Do Politicians Need To Go Viral To Win?

Summary

GD Politics Podcast Summary: "Do Politicians Need To Go Viral To Win?"

Released on August 11, 2025

Hosts:

• Galen Druke – Host of GD Politics
• Adam Oleksik – Linguist and author of "I'll Go Speak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language", known online as Etymology Nerd

Overview: In this insightful episode of GD Politics, Galen Druke engages in a deep conversation with linguist Adam Oleksik to explore the profound impact of social media algorithms on language, culture, and political communication. The discussion delves into the concept of "algospeak," the viral nature of political messaging, and the intricate ways language evolves in the digital age.

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1. The Rise of Algospeak

Galen Druke opens the discussion by highlighting the chaotic state of American politics, describing it as "vibe check after vibe check" with rampant gaslighting and rage farming. He introduces the topic of how the internet, particularly social media algorithms, shape our language and, consequently, our culture and politics.

[00:45] Galen Druke: "Everyone's either gaslighting, rage farming, or displaying NPC behavior. American politics is just vibe check after vibe check."

Adam Oleksik explains that algorithms act as a new infrastructure influencing language by determining which words and ideas gain prominence. He cites the example of the word "unalive," which emerged as a euphemism for suicide due to platform restrictions.

[02:22] Adam Oleksik: "All language is political."

2. Algospeak: Virality vs. Censorship

The conversation pivots to whether algospeak is primarily seeking virality or acting as a form of censorship. Oleksik argues that it's a combination of both, driven by platforms' need to capture attention for monetization purposes.

[03:45] Adam Oleksik: "They're trying to get your attention so that they can sell you as many products as possible and commodify your data."

He emphasizes that creators, in turn, adapt their language to align with platform metrics like retention and engagement, leading to the evolution of language that favors attention-grabbing terms.

3. Evolution and Spread of Online Language

Examples of Algospeak:

Galen prompts Adam to provide examples of words that have gained popularity online, whether meaningful or nonsensical.

[05:02] Galen Druke: "What are some other words that have become popularized online that either mean something or nothing?"

Adam Oleksik lists various instances, including:

• Riz – Meaning charisma
• Skibidi – A nonsensical term popularized through memes
• Segs – Short for sex
• Sigma – Initially an incel term, now used by middle schoolers to describe a strong, independent individual

[05:26] Adam Oleksik: "There's segs for sex, there's all kinds of emoji substitutions... words that mean nothing, like sigma as an interjection."

4. The Incel Influence on Mainstream Language

A significant portion of the episode examines how language from niche communities, particularly the incel (involuntary celibate) community, permeates mainstream discourse.

Spread Mechanism:

Adam explains that the incel community, originating from platforms like 4chan, is highly productive in creating new slang. These terms often seep into broader internet culture through platforms like TikTok, sometimes stripped of their original negative connotations.

[09:55] Adam Oleksik: "Incels developed the idea of black pilled, which is you're in the incel community."

Examples of Incel-Derived Terms:

• Black pilled – Acceptance of incel ideology
• Maxing – Optimizing or maximizing something, e.g., "burrito pilled"
• Chad – An alpha male figure

[11:02] Adam Oleksik: "You have to start with the fact that the incel community is highly productive in coming up with new words."

5. Impact on Political Communication

The dialogue shifts to the intersection of language evolution and political success, pondering whether going viral is essential for politicians today.

Virality as a Tool:

Adam posits that, much like how Kennedy's photogenic presence aided his 1960 campaign, today's politicians benefit from being memeable and having viral potential.

[20:26] Adam Oleksik: "These candidates that are better at being memeable are perhaps more successful in the algorithmic era."

Case Study – Zoran Mandani:

They discuss Zoran Mandani's successful campaign, attributing his viral success to a message of radical inclusivity that spread effortlessly without triggering exclusionary perceptions.

[21:44] Adam Oleksik: "He gave this radically inclusive vibe. That was the only people who were being excluded were the billionaires."

6. Shifts in Communication Styles

Simplistic and Sensational Communication:

Adam highlights that algorithms favor sensationalism and extreme ideas as they are more likely to capture attention and go viral, often at the expense of nuanced, centrist views.

[16:13] Adam Oleksik: "Rage bait, clickbait, extremism. Extreme ideas are always going to go more viral than non-extreme ideas."

Packaging Political Messages:

The discussion touches on how political messages are increasingly woven into cultural content, making them more palatable and less overtly political, thereby enhancing their viral potential.

[25:06] Adam Oleksik: "You have politics packaged within culture."

7. Linguistics of Political Language

Dog Whistles and Ingroup Language:

Galen and Adam explore how politicians use language to both include and exclude, employing dog whistles that resonate with specific groups while maintaining broader appeal.

