing people to create AI-generated accounts. I've come across a lot of AI-generated accounts on Instagram that at first glance really do look like real people. I think there will always be a need on the internet for just raw humanity. And there's this aesthetic called internet ugly that anytime you try to impose a world of smooth gradients, we're going to come up with something messy. Look at the Italian brain rot memes earlier this year, which was a series of AI-generated animals with absurd kind of torsos.

49:42Adam Aleksic:And I think that was a serious cultural reaction against AI. It was like we had this new, like, smooth kind of software. AI is finally getting good. Let's make the most ridiculous thing possible. And that was an absurd human reaction. And we're going to continue doing kind of ugly, gritty, authentic-feeling things with the internet because that's what we crave, real humanity. AI representations of reality will always be necessarily a flatter version of reality. It's a map. The map can never be the territory. They'll never be fully caught up to the way we use language. We use slang, particularly.

50:12Adam Aleksic:Ask ChatGPT to talk to you in slang. It's going to sound clunky. It doesn't sound real because they don't actually understand pragmatics. They don't understand how language is used in context. So I strongly believe that humans will always find a way to creatively be one step ahead of AI. And yes, yes, AI is here. there's a real reality that we won't like know what exactly is certain there's sort of this epistemic kind of confusion going on at the same time i feel optimistic for and there might be like another thing is we might see a cultural backlash against our algorithms we're definitely seeing a backlash against ai but there will be more people seeking out these decentralized platforms blue sky substack individual groups discord i think the algorithms will remain the underlying infrastructure of mass communication on the internet and it's very important we talk about this and i think this book will continue to be relevant because it's that medium is going to continue affecting us.

51:03Adam Aleksic:The bulk of it.

51:03Kara Swisher:It's a bulk.

51:03Adam Aleksic:Right, right. But individually, I think we're going to be seeking out more of that anti-stuff. And the stuff that does go popular on the internet will always have a messy humanity underlying it.

51:12Kara Swisher:Mostly. We'll see. I think they'll get very good at it.

51:14Adam Aleksic:Well, even with the AI-generated stuff that feels like, you know, that is AI-generated, it's still prompted by somebody who knows how to tap into the zeitgeist. Absolutely. Maybe there's still something human about that.

51:26Kara Swisher:So when we're talking about this, though, the people in charge, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is ultimately answers to the Chinese Communist Party. Instagram is owned by Meta, which is controlled completely by Mark Zuckerberg. YouTube is owned by Alphabet, which is still controlled by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And X, which is much smaller and is still influential, is owned by Elon Musk. Does this mean that this small group holds some of the greatest influence of however English language evolves?

51:52Adam Aleksic:Language and culture, the algocracy, I guess. All these platforms are going to continue monetizing our attention. And they found the most addictive way to do that short form vertical video run through personalized recommendations that will continue like even as however many people try to go offline, like that's always like until they find a more addictive medium, that's going to continue dominating our culture. And, and yeah, they kind of buy these baked in platform incentives that in the sort of banality of the algorithm sense, creators will replicate. I unfortunately do think that we will continue seeing language evolve under their kind of auspices.

52:29Adam Aleksic:However, I end the book on a positive note. I do think language is a reflection of how humans relate to each other. And we will continue being human and continue using language in a way that makes us human. And we might spend time less on these platforms. But at the end of the day, we are human and that's still, they can't take that away from us.

52:48Kara Swisher:I'm going to push back on you because you don't even know they're doing it. That's the thing. That's where we'll get to.

52:53Adam Aleksic:I think we need radical awareness of what they're doing. Yeah, that's kind of like one reason I really care about this book because it sort of exposes this stuff. And I'm hoping I'm working more stuff with this with media theory, going down the McLuhan route and stuff. But we need to be very, very aware of what's happening and then we can make our own choices. In the same way, you compare this to like cigarettes. or like people just didn't know or like sugar or whatever. Like there's been a lot of times throughout history where there's this like really addictive product and people just weren't aware of how bad it was.

53:23Adam Aleksic:And once we become more aware, we can make our own decisions.

53:25Kara Swisher:Except in terms of sugar, we've never been fatter. We've never been more unhealthy as at least the United States. So we know, but we don't care. And that's the problem. So you say social media is neither good nor bad. It's messy. I have a different opinion.

53:38Adam Aleksic:Well, I think it's a tool. I think it is. Yes, yes.

53:40Kara Swisher:The thing itself. Yes. So it can be tough to, you wrote this, it can be tough to tell who wins and who loses in the algorithmic era of the language change. And that's fair, but it's a bit of a comment. I want you to push you, who wins and who loses when algorithms designed to increase engagement and addiction have an outsized influence on the words we use and the way we talk to each other? I think we can make a very easy argument that it's a cruder culture because of this.

54:05Adam Aleksic:I want to say that culture and language are similar but different. Language is a proxy for culture here, and I explore a lot how culture bleeds in and how language influences culture. I don't think there's anything ever bad with language itself. If I'm just talking from a linguistic perspective, not a cultural theory perspective, with language, no such thing as brain rot, for example. No word neurologically is worse for your brain than any other word. At the end of the day, language is a way that humans have to identify what's happening in the world and talk to other humans about it. So the language is fine.

54:38Adam Aleksic:Culturally, I do agree we have a lot of problems we've got to sort through.

54:41Kara Swisher:So who wins and who loses?

54:43Adam Aleksic:Well, I think humans do sometimes win when we have memes and this sort of stuff I was talking about with Italian brain. I think there is like a positive way that we reclaim our own agency. And when we do move to other platforms, and I think we should be mixing our media as much as possible. I don't think algorithms are completely bad because they elevate some voices that haven't had voices before. I think we should be mixing our media.

55:06Kara Swisher:Totally enjoyable. Yeah. I sometimes am like, I love some of this, and I realize some of it is really dangerous. So you talked about Stevie Wonder's song from the Keep Life, which makes me love you now. That's my era. That's my era. But which words are on their way out and which are super popular?

55:23Adam Aleksic:Skivity has got another year left. That's my call. It's going to die out in the way Yeet died out. Which words are growing in popularity? We have words that are like more under the radar that are going to stick around the same way selfie stuck around, right? Like in the same way cancel stuck around. So like low-key, for example, side-eye, I talk about these in my book as examples of words that don't stick out as like, quote-unquote, brain rot, but have recently been popularized by algorithms and are maybe going to remain in place in our language. And I don't think those words are bad at all. And in fact, I don't think— No.

55:52Kara Swisher:Can Riz go? Can Riz please go?

55:54Adam Aleksic:Riz may have more of a chance to survive than Skibity, honestly. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe not.

56:00Kara Swisher:Oh, God. What is wrong with people? Riz. Stop saying that.

56:03Adam Aleksic:You're individually defining culture from a subjective perspective right now. I am, and that is correct.

56:07Kara Swisher:And hence, that's why I'm so famous. Adam, this is a fascinating book. And you're a really incredibly erudite and smart guy in thinking these things. And it's great that people are looking at this. And I really appreciate it.

56:18Adam Aleksic:Well, I really appreciate it talking to you. Thank you for pushing back a little bit.

56:27Kara Swisher:On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Birdie, Alison Rogers and Caitlin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Fox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Kate Peterson. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, all your bases are belong to us. If not, you're on Alive. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at On with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

57:05Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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