How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet

Online linguist Adam Aleksic explains how he goes viral decoding internet slang, plus why making a living online means working for 'the algorithm.' It's part 2 of our creator economy series. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  Challenge you.

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  And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, part two of our exploration of the creator economy. How people are making money off of creativity. And what creativity even means in the age of AI.

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  This is day one of becoming a full-time travel influencer.

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  I eat out a lot to here, it's everywhere I ate this past week.

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  If given the opportunity, more than half of Gen Z in the US say they'd like to be a social media influencer.

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  Product that I heard about from.

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  Making a living by creating content, often in the form of short videos online. Like Adam Alexic.

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  I speak in a, what I call, an educational influencer accent. I'll talk very quickly, I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video. And all of that is part of this expected way to talk through the algorithm.

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  Adam calls himself etymology nerd on social media, where he has over 3 million followers across platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

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  I studied linguistics in college, and the classic question you ask yourself when you're graduating with a linguistics degree is, well, what do I do next?

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  Yeah.

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  I thought, you know, I might as well give social media a try.

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  I made a bird language. It's called.

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  Adam started posting about language back in 2022.

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  The octave indicates mood, the semitone indicates.

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  Including an early series about his own habit of communicating like a bird. Other videos explain phonetics.

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  I'm pretty sure the first syllable is a very.

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  Like the sounds singer Cardi B makes.

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  Obviously, the "r" is held longer than a regular trill.

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  All the while, he watched as the audience grew, thanks to, yes, his endearing nerdiness, but also how the algorithm responded.

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  The country uses one of two words for "tea", and which one they use depends on how the word.

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  Take one of his most popular videos, which explains why some of us use the word chai while others call it tea.

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  Now chai spread along land trade routes, giving you some word.

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  This video has been watched over 16 million times.

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  I think I've known about this thing since high school, and I didn't even consider making a video about it for the longest time, because I thought, wow, everybody knows this, but I guess people don't.

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  In the video, Adam stands in front of a map, pointing out centuries-old trade routes.

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  Every language basically has one of these two words. The word chai spread by land along Silk Road landed trade routes.

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  It's the word chai in languages like Hindi, Russian, Persian.

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  And then the word tea spread along ocean trade routes.

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  Now every country in Europe wants to get their hands on some tea, so they start trading with the Dutch through ocean trade routes.

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  There's an intense, slightly manic feel to the whole thing, like he's rushing through this history lesson, even though every word he says has been chosen with care.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think I opened with a hook.

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  First, there's the intro.

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  Oh, you didn't know about how every country uses one of two words for tea? So, right off the bat, I use the word "you", which is a second-person pronoun, which always goes more viral, because people like videos about them. So if I just said, as an intro instead, this is a video about chai and tea, that's not gonna go viral, even if it's the exact same content, the exact same, like, idea.

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  Then there's the storyline.

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  It's maybe slightly reductive, like Polish has the word "erbata", but I'm sort of simplifying the story, because simple storytelling is so important to go viral on social media. You cannot have multiple narratives. You have to tell one narrative at a time on social media.

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  And his delivery.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  I am talking quickly, using my educational influencer accent. I am pointing around on the map and kind of moving around, like, creating visual disruptions. And all of that kind of is part of how you go viral.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  But also, in addition to history lessons, Adam turns the spotlight on words his followers are using right now.

• 4:40Speaker 05

  You know how the phrase "he cooked" is a good thing, but the phrase "he's cooked" is a bad thing?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Which seem to change by the day.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  The most interesting thing about the word "skibidi" is that. The thing about "w-riz" is that "w" doesn't mean.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  His special sauce is explaining to his users why they talk the way they do. But the algorithm likes it too. So is he working the algorithm? Or is the algorithm working him? Working everyone who makes and consumes content? Today on the show, we're continuing our series exploring the creator economy. How we're buying and selling creativity, and how it's changing what we value. Last time, we looked at the business side with entrepreneur and artist Yancey Strickler. This time, how the creator economy is influencing our culture and language. So in the last couple of years, Adam has parlayed his videos into a multi-hyphenate career.

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  I'm a linguist influencer and author of Algo Speak.

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  He's now in his mid-20s and makes what he calls a decent salary for a college grad who majored in a relatively obscure field.

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  In college, my research was more focused on government and linguistics, and my undergrad stuff was all about language nationalism in Serbia and Croatia.

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  Oh.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  So that's how I ended up in that line of work.

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  I really don't mean to be impertinent by asking. I know some people will say, like, how can this guy, he's like in his early 20s, how can he call himself a linguist?

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  Yeah, of course.

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  Some people might come across you and think, oh, my God, anybody can be an expert about anything.