[27:53] Galen Druke: "How do politicians manage that? Be generous with language and bring people in. But also at the same time they're like using different accents and sort of particular ways of speech to appeal to smaller groups."

Code-Switching and Authenticity:

Adam explains that code-switching—altering one's language or accent based on the audience—is a natural and essential aspect of communication, not inherently insincere.

[30:07] Adam Oleksik: "Code switching is completely normal. You're going to talk differently to your grandma than you do to your friends."

8. Conclusion and Advice for Aspiring Politicians

In wrapping up, Galen asks Adam for advice on leveraging language and communication styles to marshal attention effectively.

Navigating Algorithmic Challenges:

Adam cautions that while extremism may gain traction due to algorithmic preferences, successful messaging requires understanding context and preparing for diverse and unexpected audiences.

[32:29] Galen Druke: "What is your advice to me in terms of how to marshal attention through the language that I use and my style of communication on the Internet?"

[33:22] Adam Oleksik: "You need to be prepared for unexpected audiences to come across that video."

Final Thoughts:

The episode underscores the intricate relationship between language, social media algorithms, and political success, highlighting the necessity for politicians to adapt their communication strategies in an increasingly digital and algorithm-driven landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• Galen Druke [00:45]: "Everyone's either gaslighting, rage farming, or displaying NPC behavior."
• Adam Oleksik [02:22]: "All language is political."
• Adam Oleksik [03:45]: "They're trying to get your attention so that they can sell you as many products as possible and commodify your data."
• Adam Oleksik [05:26]: "There's segs for sex, there's all kinds of emoji substitutions... words that mean nothing, like sigma as an interjection."
• Adam Oleksik [09:55]: "Incels developed the idea of black pilled, which is you're in the incel community."
• Adam Oleksik [16:13]: "Rage bait, clickbait, extremism. Extreme ideas are always going to go more viral than non-extreme ideas."
• Adam Oleksik [30:07]: "Code switching is completely normal. You're going to talk differently to your grandma than you do to your friends."

Key Takeaways:

1. Algorithms as Language Shapers: Social media algorithms significantly influence the evolution of language by promoting attention-grabbing and often sensational terms.
2. Algospeak's Dual Role: It serves both as a mechanism for achieving virality and as a form of implicit censorship, shaping how ideas are communicated and spread.
3. Niche to Mainstream: Language originating from isolated online communities, such as incels, can rapidly infiltrate mainstream usage through memes and viral content.
4. Political Success through Virality: In the digital age, a politician's ability to go viral and appear memeable can be as crucial as traditional campaigning strategies.
5. Cultural Packaging of Politics: Effective political messaging often involves embedding political ideas within cultural content to enhance relatability and acceptance.
6. Adaptive Communication: Successful politicians and creators must adeptly code-switch and package their messages to resonate with diverse and unexpected audiences online.

This episode of GD Politics offers a compelling exploration of the symbiotic relationship between language, social media algorithms, and political dynamics, providing valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of political communication.

Transcript

[Galen Druke]

Nice glasses, by the way.

[Adam Oleksik]

I was going to comment. You've got good taste.

[Galen Druke]

Wait, okay. I actually. So I got new glasses. Maybe you can tell me what you think as somebody who clearly likes wireframe glasses.

[Adam Oleksik]

Wireframe, Round, metallic.

[Galen Druke]

Okay. I think that this makes me look maybe like more of my age or older.

[Adam Oleksik]

They both give, like. I mean, I chose my glasses. They give approachable, yet academic. And, I mean, I think we're both in that kind of profession, I guess.

[Galen Druke]

Or at least try to be. Yeah.

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah. Yours? Similar. Like, I think either way, it's a similar vibe. Maybe this one's more in the academic direction.

[Galen Druke]

Maybe when I'm trying to be taken more seriously.

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah, maybe they both look good and then I do have a bias for these wireframes.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, we'll do the wireframes for this podcast then. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke. Low key. The whole political scene is such an L. Right now. Everyone's either gaslighting, rage farming, or displaying NPC behavior. American politics is just vibe check after vibe check, but it's mostly giving flop era with zero accountability. If you're confused as to why me, a millennial podcaster, is speaking like a Gen Z tiktoker, it's because today we're gonna talk about how the Internet shapes our language and in doing so, shapes our culture and politics also. Yes, in case you were wondering, ChatGPT wrote that today the spread of ideas happens in large part on social media. And on social media, what gets promoted or demoted or even what words we're allowed to use, is largely determined by algorithms. This has created a new dynamic where algorithms are increasingly influencing how we communicate. A simple example might be the emergence of the word unalive because social media platforms banned content about suicide. But it goes well beyond that. This is the argument Adam Oleksik lays out in his new book, I'll Go Speak How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. Adam is a linguist and known online as Etymology Nerd. Adam, welcome to the podcast.

