Viral Language Helena Aeberli looks for rizz in Adam Aleksic’s “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.” By Helena Aeberli July 20, 2025 Cultural Studies
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic . Knopf , 2025. 256 pages.
LANGUAGE IS A MEANS of communication and a container of meaning. It enables us to come together to share intentions and coordinate actions, to form relationships and communities, to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups. It serves as a medium for artistic expression, and is often but not always the medium in which we think. Language is a system and a tool and an art form all at once, and as such, it is constantly changing and evolving alongside us.
According to Adam Aleksic—and anyone who spends enough time on the internet will agree with him—human communication is currently at an “inflection point” characterized by the rapid spread of “personally recommended, short-form video content.” Thanks to the development of algorithms, language is undergoing a transformative shift rivaled only by earlier developments in writing, the printing press, and the internet. New words, accents, dialects, grammatical rules, and inflections are emerging in response to personalized filter bubbles, platform guidelines and censorship, influencer marketing, and the complex mechanics of virality. If you’ve ever claimed you have “rizz” or “aura,” tacked “-pilled” or “-core” on the end of a word, or worried about the spread of “brain rot,” then congratulations. You’ve participated in the development of algospeak.
In his new book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, Aleksic, an influencer and educator known online as “The Etymology Nerd,” explores the causes and consequences of this nascent linguistic epoch. Linguistic evolution is nothing new. Inventing new terms to circumvent censorship can be seen in centuries-old practices of bowdlerization, named for the expurgated editions of Shakespeare published by the 19th-century editor Thomas Bowdler. Substituting dashes (— —) or, increasingly, asterisks (*) for vowels in offending words altered the way people wrote, while adding a healthy dose of humor. Eighties chat room leetspeak, which adopted creative respellings like “5U1C1D3” or “$U!C!D€” to dodge censors, provides another clear pattern for contemporary neologisms like “unalive.” Aleksic refers to this process of dodging platform censorship as playing linguistic “Whac-A-Mole,” and claims, somewhat reassuringly, that we’ve been doing it forever. What has changed is the mediating role played by technology—specifically, by algorithms, the sets of rules and calculations used to determine the stream of personalized content users encounter on social media—in linguistic development. There’s no Bowdler lurking behind “unalive,” just a complex and self-sustaining piece of code. And it isn’t just self-censorship. Algorithms are the invisible force shaping everything we encounter online, influencing the emergence, diffusion, and sometimes decline of new words. Language now spreads like memes do: by going viral.
Aleksic is an enthusiastic guide with an infectiously optimistic outlook, one that doesn’t quite align with the usual hand-wringing about internet slang. Excited by the opportunistic hyperspace of social media, “the beautiful, chaotic idiosyncrasies” of our new linguistic world, he’s far from a doomsayer. “Unalive” and “grape” are less examples of a culture in denial about the realities of death and sexual violence than ingenious adaptions to the algorithm, representing “an extra way of expressing ourselves that we’ve developed to fit a specific environment with specific constraints” (of course, they could very well be both). We’ve never been able to control the pace and direction of linguistic evolution, nor that of technology. If anything, algospeak is a sign of human resilience, ingenuity, and humor, a mark of the creative ways we can adapt to our changing situations. The Rizzler song—to which a whole chapter is dedicated—isn’t a sign of children’s rotted brains but a pivotal moment in the rapid development of new slang, one that marks the emergence of a distinctive Gen Alpha style of communication and humor.
Despite the unpromising subject for those of us who aren’t middle schoolers, this is a fascinating piece of etymological analysis. As it incorporated a whole host of already-trending slang words formed into an annoyingly catchy anthem, the Rizzler song operated as a kind of algospeak aggregator, pushing the audio to anyone who had previously shown interest in any of those words. Catnip for Gen Alpha, an ironic cringefest for Gen Z, and a morbid curiosity to older generations, the Rizzler song was primed to spread at “warp speed.” You’re so skibidi … A win for the algorithm, this could possibly be a win for children’s cognitive development as well, operating as a form of brain-stimulating “language play”—a far cry from the usual expressions of concern.
Possibly. The problem with all this bright-eyed enthusing is that it can conceal the political dimensions of Aleksic’s subject. If language is a bearer of meaning, it is also a bearer of power, one that shapes the ways we define ourselves and live our lives. There is a dark side to algospeak. Personalization connects individuals with shared interests in online communities and provides a common language to unite them, which is all very well in the case of Taylor Swift fans but rather more unnerving when it comes to incels. Nor are these online communities wholly closed off to the outside world, leading to context collapse when terms with a hyperspecific meaning escape their original frame of reference. “Blackpilled,” “cuck,” “sigma,” and “looksmaxxing” all originated in incel communities on 4chan before becoming mainstreamed, spreading previously niche ideas as well as words. Preteens might not know the origins of the words they’re using (“sigma” features in the Rizzler song), while adults might use them ironically. But algospeak has enabled aspects of incel ideology, such as the hardcore body practices associated with “looksmaxxing,” to enter the mainstream, influencing “normie” culture even as their more noxious elements are diluted.
It isn’t just incel terms that undergo context collapse. Aleksic quips that “if a word doesn’t come from 4chan, it’s probably from AAE [African American English] ”. Much like the spread of incel slang, the mainstreaming of AAE is caused by the blurry boundaries of the filter bubble and the ease with which unique words lose their cultural value in the face of “linguistic appropriation” for trends. The co-optation of AAE—from “cool” in the 1940s to “bae,” “fam,” and “fleek” in the 2010s—is one of the most striking aspects of contemporary linguistic evolution, particularly since the rise of short-form video. A vernacular that developed in the context of systemic racism and the struggle for power and belonging has now been memeified into “internet slang,” a form of “digital blackface” that Aleksic links to a long tradition of racist stereotyping including 19th-century minstrel theater. The threat of filter bubbles is thus twofold—that “communities can harm us” (as in the case of incels) and “we can harm communities” (as in the case of AAE).
Yet this somewhat cautious (and itself catchy) analysis doesn’t go far enough. Who is “we”? Is this picture of divided communities really all there is, or is there something else at play? Language, as any good Foucauldian can tell you, is an expression of power. Linguistic systems communicate ideology as well as words, and changes in the linguistic domain are often accompanied by broader shifts in cultural beliefs, attitudes, and influence. Take “girl dinner,” a term that began trending in 2023 to refer to a light, nutritionally negligible replacement for a full meal, often consumed by young women. For Aleksic, “girl dinner” is a successful example of “trendbait”—“saying things specifically in the hopes of becoming a viral trend.” On one level, this is true: “girl dinner” illustrates the relationship between algospeak and memes, and their entangled viral circulation. Yet “girl dinner” emerged within a broader cultural shift that has seen not just the “hot girl walk” and “girl math” but also the rise of the “tradwife” and #SkinnyTok, alongside a wholesale attack on women’s rights, including abortion bans and pronatalist policies. What is the direction of causation here, or in the spread of incel slang? What role do trends like “girl dinner” or “tradwife” play in the propagation of reactionary anti-feminism? And what does the algorithm do to the relationship between words and those who use them—and even between words and culture on a broader scale? With critical analysis, “girl dinner” starts to look intimately connected to the spread of incel slang Aleksic so deftly traces.
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