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  It is true that I have an undergrad degree in linguistics, not a graduate degree. I think what I'm doing is actually uniquely suited to studying slang etymology, because to really understand what it means for something to spread online, you have to be online yourself. And I definitely never knew I'd end up studying social media linguistics, but it's just happened that I started making videos about language, about etymology on these platforms, and I started noticing my own speech being restricted a little bit. I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Can you give me an example of that? Like, what?

• 6:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, you can't say the word "kill" on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video's gonna be shown to fewer people, so people turn to alternatives, like "unalive".

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  What happens after you unalive?

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  I had not heard of unalive until I read your book, actually. Clearly, I don't hang out with enough young people. But like, people started saying unalive instead of someone was killed or dead to get around censorship or get around restrictions on language on these platforms.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's a more platform-safe alternative. As far as we can tell, the word unalive started in 2013 with an ultimate Spider-Man meme that then turned into a Roblox meme in the late 2010s that then started being used by the mental health community on TikTok. But then I also found that people were using the word unalive offline. There are kids in middle schools who talk about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself in their classroom essays.

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  Or a classroom discussion on the unaliving that happens in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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  Here's Adam Alexic on the TED stage.

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  And these aren't hypothetical situations. These are actual examples drawn from the 1,000-plus middle school teachers I've surveyed about this word. Clearly, 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 "decesus", 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.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  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 posts 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 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.

• 9:21Speaker 06

  But decease didn't happen because it was impossible to carve the word "mors" into an ancient Roman tablet. We are entering an entirely new era of language change driven by social media algorithms.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  The algo speak, that's what it's traditionally called, this sort of platform circumvention, is only the tip of the iceberg of how these platforms are affecting our language. I also noticed, you know, myself playing into viral trends. I look at other influencers doing this, too. I look at attention grabbing language because these platforms are designed to monetize your attention and all the incentive structure is there for influencers to replicate. How do we grab people's attention? So, language is also kind of revolving more around ephemeral trends and what grabs attention. And we have algorithms creating in-groups and echo chambers through how they categorize users. And these in-groups actually serve as incubators for language formation.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  And all of this is sort of what I call algo speak, the expanded definition, that our language is broadly being shaped by social media algorithms right now.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Can we talk about the first part of that word, algo speak? Algo meaning algorithms, right? Like, let's talk about the algorithm. As a former tech reporter, I'm like, well, it's not the algorithm.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was about to say.

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  There's like millions of algorithms, right? But when people use it, what are they referring to? And can you walk us through what exactly you have noticed or how you've learned about how it does work in certain places?

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I'm so glad you brought up that it's not the algorithm because one of the biggest tenets we have when talking about the algorithm is to simplify it, to personify it. And that makes it feel more normal what's happening, I guess. It is a lot of different algorithms. How users are classified is one algorithm. How content is classified is another algorithm. And actually, even within those algorithms, there's a bunch of sub-algorithms that are all doing their own thing with content classification. So, there's a lot of different processes running at the same time. And all of these are playing a part in the greater machination of how a video ends up from someone uploading it onto your for you feed.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm thinking of myself. I love how I have bullied the algorithm on Instagram into only giving me nature and pets. I've protected my experience on that platform, but it obviously knows I'm a middle-aged woman who likes to go on long walks and doesn't want to look at the news when she's on Instagram. Yeah, tell me about like, is that basically what we're talking about here?

• 11:52Speaker 05

  There's a lot of sense that you can train your algorithm, that you can personalize it. It is, after all, called the for you page. And people often say things like, oh, you know, I built my own for you page, or the algorithm really knows me. And I think this is also playing into that idea of training your algorithm. It is a simplified story. Yes, you partially have trained some aspect of what content is being recommended to you, but also on your Instagram feed, that is mostly, you know, outdoors content. Every third video is probably an advertisement. And you don't actually want to see the advertisement. So, is the algorithm really for you? No, it's kind of both for you and for the platform's benefit. And every video that's shown to you, every video that shows up on the for you feed is

• 12:34Speaker 05

  actually something that benefits the platform definitionally because it gets your engagement, it gets your attention. So, the things that spread are more for the platform than for you, but it's all kind of packaged under this guise of for you. And I think the personalization is one of the most dangerous things because we really forget what's going on on a broader level.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  In a minute, more with online linguist Adam Alexic on how social media algorithms are influencing influencers online.

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  It's constantly changing what priorities and incentives it's rewarding. And influencers have to just feel it out. They have to be aware of the algorithm by interacting with it on a daily basis.

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  On the show today, the creator economy, part two. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. We'll be right back.