[Adam Oleksik]

Hi. So excited to be here.

[Galen Druke]

I'm so excited to have you. So I'm going to make you tie all of this into politics. Eventually, but it'll happen.

[Adam Oleksik]

All language is political. We got this. Yeah.

[Galen Druke]

Well, there you go. Okay. I was going to say, let's live a little and not talk about politics for a second, but if all language is political, then by default, we are talking about politics. So how does algospeak work? In a nutshell?

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah. So I open with that example of Unalive the fact that the word kill is suppressed in TikTok, and creators find ways to reroute around that algorithmic censorship. But I think algorithms are so much more than that. They're an infrastructure underlying how we communicate. And the story of language is a story of how we use tools to communicate. And each of those tools is going to uniquely affect language. Every once in a while there's like these, these big inflection points that change the medium of what we're saying. And then as a result, language also changes. The Internet emerged and that allowed for the written replication of informal speech when, when books and the printing press emerged. That also changed how we popularize certain language, vernacular printing, all that. Now algorithms are a new infrastructure underlying language. They change where words come from, how words spread, and how quickly words get there.

[Galen Druke]

We started with an example of censorship, the platforms preventing people from talking about killing themselves or suicide. Not to get really dark at the start of this, but there's also something else going on with the algorithms that's really powerful, which is promoting or demoting certain ideas or language or ways of communicating, which is really driving this algo speak that you talk about. Is it seeking virality or is it censorship?

[Adam Oleksik]

You have to start with what these platforms are doing. And these platforms are trying to get your attention so that they can sell you as many products as possible and commodify your data. And it all relies on attention. So they bake in a attention incentives into their infrastructure. Now I, as a creator, I have to think about metrics like retention, how long people stay watching my video. I have to think about likes, shares, comments, all that. That is me identifying with a platform's metrics in order to be able to push my message further. But in doing so, I'm grabbing your attention. So we also see language evolving around what grabs attention as well.

[Galen Druke]

So give me an example of that.

[Adam Oleksik]

There's innate things that fascinate us. We're fascinated with younger people's slang. The way you open this podcast with that, when we think about words like riz or skibidi, we are collect, actively captivated by the idea that younger people are talking differently than we are. And so that gets remixed online into cringe, comedy and circularly becomes more of a thing. And this happens because when, when something starts trending in the algorithm, creators pay attention to that. They see, oh, this is trending. And I as a creator need to hop onto trends in order to stay relevant, in order for my content to be seen. And so they see something is trending they capitalize on that trend, and they circularly push those words further, performing them further into virality. So we have this sort of engagement treadmill of words being pushed more simply because they already are trending and we're trying to push them further.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, so you mentioned Riz and skibidi, which folks may be familiar with, but riz means charisma and skibidi means nothing from what I understand after reading your book.

[Adam Oleksik]

No, you're, you're pretty versed.

[Galen Druke]

Yeah, let's like indulge a little bit here. What are some other words that have become popularized online that either mean something or nothing? And by the way, this is an independent enterprise, so you can be as profane as you like.

[Adam Oleksik]

Oh, yeah. If we're looking at standard algo speak, there's segs for sex, there's all kinds of emoji substitutions. We've all been using the eggplant to mean penis. But it's, it's exactly what is happening online even more now. The ninja emoji standing in for the N word. All that is algo speak. And it's, it's a literally what linguists call a productive force, something that causes more language change because these algorithms are forcing us to come up with new ways to articulate ourselves. And that means finding new words. And so literally they're forming more language, faster words that mean nothing. There's, there's a few of those. The way people use sigma as an interjection. What the sigma? Sigma doesn't really mean anything there. It's just a funny thing to say. But sigma also could have the meaning of an independent man in the manosphere. And now we see, like, words diluting from the manosphere into everyday middle schooler vocabulary, which is also another thing that's interesting to me about online language and how algorithms spread ideas across different communities, across different filter bubbles and echo chambers, that we have these very niche, isolated communities exporting their ideas to the mainstream.

[Galen Druke]

In your book, you say that experts use almost epidemiological tools to track the spread of ideas. What does the spread of an idea on the Internet look like today?

