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- [00:01]
Kara Swisher
All your bases belong to us. Greatest one.
- [00:04]
Adam Oleksik
Yeah. That's a 90s kind of reference.
- [00:06]
Kara Swisher
That's Kara Swisher's time period when she first came on.
- [00:10]
Adam Oleksik
Usually I come on here and I make people feel old. You're making me feel really like a child.
- [00:26]
Kara Swisher
Hi, everyone. From New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. Today I'm talking to adam Oleksik, a 24 year old Harvard educated linguist who is the author of How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. And he's also a social media influencer himself. Adam says the social media algorithms are leading to the creation of more new words than ever before. And recognizing the incentives behind the algorithms can help us understand how our language culture and even our politics are being influenced by opaque systems owned by a tiny number of billions billionaires or beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. I'm excited to talk to him because I've been following how language changed on the Internet since before he was born. Let's be clear. And there's all kinds of words that do come out and people use and they come and they go. It started with memes. All kinds of things happened in the early Internet. You started to see this. And people talk in short language, memeified language, essentially. And it also creates new words and new ways people talk to each other. The meme, I think, is one of the more important social media cues of the era. And if you know them correctly, you're on the in. If you don't, you are cringe often like myself, as my kids say. Our expert question today comes from Brooke Hammerling, the founder of the New New Thing and a writer and podcast host@popculturemondays.com She's a good friend of mine, but I gotta say, she knows more about Internet memes than anyone else I know. So stick around. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow, who are enabling people to do more fulfilling work, the work they actually want to do. You know what people don't want to do? Boring, busy work. But now, with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business. It, hr, customer service, and more. And that means your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Get started@servicenow.com AI Agents.
- [02:39]
Adam Oleksik
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- [03:17]
Kara Swisher
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- [03:33]
Adam Oleksik
You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so.
- [03:36]
Kara Swisher
You can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure leaf iced tea. Time for a tea break. Time for a pure leaf.
- [03:48]
Adam Oleksik
It is on.
- [03:50]
Kara Swisher
Let's dive right into the book. How did the word unalive develop and what does it say about the way our language is changing?
- [03:57]
Adam Oleksik
Right. So my book starts with that example, unalive. There's kids in middle schools talking about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself in their essays and having classroom discussions on the unaliving that happens. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. It's a synonym for killer. Commit suicide. And people are using it first on TikTok because you can't say kill. It's not necessarily censored, but it's suppressed. Your videos will get pushed to fewer people. And so creators try to circumvent that with coming up with quote unquote algo speak language meant to circumvent kind of online censorship.
- [04:30]
Kara Swisher
Circumvent. So you're circumvised, whatever the content moderation system, if there is one at all.
- [04:35]
Adam Oleksik
Right. But it's, it's also taken on a new life offline as a euphemism. And it's sort of this perfect example, I think, of this new algorithmic infrastructure of the Internet bleeding into our everyday lives. But I think this is the new kind of defining feature of mass communication online right now and how we relate to each other online and that's affecting actual language.
- [04:54]
Kara Swisher
It's fascinating. So using a watermelon emoji as a way to signal support for Palestine is another example. Talk about the many layers of communication that happen when someone uses a word or emoji to show support for a cause or social media. Talk about that a little bit.
- [05:09]
Adam Oleksik
I'm so glad you brought up the watermelon. It's a fascinating Example, we have a few layers of kind of performance happening. You're first performing for the person. There's like a literal meaning and that the watermelon stands in for Palestine. So it has a literal meaning, it has a performative meaning. The performative meaning is I'm in your shirt shared group. We understand the social context of what this means. You're also performing for the algorithm. I call that algorithmic performativity. You're performing in a way that the algorithm will allow this video to be pushed further. And again, the Palestinian flag is not actually censored. Sometimes there's just an imagination of what the algorithm does and people over. Correct. But it probably does, like suppress some posts relating to the conflict. They have community guidelines around, let's not exaggerate conflicts and stuff like that. So they probably do suppress videos with a Palestinian flag. And so creators turn to the watermelon emoji as a way of getting their videos seen by more people. And so you're performing for that. But at the same time, there's a metalinguistic indicator, like a fourth level. You're also signaling to your audience, hey, by the way, we're being watched by this platform and I'm using this watermelon emoji not just to mean the literal thing, not just for the algorithm, but also to tell you we are in.