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  Hey, before we get back to the show, if TED Radio Hour has ever made you laugh or cry or just think deeply about the world around you, please do us a solid and leave the show a review wherever you like listening to podcasts. It really helps more people find us, and it helps us make the show even better. We really appreciate it. Now, back to the show. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show, part two of our look at the creator economy. Our guide today is creator Adam Alexic. Adam is known as Etymology Nerd to his 3 million followers online, where he's cracked the code of how to go viral.

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  His videos dissect how different people use different words, like "demure." "Demure." Is "demure" changed forever? Can you explain to people what's happened to "demure"?

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  Yeah, there was a "demure" trend about being demure, mindful, and cutesy in the workplace.

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  Do I make up for work? Very demure.

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  Playing into cultural ideas of reservedness.

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  With a green crease. Not demure.

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  "Demure" used to mean modest and reserved.

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  I'm eating a salad. Very demure.

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  Then it trended on TikTok, where understatement became performative. How ironic. You don't know how to keep a demure for at least five minutes. It went everywhere, from teens to celebrities like the Kardashians and Jennifer Lopez.

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  I drink from the bottle. Very demure.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, there is this huge Gen Z aesthetic of nonchalance. And "demure" was sort of making fun of that, but at the same time, I think some people used it genuinely.

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  This new use of "demure" made it dictionary.com's word of the year in 2024.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  And it's not just new words to avoid algorithmic censorship. The very structure of social media is changing where words come from, how words get popular, and how quickly those words spread. I believe some of you might be familiar with this song.

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  You're so skibidi. You're so phantom tax. I just want to be your sigma.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  Sticking out your giat for the Rizler. You're so skibidi. You're so phantom tax. I just want to be your sigma. Freaking come here. Give me your Ohio. For those of you out of the loop, these are the lyrics to the Rizler song, a meme that went massively viral last year. It's full of current middle school slang words like "riz," "giat," and "skibidi," and was instrumental in popularizing those words to a broader audience.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Sticking out your giat for the Rizler. You're so skibidi. You're so phantom tax. I just want to be your sigma.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  Social media algorithms reward repetition. If a song is funny or catchy and people interact with it, the algorithm will then push that song to more people since it's proven to drive engagement on the app. The same is true of memes, or words in general, since trending metadata like hashtags will also be pushed to people who previously showed interest in similar content. Creators are very aware of this. And we actively use trending audios or hashtags to make our videos perform better. In the wake of the Rizler song, for example, we saw an explosion of people making videos with the words "riz," "giat," and "skibidi" because they knew those videos would do well.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  And as a result, the word spread. Language has always been a little bit like a virus. Words are transmitted from one host to another, reproducing and changing as they infect different people along social networks. But now, the literally viral nature of social media is accelerating this process from start to finish. In the span of just a year, a word like "riz" can go from complete obscurity to becoming the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year.

• 19:14Speaker 05

  And the algorithm is the culprit, but influencers are the accomplices. We use whatever tricks we can to keep you entertained because that makes our videos do better, which helps us earn a living. This means that we often end up creating and spreading words that help the system.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Clearly, you understand how the algorithm works in that you have been able to leverage it in a way that gets more people interested in the roots of language and explaining it to them. How did you do that?

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Absolutely. There's sort of a deal with the devil that has to happen, right? You have to accept as a creator, yes, I'm playing into what the algorithm is rewarding. And they're going to reward, for example, trends. So I started talking about trending language, also analyzing the trending language where it came from. It, you know, it's good for my business that the word skibidi goes viral because now I get to talk about the etymology of skibidi. And because people are socially fascinated in this phenomenon, my video is going to go more viral than an analysis of the word chair or table or whatever. That's less interesting to people.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Let's pause. A footnote, skibidi. What's it mean? Where'd it come from for those who don't know like me?

• 20:28Speaker 05

  I feel like at this point, at least most people have heard of skibidi somewhere in the news. It was just added to the Cambridge Dictionary. But skibidi is a nonsense word. It can be used completely randomly as an interjection that doesn't mean anything, but it could be an intensifier. So you could say, "skibidi riz is like very intense riz in either a good or a bad direction."

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Meaning charisma, just, you know.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  It's NPR. We have an older audience.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  No, of course. Very important to clarify. Yeah, so these are all kind of called brain rot words. And it's this meme aesthetic of supposedly words that are bad for your brain. As a linguist, I have to say there is nothing actually about these words that is mentally deleterious at all. But it is sort of the catch-all meme aesthetic of nonsensical repetition of algorithmic slang. And skibidi comes out of that YouTube short series. Riz comes from this Twitch streamer, Kai Sannat. But both are kind of taking on this role of absurdity in the algorithmic kind of milieu. It's more of, it's absurd because it's absurd because it's being recommended to us by the algorithm. And then middle schoolers start saying it because it sounds funny.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  And then when older people start saying it, they stop saying it.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. I think we're well past skibidi. I think skibidi is on its last throes right now. It may be in the dictionary, but it's getting less and less popular in the middle schools.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  In the middle schools.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  I feel like these new words come up and I'm like, I can't, I don't know. By the time I understand it, they'll have moved on. So what's the point? But that's probably smart because nobody wants to hear me saying skibidi anyway. Except they just did.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  Well, you know, some of the trends that really stick out, I think they have shorter lifespans because it is that thing that you mentioned. Once your grandmother starts saying skibidi, you no longer want to say skibidi yourself.