[Adam Oleksik]

The standard model of mimetics, which is flawed. It's a metaphor. It doesn't work perfectly, but you can kind of think of it like a virus. You think about how a word can infect a host, and then that person will transmit that to another person, and then it spreads throughout the population that way. And we, we see this terminology when we talk about social media going viral. It is a more complicated picture but it's how social trends diffuse among in groups and out groups. You feel cool when you're part of a trend, and you adopt that because of your perception of what's happening. And then once the trend dies out, once the virus moves through the population, once your grandmother starts saying the word skibidi, it's no longer cool. It might die out, but there's this perception of prestige, of words tend to follow what is seen as funny or what is cool. There's a lot of words, for example, coming from African American English, particularly the ballroom slang in New York city in the 1980s. That's slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate, bet, yas. It's giving. All of those come from that queer black Latino space in New York City. And yet, because they're perceived as cool by adjacent groups, it starts with that space, and then it starts being used by, like, maybe white gay men, and it starts being used by the straight white girlfriends of gay men. And there's a natural way social ideas diffuse. That's always been a thing. The word cool itself comes from African American English, ironically borrowed because it was perceived as cool. But that took, like, 40 years to hit the mainstream. All these words got here a lot, you know, faster once they were popularized on TikTok, because there's also context collapse. There's the idea that you don't know where words are coming from, and it allows words to move faster without a regulating mechanism where somebody couldn't, like, look at you and say, maybe that word's not meant for you. So these words move a little bit faster. They escape the original filter bubbles because these boundaries are porous. And the algorithm will expose people to ideas that they might not have an idea about before, but it'll push things and trends to the mainstream, partially out of collective fascination, partially out of what's funny and cool.

[Galen Druke]

So this is why, when I hang out with my young cousins, they're saying yas, queen in the same exact way that the drag queens on Paris is Burning are saying it, right?

[Adam Oleksik]

They have no idea. Usually, like, I also same with, like, Sigma when. When a middle schooler says, what the sigma. I had an opportunity last month to interview a bunch of middle schoolers. They don't know where it comes from. They just think, oh, this is a funny word. I say this because my friend Jaden says it. And it's just a way for them to connect with one another. They lose context completely. They don't know about the ballroom scene. They don't know about incels, thankfully. So maybe it's not as harmful as it could be, but also potentially, maybe those ideas are filtering through and you can sort of follow the conduits of how culture is changing by following where words are coming from.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, well, if they don't know about incels, let's tell them. You track how incel language, which is involuntary celibates, which is men who say that they can't have sex because they're too unattractive, formed a community online, developed a whole set of language around their community that then bled throughout the rest of Internet culture. And to the middle schoolers that you're talking about who heard the word sigma like you were saying from Jaden, how did this exactly work? And for folks who aren't initiated, what are the languages? What kind of language that we use today comes from the incel community?

[Adam Oleksik]

There's a lot of things going on here. I'll throw out just a few words. And if you're not young, you might not know some of them pills.

[Galen Druke]

What counts as young, by the way?

[Adam Oleksik]

I don't know.

[Galen Druke]

I ask as a millennial to a.

[Adam Oleksik]

Gen Z er, you might be on the boundary here. Well, I'm certainly in politics spaces. You'll hear the suffix pilled convince into a lifestyle, oh, if I like eating burritos, I'm burrito pilled. And that comes out of red pilled and blue pilled. But it was only popularized as a productive suffix after it was bracketed off of those words and formed black pilled, which means convinced incel ideology. And then they start appending it to other meme language. And so it only spreads beyond red pilled and blue pilled because of the incel influence. There's max.

[Galen Druke]

So first, to be clear, incels developed the idea of black pilled, which is you're in the incel community.

[Adam Oleksik]

You have the matrix, you have the red pill and the blue pill. And that's applied to politics. You can become red pilled if you become republican or blue pilled if you become a democrat. And then black pilled is accepting this philosophy they have. It's called the black pill or lookism. It's this idea about physical attractiveness being the determiner of your sexual market value. They have a lot of, like, frameworks and hierarchies built up around that kind of stuff.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, Some of the other words.

[Adam Oleksik]

Right. So, okay, pilled is just convinced into a lifestyle. Maxing is maximizing something. So if I really like eating burritos, I can be burrito maxing Sigma. We see words like chad cell as a suffix I. I got a meme when I started researching this and I use this example in the book. I got a meme about it's so hard being a walk pilled cardio maxer in a car cell gas cooked state like Arizona. And that might sound like nonsensical. It just means like it's. It's hard walking if you live in Arizona. But that's an example of how this might be used. This incel language might be used in a different context. Okay, so why are these words getting here? Where are they coming from? You have to start with the fact that the incel community is highly productive in coming up with new words. First, the space started incubating on 4chan, although it later moved off of that. But 4chan itself is because everybody's anonymous. There's a need to demonstrate a performative proficiency in shared slang and come up with new slang words. So 4chan already is a highly productive space. There's a common aphorism that all Internet culture is downstream of 4chan. I think, you know, it's downstream of 4chan or black culture. I think that's pretty much true. But okay, so 4chan's highly productive @ coming up with new words. Incels later move to other forums. But they still have this language. They still have the. They fused with the ideas of the manosphere and the alt right in 4chan. And they're this violent, misogynistic group that has all these. Yeah. Built up ideas. And. And in the incel space, there's layers of how in the group you are within the circle. It's cult like. There's a group of true cells who use language like you can't even understand what they're saying. They have so many built up, very negative language. They'll call women foids, dumpsters, roasties. They'll have all these Asian classifications for rice cells and curry cells. And that's the idea that racial hierarchies exist in sexual market. It's a very strange like dynamic they have and the philosophy, but they have all that language which is not compelling to the mainstream. Some of their ideas do work as memes that can be broken off and reapplied to new situations that don't seem as clearly negative, as clearly tied to dehumanizing women or something like that. And this is where one incels are like their language is funny. The concept of an incel can be funny and the word spread. Ironically, that's one way it spreads. Another way is incels deliberately weaponize memes and move across like they try to Trojan horse their ideas through filter bubbles by packaging them in more compelling frameworks, like funny memes. You also see, like, in the beauty space on TikTok. It's funny because the incels have this whole phrenological system of classification of beauty. And there's mewing as a concept of jawline improvement technique and canthal tilts, which is like the angle of your eyes and intraocular distance. And these are all like skull measuring things. But you'll see like beauty influencers getting.