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  Hey, I'm not a grandmother yet.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  I wasn't calling you a grandmother.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  OK.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  But there is that aspect to how trends die out that once it starts being used by an out group, it initially had value because it was in the in-group. And now it no longer has that value. So it no longer has any cachet as a joke. And then we move on. And there's constantly new jokes percolating. I also think it's important to pay attention to the jokes that don't seem as obvious or don't even appear as jokes in the first place. I think these are the words that are actually going to change our language more permanently. Words that are percolating from usually minority groups or from more fringe phenomena, those are the ones that actually end up influencing our language. So I talk about the distinction between skibidi and low-key.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  So low-key is this adverb. It's been around since the 1800s as a word meaning like muted or something. But it was recently popularized in an adverbial sense. And this is from African-American English, where people would say, oh, that party was low-key good.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Meaning like chill?

• 23:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, low-key, yeah. It kind of means like, you know, nonchalant. I don't want to say it too much, being more low-key about it, right? It's muted. It's mutedness, reservedness.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Also, the way you just use nonchalant, not how I use nonchalant.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. The word nonchalant is evolving as well. There's been an internet meme since like 2023 about how people are using this. So I guess it's tough being a translator when you're also deep in the kind of algorithm yourself. But yeah, so low-key, I think, and these changing definitions that we see with a lot of other words are also happening, but don't stick out as much as skibidi. And I think it's those words that don't stick out that are going to have a greater impact on our language hundreds of years from now.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  So what you're just saying actually is explaining a lot of my 15-year-old daughter's behavior. I mean, teenagers, whatever, twas ever thus. Every generation has its own way of rebelling. But nonchalance is definitely a thing.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. Also, an important point about the 15-year-olds. I think these are, these kids are the bellwethers of where language is going to go. They are the ones that are actually most flexible with their linguistic behaviors. The elementary schoolers aren't quite as tapped into social trends yet or as searching to create identities. And older people are more entrenched in our ideas of how language should be or what words are supposed to sound like. And middle schoolers are forming their identity. They're trying to differentiate themselves from adults and from previous generations. They're trying to build a collective kind of identity for themselves. And so they are more flexible with adopting language. So you should be paying attention to your 15-year-old if you want to really understand what the state of the English language is right now.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  So I guess someone would say like, yeah, but in my, you know, at my school, I remember there was like certain words. This is kind of gross. But in fourth grade, there was a kid who would spit at people but only using his glands under his tongue. And he called it a gleek.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  This is super weird. But then it just took off in the fourth grade. It was like, boys would gleek the girl that they liked. Gross. But also, clearly, good word because it's stuck with me for all these years. But, but that's always been the case. Like, how is it different than, you know, social groups coming up with their own language? Or for that matter, like the printing press, the, the radio?

• 25:37Speaker 05

  I'm so glad we're bringing up the printing press and the radio because the medium is the message. The way we're talking is going to shape the way that trends diffuse. And I'm not going to say, oh, it's new that humans are using language to communicate or come up with social trends. No, that is a fundamentally human activity. And we will always do it and we will always find new ways to do it. But the algorithm is now mediating that interaction in the same way that the classroom did with the word gleek.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  The story of language as a whole is told by what mediums we're using to communicate. Before, we had parchment and papyrus and everything. We relied a lot more on oral communication. Stories would be told through rhyme and meter. And then we moved to parchment and paper. And people were really concerned about that at the time. I think Plato was concerned about brain rot from people not memorizing things as much. Then we start segmenting our stories differently with paper, right? We can, we can have chapters. We can actually put spaces between words as opposed to stone tablets where all the words were smooshed together. And then we, we start mass producing things with the printing press. And the printing press now allows for vernacular language to reproduce and kind of solidify also at the same time