[Galen Druke]

Getting a little Nazi ish here.

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah, right. You'll see. Well, you see beauty influencers apply their makeup using canthal tilt filters or they'll talk about their, like, jawline angle and interocular distance and hunter eyes versus prey eyes. And these are all ideas coming straight out of like, incel skull classifications. But it's because incels like, intentionally went over to Reddit forums like R Rate Me where women asked to be judged in their appearance and men would like, put it in these ideas. And then they bring that over to TikTok and then it gets popular. And then there's this also this boundary between what's real and what's fake. And that's kind of compelling to people. Like, you're not sure whether people are actually saying this, so it's kind of funny. In the same way we're not sure whether gen Alpha is actually saying skibidi. So we popularized the word skibidi. I'm just going on a rant here. Feel free to stop me. But there's a lot going on and it's. It's a very nuanced picture.

[Galen Druke]

And the word ultimately that makes it to all of the middle schoolers that you're interviewing is Sigma. What does sigma mean?

[Adam Oleksik]

In the incel hierarchy, there's a triangle of Alphas on top, these are the Chads, and there's Betas who are alpha orbiters who are still able to get the leftovers of women that Alphas leave over. And then at the bottom are incels who are unable to have sex. A sigma is an idealized man in the manosphere that's like similar to an Alpha in social status but chooses to do their own thing at this point, I think middle schoolers use it interchangeably with the word Alpha. It can just mean a strong, independent man. But that's kind of like where that word developed out of and then leaked into the mainstream.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, so this is one of the examples for how words can make it from pretty up environment into the mouths of middle schoolers. But it's not just words that are being promoted or filtering through the Internet. It's also styles of communication. And you talk about how increasingly the algorithms promote simplistic explanations, outrage certain modes of communication, not just language. How does that work?

[Adam Oleksik]

So one thing I talk about is the sensationalism that algorithms necessitate. The fact that if we're grabbing attention, which is what these platforms are incentivizing, we have to start with, platforms want your attention. They want your eyeballs. So you start with that, and the logical conclusion is rage, bait, clickbait, extremism. Extreme ideas are always going to go more viral than non extreme ideas. I grew up in Albany's 20th congressional district. My congressman was Paul Tonko. He is boring. He never goes viral. Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC have more extreme views. They're more likely to go viral. It's a bimodal distribution of, like, groups that go viral versus, like, you don't get represented, like, maybe more centrist ideas.

[Galen Druke]

All right, well, you took the lead in terms of transitioning us into politics, so I'm going to take the bait. Today's podcast is brought to you by you, the listener. This podcast is possible because of paid [e-mail] paid subscribers get access to about twice the number of episodes. They can join in our private chat and send in questions that we'll later answer on the show. And most importantly, they ensure that we can continue to try to understand politics and the world with curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. When you become a paid subscriber, you can also connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts and never miss an episode. Join the GD Politics podcast community today at GDPolitics.com in fact, go to GDPolitics.com right now and become a subscriber. We will still be here when you get back. That's GDPolitics.com and thank you. I think that two things are true when it comes to how this all interacts with politics. First, as people say, Twitter is not real life. There are a lot of people who are not plugged into the world at all that you're talking about. Even as somebody who's decently online, a lot of the things that you talk about in this book, I'm like, wait, what the hell? But also second, politics is in many ways a competition for attention, whether online or offline. And the ability to marshal that attention towards a person or set of ideas. And that process is increasingly happening within the social media structures that you're talking about. So you mentioned Already that it's driving perhaps more extreme ways of communication or extreme ideas. How else is Algospeak shaping our political behavior?