• 26:48Speaker 05

  the traditional gatekeepers of who gets to control how we talk. And so for a while, the printing press is the dominant mode of communication. You have a lot of standard language being replicated in all these different languages rather than just church Latin.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  And the internet finally creates this opportunity for the written replication of informal speech. You have people using slang words. You have people writing in lowercase and using abbreviations. And this is sort of this revolution in who can talk and who can vote on what language is supposed to be like. And that sort of lays the foundation for what I think is the new inflection point.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Algorithms govern the distribution of content. I don't know what type of videos I'm going to post on here yet.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  OK, but why is your content not blowing up if you're doing everything right?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Things don't go viral unless they work for the algorithm. And what that means is that the language we're using is always sort of performing for the algorithm as well. And this is this medium that is always there, that is always shaping how ideas diffuse online. And that means any idea that diffuses is either good for the algorithm or it's created for the algorithm. That means using words like "unalive." That means playing into trends like skibidi. That means a lot of creators are just incentivized to come up with new words or use trendy language because the algorithm sees that language as metadata. In the past, metadata was something like a hashtag, something that gives you information about the content. Now the algorithm sees everything. The natural language processing,

• 28:24Speaker 05

  computer vision components, all sub-algorithms, analyze that and they create this numerical representation of what a video is. And they already know what the video is about. But the word is part of that. So we're incentivized to use words that aid in the distribution of our own video.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Just to follow up on, you know, the classic Marshall McEwen idea of the medium is the message. The algorithm is the one that's shaping language. But to be clear, the algorithm is programmed by people, people who work for very large tech companies who want to monetize.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And they create those structures that are then replicated by other influencers down the line that, oh, you need engagement, you need retention, which is how long people watch a video, you need likes. And so now, as an influencer, I'm trying to make all my videos to get people to watch the whole time, and I want to get likes. Otherwise, the video is not going to be distributed. So I have to play into that. I also want to note that there's emergent social phenomena that aren't programmed just by these engineers. It's not purely like this top-down process. There is social expectations that come with each medium. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Dave Mattingly. On NPR, you have like an NPR voice that's been studied. President Trump is making his first official trip of this term.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  Clearly, I am not good at adapting into this.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Oh, I think they've been trying to get rid of that for years, though.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  But at the same time--

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And yet, here I am.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  You're speaking in a, maybe a more radio-friendly voice. I'm speaking in a more algorithm-friendly voice, because that's what we've learned to talk when we're kind of communicating like this.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Wait, somebody might be like, what do you mean, an algorithm-friendly voice? Define that.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  There's actually a bunch of different types of influencer accents, but you're probably familiar with the most famous sort of lifestyle influencer accent, the, hey, guys, welcome to NPR. Today, we're going to be talking about algorithms. It has that uptalk, it has the rising tone--

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Well, because you're not getting any response from anyone, so you're like, trying to have a conversation with yourself, essentially.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. This is a one-sided communication. That is an important part of shaping it, but that's not all. You know, I could just continuously monotone deadpan into the camera, and that wouldn't go viral, because there's an expectation of how people are supposed to talk.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  And this sort of lifestyle influencer accent came out of the previous YouTube accent, which came out of the Valley Girl accent. So there's layers of social prestige in how we talk, and there's an expectation of what the lifestyle influencer is supposed to sound like.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Now, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that the human brain is attracted to those, and therefore it gets more listens, and therefore the algorithm continues to push it? Or are you saying that the algorithm is hearing those intonations and pushing it harder on people?

• 31:12Speaker 05

  No, I don't think the algorithm is picking up on accent intonations. I think there is actual human bias toward social prestige. We evaluate any kind of social situation through our lens of like, is this something worth listening to? And then, like, our slight scroll patterns get replicated through what the algorithm recommends. The algorithm doesn't even need to analyze whether or not this person is speaking in a lifestyle influencer accent. It's merely telling that, oh, this viewer scrolled away quickly because this person wasn't speaking in a socially-approved accent in their minds, and that means I'm going to recommend this video to fewer users. And so there's sort of a selection that happens for socially-desirable accents to replicate.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  And I also want to clarify that's only one type of accent that's the most stereotyped, because, you know, women are scrutinized with language. I speak in what I call an educational influencer accent. I'll talk very quickly, I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  I get the sense, though, that you were a fast talker always, no?

• 32:12Speaker 05

  I definitely am a fast talker, and I'm definitely giving away myself here. But also, there is a perfection that I strive for in the videos, where I'll retake certain clips if it seems like I don't have the right intonation on the right word, or if I stumble on my words, if I don't talk fast enough. And so what now is still like a kind of more natural way of speaking for me, and I, again, would probably speak differently if I was in a larger group conversation, where you don't need to, it's like more laid back, you know, it's more demure.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  You're so nonchalant, Adam, my God.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  I don't want to be chalant all the time. There's a time and a place to be chalant, and there's a time to be nonchalant.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Wait, there's a, hold on. There's a difference between chalant and nonchalant?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Well, nonchalant is being reserved, and then--

• 32:59Speaker 00

  But chalant is not its own word, what?

• 33:01Speaker 05

  But it is. It is now. It's a slang word that was popularized through, like, social media--

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Meaning?