[Adam Oleksik]

I mean, the filter bubble thing has been talked about to death. But here. Here's an important thing to keep in mind as well about algorithms, is that all words are metadata. Now, it used to be metadata was like hashtags, information about the content. Now algorithms analyze every word that's uploaded, every word that appears on scre. Through nlp, through computer vision, they can tell everything. And so the individual words become extremely important, and they all become pieces of information about categorizing people predictively. Into these clusters, you create, like, embeddings and numerical representations of who people are and what videos should be sent to which people. And so you tend to have maybe an exaggerated. Because these are flattened representations of people online, you have an exaggerated, diluted version of reality present that people then perceive. And this does bleed into real reality. It does influence us offline. But what's another thing that's interesting here is there's like, cultural echo chambers that are inextricable from political echo chambers. Like, the people who are getting the hawk to a meme last summer are the people who ended up voting for Donald Trump and the people who got the brat memes are the people who ended up voting for Kamala Harris. So, and that. That's like, these are memes. These are ideas and words that spread separately from politics, but it's really not separate because it's just clusters of how algorithms assign people into groups.

[Galen Druke]

Wait, hold on. You mean if you got served the hoktuha meme, you voted for Donald Trump?

[Adam Oleksik]

Not. Not like one to one, you know, but there is correlation there with the people who receive certain memes and people who vote certain ways. Like, liberals are probably getting the performative matcha male manipulator stuff because that's a liberal in joke right now. Last time I was.

[Galen Druke]

Wait, wait, wait. Hold right on. Hold right on. The liberal matcha male manipulator meme. Who's that?

[Adam Oleksik]

There's a meme right now starting in New York City and going online about performative liberal men listening to Claro. And reading Judith Butler or something. That's a meme. That's like.

[Galen Druke]

And drinking matcha.

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah, right. And that's sort of that meme. You only really get it if you're in the progressive echo chambers and see why that's funny. Um, it's not related directly to politics, but there's, like, groups that get assigned certain memes, and there's algorithms circularly reinforce these clusters as people engage with this kind of content.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, so what's going viral on right wing social media right now?

[Adam Oleksik]

I'm not super on right wing social media. Uh, it, it is hard to be tapped in. Right. Well, there's the obvious political stuff. I mean, we, we all are aware of the Epstein discourse and the Twitter discourse, but what cultural memes are trending is, is like a different story. There's what music we're listening to, that's all like also algorithmically pushed. That's different.

[Galen Druke]

We talked a little bit about going viral, but you also mentioned like Marjorie Taylor Greene and aoc and when I think of successful politicians, at least electorally, obviously they won office, but I don't know that I would think of them as the most popular politicians in America. Is going viral synonymous with being successful as a politician?

[Adam Oleksik]

I do think it's important, like in the same sense that I think each medium affects how we communicate. Each medium affects political success. You know, the exact like statistics behind how much the 1960 debate affected things varies or whatever. But it's generally thought that a factor that helped Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 is that Kennedy was more photogenic on TV. And it's, it makes intuitive sense that more attractive candidates did better in the TV medium than non attractive candidates. In the same way, I think the fact that algorithms are dominating our discourse right now means that more memeable candidates, candidates that have more viral potential. And this is something that, like, if we talk memetics, there is an idea of some memes perform better than other memes. And so these candidates that are better at being memeable are perhaps more successful in the algorithmic era.

[Galen Druke]

What about Zoran Mandani? What about his approach to campaigning made him so prone to going viral?

[Adam Oleksik]

Yeah, he also had good knowledge clearly of social media. He's very savvy with, with that stuff. But it's about how these ideas even spread. Right. Let's think like why are. Do people feel turned off by a lot of liberal ideas, by woke academia? It's because there's this feeling of exclusivity. It's this feeling of like, if you're not with us, you're, you're a Nazi. And I don't think Zoron ever gave that vibe. He gave this radically inclusive vibe. That was the only people who were being excluded were the billionaires. And he was saying, all right, everybody wants $8, you know, chicken. Everybody wants affordable housing, let's make that happen. And it was this like Radically inclusive message. I think that doesn't feel like there's a cutoff to the meme. And memes spread through groups. Right. That's how, like, these ideas diffuse. And there's a, a certain point sometimes where people encounter resistance unless it's trojan horsed through with some other concept, like let's make it easier for there to be more halal carts, or let's make it like that's how you trojan horse through democratic socialism. It's not like people feel a huge turnoff when you say the word socialism, but they, they do like the idea of cheaper chicken kebabs.

[Galen Druke]

Are there predictable formulas for political virality?

[Adam Oleksik]

No. And here's where we run into the problem. It's hard to approach this from a data science or quantitative perspective, because what we're talking about right now is vibes. A vibe is a person's like, affect of a situation, our understanding of what's going on. The vibes are constantly changing. And this is also maybe a problem with like, quantifying. Exactly. Oh, how much does TV affect things? How much does TikTok affect things? It's hard to put a number on people's feelings about things. And these are like embodied impressions we have of a situation. And, and the vibes for each campaign are going to be different. There's a different cultural context. There might be like a different issue the American people are facing. There might be. So, like, if you want to be successful, you have to assess what the vibes are.