• 33:07Speaker 05

  And people will talk, meaning the opposite of nonchalant, meaning you are overt about something.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Like jazzed?

• 33:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're excited about something. I'm chalant about language, you know?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  When I say jazzed, are you like, whoa, 87, or what?

• 33:21Speaker 05

  I mean, I probably would just use the word chalant, exactly.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  When we come back, Adam's concern and optimism for social media users, younger ones in particular. Plus, Adam and I go viral, maybe.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  Oh, you didn't know about the word--

• 33:38Speaker 00

  All right, how do we begin? Oh, sorry. It's just terrible. Today on the show, the creator economy and its effects on language. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 35:31Speaker 00

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. We've been talking to Adam Alexic about the creator economy. Adam calls himself a social media linguist. He's also the author of Algo Speak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. And he has built his career explaining the cultural and generational divide on how we use words.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  We didn't have the idea of a social generation in the 1800s. This is like a new thing. People were coming back from World War I. We called them the lost generation. Oh, the people coming back from World War II, that's the GI generation, then we have baby boomers. And then we actually don't know what to call you, the next generation after that. We're like, well, I guess they don't have a desire to be defined, so we'll call them Gen X. And then we just keep running with the idea that generations exist. And then we have like, millennial, yeah, because it's 2000. And then, well, we don't know what to call Gen Z either. So we'll just do whatever was two after Gen X. And now, we just ran out of the alphabet, so we'll call it Gen Alpha. But I think influencers play into these labels, because there is a human, social fascination with being labeled.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  We love things like MBTI's and Zodiacs, and the idea of belonging to a bucket and with a generation.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  And it's shorthand, right?

• 36:44Speaker 05

  It is. It is shorthand. Obviously, it's reductive, and I think people realize that. But we're using more generational language than we were before, because it works. It works to talk about the Gen Z finger heart versus the millennial heart. Or before Gen X, people will start a short-form video, they'll, they'll do like a little breath in.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Uh-huh.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  It's so strange to me that we put ourselves in buckets like that, and they actually serve as algorithmic trend bait to say that you are, oh, this is a Gen Z thing, this is a, the Gen Z stare went viral recently. I did a video on the boomer ellipses. There's always a random dot, dot, dot in the middle of their messages.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Oh, I do that.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  I phrased it that way, because I knew it would go viral. Like, why do boomers put dots in their texts, which is not a normal thing that young people do? So it was simply more efficient to separate ideas--

• 37:34Speaker 00

  But it's like trailing off in your language.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, there's different texting etiquette among different generations. And again, to use that word generation already feels like, I mean, all of language is putting things into categories, but I think some categories are more reductive than others.

• 37:49Speaker 06

  For example, the suffix core has recently gotten very popular in Gen Z slang to describe specific aesthetics, like cottage core, or goblin core, or angel core. And on the surface level, these are cute. You watch a cottage core video, you like it. Later on, you get more cottage core content. You might even start to identify with a cottage core aesthetic. But here's the thing, it's all fake. The entire reason these aesthetics exist is because TikTok algorithm has decided that words like cottage core qualify as trending metadata. So creators respond by making more cottage core content that propagates the word, and then more people interact with it, which makes the word trendier.

• 38:34Speaker 06

  And this happens because social media algorithms want to make you identify with hyper-compartmentalized labels, since they can then give you extremely specific, commercialized content catering to that identity. Now that you're a cottage core person, you feel special every time you get a cottage core video. You're like, cottage core? Oh, the algorithm really knows me. The algorithm gave you that identity. You might even start buying cottage core clothing or cottage core decorations to fit your new lifestyle as a cottage core person, and that's exactly what they want. The craziest part is, they're not even trying to hide this.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  This is at the heart of the capitalist maker economy, no?

• 39:21Speaker 05

  This is such an important point to understand about how algorithms work. They want more categories. It's really good for them if I'm a demisexual Goblin Core Gen Z Swifty.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  I don't even know what you just said, but yes, go on.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  The point is, those are all little identifiers, little pieces of metadata about myself as a user. The algorithm actually doesn't need the words, but humans sense that they are trying to perform for the algorithm, and they create these words, and they actually circularly, emergently, make more of a cluster of users who identify with this label, and that it makes more for the algorithm to reward. And it's all part of this surveillance capitalism system, where now they have more things to label about us, more ways to target us more specifically. If you look at TikTok's business page in 2021, it says that subcultures are the new demographics, and it gives businesses ideas for how to profit off things like cottage core and the hashtag baddie aesthetic.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  And what's crazy to me about that page, they are using the word demographic, because in the past, a demographic was like race, age, gender. And now it's also whether you're cottage core or not.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  So as a Gen Xer, part of me is like, dude, you're totally selling out. But I'm guessing that that was an extremely time-specific way of testing you on why you are in the career you're in.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  I think I'm extremely aware of the dissonance, I guess, that is required to be a creator talking about these words and caring about how algorithms are affecting our culture. I think it is possible to use these algorithms subversively, otherwise I would not. It's also, I think, very important to mix forms of media. If we're going back to McLuhan and media theory, there's a scholar called Harold Innis, who came before McLuhan in Canada. I think he has a fascinating point about space bias versus time biased communication. And time biased sticks with the cultural record, like books and oral traditions. And so while it might take way longer to reach an audience that's the same size, space

• 41:24Speaker 05

  biased media fills up a lot of space really quickly, but doesn't stick around. Something like a newspaper, or mass media, or TV, or right now, algorithms are incredibly space biased. They fill our consciousness, and then they go away. So it seems that both types of media have their pros and cons, right? Space biased media is very good for communicating to a big audience, and time biased media is very good for maintaining some kind of cultural constancy or longevity. And so I think we should be mixing as much time biased and space biased media as possible, where we build a more holistic picture of society and reality by consuming and engaging with all these different types of media. So that's why I wrote a book.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did want to ask you that. Writing a book seems kind of retro in a way, but based on what you've just said, am I right to assume that you were happy to create it? Well, A, because you got paid, and B, gets your ideas to more people, but C, it's more tangible, that it'll stand the test of time, maybe unlike some of your TikTok videos?

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think anybody's looking at my TikTok videos from 2023. Somebody might look at this book two years from now, though. So there is a difference to how ideas can diffuse, and ideas will diffuse differently depending on the medium. So a lot of this is just built up layers of human social constructs. The NPR social construct of how we're supposed to talk versus the book social construct of how I'm supposed to write, which is informal English, mind you. And then there's the TikTok construct of how I'm supposed to talk, and each of these has a different layer of respect or understanding of how I should be communicating.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  So who are you really, Adam?

• 43:03Speaker 05

  I think a good communicator should know to adapt to different media, and to different types of people, and to different social settings. And we are constantly code-switching all around us. You are a different person talking to your grandmother than talking to your best friend, and that is super normal. Your grandmother's house is a different medium than the bar that you're hanging out with your friend at. So this is an aspect of human nature, to switch with the medium, but kind of maintain conceptual constancy, I guess. Still have your own moral system and your own direction with what you're trying to do.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  I asked Adam to make a video with me.

• 43:43Speaker 05

  Oh, you didn't know about the word?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Right, how do we begin? Oh, sorry. And use his formula to see if we could go viral.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  The lighting's kind of bad.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  By playing to the algorithm.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Our first requirement, a trendy new word.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  Oh, you didn't know about the word clanker?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  And you always need a good hook. Gen X versus Gen Z. No, I had no idea. I'm Gen X.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  It's kind of a speculative slur for robots. So the idea that they would become more sentient in the future, and they could be treated as a human minority today.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  The point of this video, to get people thinking about why we would even invent a slur for something that humans created, in this case, robots, which we are now calling clankers as a slur.

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Exactly. So the idea is a derogatory play on the idea of clanking as a robot, but also the N-word itself. It comes from Star Wars, where robots are seen as sort of a secondary race, and there's a lot of ideas about clankers being a lower class, but sort of anthropomorphized citizen in the future.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  In some ways, that makes sense, like they're not humans, so shouldn't they be treated as clankers?

• 44:46Speaker 05

  You know, it's just the idea that in the future, they would become conscious, and we aren't recognizing that. It's sort of an online meme that's speculating about your daughter bringing home a clanker in the year 2060.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  So like, 2060, my daughter's going to bring home a robot who is really, really nice to her, therefore, a nicer boyfriend than a real human, but he's kind of a clanker.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  Right. Well, the idea is you don't want your daughter dating a robot.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Amen to that.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Well, in 2060, that might be racist.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Oh, God. Will the word clanker be around a year from now? Maybe not. Are these trendy words and memes among the world's most urgent issues? Definitely not. But as much as they are fun and interesting, there is a darker side to this world of algorithms and memes.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  I do want to make sure that I ask you, there are people who are using language and the way the algorithm works to get across all kinds of ideas. Last year, we saw the shocking murder of Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer. That trial is ongoing, but before his death, as an influencer, he built a big following online, in part through a very particular use of language, right? It was short, punchy, geared for viral-ness. From your perspective, how does that illustrate the way that social media platforms are shaping the way public figures communicate?