[Galen Druke]

You also talk about how people mistrust old forms of advertising, I guess, particularly younger people. Does that also mean that they sort of mistrust old forms of political campaigning?

[Adam Oleksik]

I think so. I think it's. For a meme to spread, it has to be packaged in a compelling medium. It has to be turned into something. So I make educational content online. Online, right. And this has always been a thing that you need attention to, to teach people. A teacher needs attention of their students to get a concept across. But a classroom, like, the package is like, different. Online, I have to do everything as more overt edutainment. I, even though I'm trying to spread educational message, I very deliberately have to package it as something funny, as something entertaining, because that's how you get an idea through, like the idea of the Trojan horse, which again, we're using metaphors here. Metaphors are never correct. But it's. If you wrap something up in an idea inside some other idea, it can push further. And the same is true of politics and advertising here. You asked about Advertising stray advertisement for a Coca Cola can in the past on TV didn't do as well as showing a family connecting over Coca Cola because you connect more to the family, because the package for the advertisement is, oh, this human connectiveness, which makes you feel better. Now we're a little more skeptical of that form of advertising. Things need to be packaged as like a get ready with me brand deals, but it's still like a new medium in which we hold the idea. And the same is true of political messaging right now.

[Galen Druke]

And how does that end up manifesting in the political space?

[Adam Oleksik]

It means that you have politics packaged within culture, and that's what you get with these far right podcasts. People keep talking about, you know, where's the Joe Rogan Theo Vaughn of the left? It's packaging politics inside culture. And the culture of the left was this idea of exclusivity, of, like, you're either with us or you're a Nazi, right? And I think they. It was built on good ideas. The ideas of woke academia were like, let's make people feel more included. But paradoxically, they pushed that framework in a way that made people feel excluded, and it felt there was a cutoff. Every person has like a decision point when they encounter a meme like, do I want to accept this? And their boundary is lower when it's in that. Wrapped up in that package of something cool. And. And Joe Rogan is cool. He's talking about other things too. He's not just talking about politics. He's talking about psychedelics. He's talking about exploring interesting theories of consciousness. You might just watch him for that. But in inside, there's like a seed of these ideas that are. That are being pushed through.

[Galen Druke]

There's also the version of AOC playing video games on Twitch and talking about politics while doing that. Does that work? I mean, I'm not online in these spaces, so I don't know. Like, when AOC is getting ready and putting on makeup while talking about, you know, the one big beautiful bill act, or talking about Medicare for all while playing Twitch, there's probably a certain take on that, which, like, oh, this is cringe. There's another take on it which is like, oh, this is relatable.

[Adam Oleksik]

Well, okay, the big buzzword in the influencer, in the creator economy is authenticity. Authenticity is a. Is a package here. The fact that if you talk about Medicare while you're like playing Twitch, it's easier to spread your message than if you just talk about Medicare. And that's the package. It's Something that holds something else. And it's a more compelling way to push funnel through this idea to people who also like they feel immediate resistance to being advertised to. We all have felt that on some level throughout history. And now there's just more awareness of when we're being advertised to and we feel when someone is relatable, when we feel like it's genuinely coming from a human who's not trying to push us anything but just wants to play some games on Twitch, that feels more relatable, something you're more willing to pay attention to and pick up on these cues.

[Galen Druke]

Let's talk a little bit more overtly about the linguistics of politics. You mentioned that the left found itself in a place where it was using language to sort of distinguish the barriers of their in group. You know, it's little things even like saying, oh, we need to center this or center that is something that the progressive side of the Democratic party says all the time or pronouns or whatever it may be. So maybe that can get cause challenges because you're not using broad appeal, generous language that brings everybody in at the same time. Part of politics is letting people know that you're on their side or whatnot. And so using at times ingroup language.

[Adam Oleksik]

And that's how we get dog whistles and.

[Galen Druke]

Right, and so how do politicians manage that? Be generous with language and bring people in. But also at the same time they're like using different accents and sort of particular ways of speech to appeal to smaller groups.