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a sort of gotcha style that goes viral that you'll see Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk in the past use. That's like, keep it concise, keep it clip-farmed, so something that can go viral as a 30-second clip, some snarky soundbite, doesn't matter who's more correct, just who can go more viral. And if you can go more viral than the other person, you can outcompete rebuttals or counterpoints. So it's more about just get your idea out there than have some measured response. And algorithms reward extreme things, right? We were talking about engagement optimization, what these algorithms are doing to get our attention. Things that are good at getting attention are unfortunately really extreme things. So far-left and far-right opinions and voices are going to be amplified.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  You know, AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene are always going to go viral than my congressman where I grew up in Albany, New York, Paul Tonko. No offense, he's kind of boring. He doesn't go viral, right? There's no kind of extreme point to his views, so it's not going to go as far on the algorithm. And so you have this ability of more extreme views to outcompete less extreme views, diffuse further, and then more people maybe start adopting that. It represents a new chance for people to donate money, or I think Donald Trump is the first algorithmic president, in the same way that Kennedy was the first TV president. He was famously kind of elected over Nixon because he looked more photogenic. And I think Donald Trump is the more memeable president. And if photogenic candidates were good on TV, memeable presidents are good for algorithms.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  I mean, one illustration, I think, of how, just back to Charlie Kirk, how this can play out in real life. I had a conversation with a friend, a mom, who said to me, I hate to admit it, I had not heard of Charlie Kirk. But I asked my 14-year-old son if he had, and he said, duh, Mom, of course I have. I'm a white 14-year-old kid on social media. I'm targeted exactly by them. Of course I've seen his videos. The fact that he understood what he was getting and why he was getting it, do you think that the younger generation is more savvy? And are they questioning what the information that they're getting because they are thinking about the medium?

• 48:29Speaker 05

  Yes, I actually have so much optimism for the younger generation. I actually think older generations are maybe more concerningly illiterate of the new medium. The first people to get tricked by slop were boomers on Facebook, and there was like a shrimp Jesus that went viral. I think young people generally have a decent understanding of, oh, this could be AI, this might not be real, or like, this is the algorithm, and the algorithm is not necessarily showing me what I want. When people engage less with new media, they are less aware of how some things are fake or overrepresented. But yes, definitely, it is still a pipeline for younger people to get radicalized. A lot of this comes directly out of extreme ideology built on 4chan.

• 49:13Speaker 06

  Some of the linguistic communities created by the algorithm can be actively harmful. Many younger people have started using the suffix "pilled" to mean convinced into a lifestyle.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  If I recently discovered that I really like eating burritos, for example, I can say, I'm so burrito-pilled.

• 49:35Speaker 06

  But that word was formed through analogy with "blackpilled," a term meaning convinced into incel ideology. Now, incels are a dangerous misogynistic group, and yet somehow, the vocabulary is filtering into Gen Z slang, because the algorithm gave these hate groups a space. And again, many people don't even know where it came from. But for the few people who might be interested in the underlying idea, it's now more accessible to them because of the way that slang spreads on the internet.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  What do you think that means? You just said you were an optimist for younger generation. But after hearing you say that, I worry a lot.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  I'm an optimist for younger generations having literacy about this stuff. I am not an optimist in terms of algorithms and how they impact our culture. I do want to draw that distinction between language and culture because I sort of comment on both a lot. And I think language is fine, and there's nothing wrong with individual words. They're never brain rot. I do think the same way as Chinese language points us towards greater cultural shifts. You see a lot of words coming from that 4chan manosphere space. And we should be paying attention to why are these words coming out of that space? It's because that space is good at creating memes that export their ideology. And sometimes their ideology is very intertwined with far-right ideas and aesthetics.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  And yeah, that's kind of a problem of algorithms themselves, how they push extreme perspectives. What I said earlier about mixing media, I really hope that we come to realize as a culture that we should not just be relying on algorithms for our news. But also, you know, mainstream news has its own biases. It's good to get news from as many places as possible and build a greater picture of reality. It's good to build your stories of who people are through in-person connections as well because algorithms are going to show you a flattened representation of what society is. I do think we should be aware. We should be aware when the way we're talking may have been conditioned by the algorithm.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  We should be aware when the words we're using may have been engineered to sell us things. We should be aware when our language regurgitates extremist rhetoric. And we should be aware when that language can be used to harm other people. We should be aware of etymology in general because it helps us better understand who we are today. We should be aware. And with that, I have just one final piece of slang for you. It's a common phrase used by younger people when we finish a long-winded explanation of something. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  That was Adam Alexic. He's the author of Algo Speak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. You can find him at @etymologynerd on social media, and you can see his talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. If you enjoyed it, leave us a comment. What words are you using? We would love to know. You can do that on Spotify or email us at [email protected]. We love hearing from you. This episode was produced by Matthew Cloutier and edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussier, Rachel Faulkner-White, Katie Monteleone, Fiona Giran, Harsha Nehada, and Phoebe Lett.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damian Herring and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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