[Adam Oleksik]

Right, right. In the same way that I'll speak in a different accent when I'm making a social media video. A TV broadcaster will speak a different accent with their appearing on tv. We all constantly switch our accents for different mediums. Again, it's a question of how we act in mediums. Yeah. A politician in South Carolina, they tend to take on more southern sounding accents than when they're talking in New York. And that's, you know, not a coincidence. That's because they're again, I don't want to overuse the word packaging, but it's sort of like a, like a font like Times New Roman. If I write a book in Times New Roman, you take it more seriously than if I write in a Comic Sans. Even if it's the exact same idea. It's just because you have a vibe and affectation and understanding of how this mode of presentation feels relatable or not relatable. And yeah, so I think dog whistles are a big part of this. Not even in the negative sense. It's just like, you want to use language that feels inclusive to everybody, but at the same time has those, like, kind of hints for your real bass to pick up on. I think Zoron did that really well. For example, like, he used this language, which felt welcoming to everybody, but you could still tell he was a socialist.

[Galen Druke]

I've talked about this, I think, on a podcast a long time ago, But I was asking a friend who's a linguist, why is it the case that, particularly when I drink alcohol, I start to mimic the accent of the person that I'm speaking with? It seems kind of poser ish. And he was like, no, no, it's actually generosity, right? Like, you want to make the person that you're talking to feel like you're relatable to them, and that in mimicking other people's accents, you're sort of like. And this person was British. So in particular, he was saying, like, you can move up the socioeconomic scale or down the socioeconomic scale based on the accent that you use. And when you're talking to, like, somebody of a lower economic status, you want to move your accent down the scale. And when you're talking to somebody with a higher economic socioeconomic status, you want to move your accent up the scale. Is that generosity, though, or is that poser behavior?

[Adam Oleksik]

No, I mean, code switching is completely normal. You're going to talk differently to your grandma than you do to your friends. That's not you being inauthentic. There's no such thing as an authentic self. I think everybody should read Irving Goffman's presentation of the self in everyday life. This is a great book, but the idea is we're, like, constantly performing for a perceived audience, and that audience is going to be different in different circumstances. On the algorithm, we have to perform for our imaginary audience in the same way a TV broadcaster has to perform for their imaginary audience, but we also have to perform for the algorithm itself, because otherwise the video is not gonna be pushed. So there's a few layers of performativity there. But, yeah, code switching is a natural thing. And here's the thing about alcohol and why you feel like you're performing more. It's a question of vibe. Again, the alcohol lowers that social barrier. And now your vibe is one such that you're more willing to kind of like algorithms amplify human behavior. Alcohol does in another way oftentimes.

[Galen Druke]

Also, politicians can change the way that we feel about an idea based on how they talk about it. Like, the most common example, I think, in politics is the estate tax versus.

[Adam Oleksik]

The death tax, Obamacare versus the Affordable Care Act. And there's a huge difference in which one people support. Yeah, totally. A pro rights versus, like, pro abortion versus pro, you know, pro life. Yeah, that kind of stuff, I guess.

[Galen Druke]

Like, is that effective? And what are some examples that we're using today?

[Adam Oleksik]

Absolutely. And that's exactly kind of like what this is. Like, the fact that these words have different feelings linguistically. There should be no major difference between you're saying you're pro life and between saying you're pro abortion. But really, we have a huge kind of recoil when we hear abortion. In the same way middle schoolers have recoil when they hear the word suicide and they use the word unalive as a genuine euphemism because it sounds less scary. I think there's a lot of that happening with political speech as well. Look at the way, like, a lot of the discourse is happening around, like, Palestine. I'm fascinated with Palestinian algo speak, like the watermelon emoji instead of the Palestinian flag or IOF instead of idf. And this is one, it's to circumvent the algorithm. Two, it's to signal to your in group that you're part of this in group. Three, it's it's reframing kind of this struggle because it's awareness of the algorithmic performativity. It's saying, hey, by the way, I'm saying this because the algorithm won't let me say IDF or the Palestinian flag without my video getting suppressed. So there's like a meta, meta signal happening when you say that implicitly. And there's a really interesting kind of dynamic of communication happening there.

[Galen Druke]

Okay, wrapping up here. I'm getting ready to run for office in 2026 or 2020. I'm not actually, but say that I am. What is your advice to me in terms of how to marshal attention through the language that I use and my style of communication on the Internet?

[Adam Oleksik]

I mean, unfortunately, extremism does work because the way the algorithms push certain things, you have to think about context and how context collapse occurs on social media. When a video is sent out, it's going to be viewed by an audience you don't expect. That means you need to be able to package this in a way where the algorithm will only continue recommending things because it reevaluates the demographics of, like, who watches a video, and that's how it decides whether to send it further. So it continuously reevaluates whether to send videos further. You need to be prepared for unexpected audiences to come across that video.

[Galen Druke]

All right, well, good advice. We're going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much, Adam for joining me.

[Adam Oleksik]

Thank you for having me.

[Galen Druke]

My name is Galen Drook. Remember to become a subscriber to this [e-mail] and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes and access to the videos for the podcast. You can also join our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. And most importantly, you ensure that we can keep making a podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. Also, be a friend of the podcast and go give us a five star rating. Maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.