- [06:15]
Kara Swisher
A surveillance state and we know this. So we're going to be tricky. Although it's in plain sight in a lot of ways. Right. I mean, everybody, I assume the companies know what they're doing there too, and.
- [06:25]
Adam Oleksik
Allow it to happen, obviously. And the companies have caught on to unalive too. If you search up the word unalive right now on TikTok, it'll redirect you to a page for seeking mental health guidance. And some creators started putting an AT sign instead of the letter A or an exclamation point instead of the letter I. And that's to circumvent the second layer. And I. The example I use in the book is we're playing linguistic whack a mole. The algorithm keeps coming down, the hammer comes down and then new mole pops up. And in linguistics, we call that a productive force, something that produces more language.
- [06:53]
Kara Swisher
So. So some listeners, they might think this is interesting, but why should I care about teen slang or emojis by social media activists? What do you say to them? Why does studying how algorithms shape language evolution tell us about power and communication and the society writ large?
- [07:08]
Adam Oleksik
Yeah, I think we have to start with this stuff. We're talking about the quintessential examples of algo speak language meant to circumvent the algorithm. That's the tip of the iceberg. These are the known knowns, the examples we can point to. We can say, oh, this is just a clear, obvious example of algorithms rerouting our speech. I think there's also less clear examples, maybe the known unknowns. And we're not even getting into. I mean, we can't possibly know what the unknown unknowns are. But the more I began to look into this, this was the example that first drew me as a creator, as a linguist, because I can't turn off linguist brain, I can't turn off content creator brain. I'm constantly looking at my own language and thinking, wow, what am I saying here? Why am I saying it? So I was drawn to that kind of algorithm speak. And the more I looked into it, the more I think algorithms are shaping every aspect of online communication right now, at least on these platforms, which is the predominant way that we're communicating. So you have the influencer accent. These are sort of inflections and ways of stressing words that are meant to grab your attention better. Because the underlying logic of these platforms is let's get people's attention for as long as possible so we can commodify it so we can sell more ads and sell their data. That means that language is really, really revolving around what grabs people's attention. This has been true in the past. You've always needed to grab people's attention to communicate. But I think it's compounded on the algorithm. I think it's amplified. And this is a pattern you see time and time again. It's a normal human process, but it's exaggerated by the algorithm. So you have attention grabbing mechanisms humans also naturally create in groups and out groups. That's an innate tendency that we do. But algorithms have a tendency to separate us into filter bubbles. And so they emergently compound this human tendency with their behaviors. And then we have this completely new thing. And these algorithmically created echo chambers are now incubators for new language change. You have communities forming online that have a shared need to invent new vocabulary. One example I use in the book is like a K pop community, which maybe didn't have a way to coalesce before when they were geographically disparate. Now they have a fandom and it starts on Tumblr and Twitter and moves to TikTok. And now they have all this like in group vocabulary, which is like completely unique to them. But sometimes the words escape to the mainstream, like the word delulu, which started as a way to describe a fan's delusion toward their idol.
- [09:06]
Kara Swisher
So you're also an influencer also. It's sort of a new word for a job. At least. You have 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 750,000 on TikTok, and over 600,000 on YouTube. Last year, you went viral for the term Boomer ellipses. Explain that and why it worked and the strategy for going viral there.
- [09:24]
Adam Oleksik
The Boomer ellipsis identified the kind of dot, dot, dot that boomers do in their text messages. You know, sort of an unfamiliarity with the conventions of Internet speak. That's, you know, that's more of the early Internet era kind of explaining through that lens that Gretchen McCulloch set up. So I was explaining this phenomenon that I don't think anybody else had talked about before or there were some vague studies on this. I particularly coined the phrase Boomer ellipsis as an example of trend bait. This is something that I talk about in the book that influencers try to identify what will the next trend be? They go out of their way to coin new phrases, coin new words, because it's some kind of sociologically compelling thing to us that, oh, there's this phrase, I don't know what this means. And now I want to be in on the group that knows what this phrase means. So it satisfies that in group curiosity. At the same time, it speaks to our fascination with intergenerational differences. I also dedicate a chapter to that. Right now, for example, the Gen Z stare is trending on TikTok. Before that, we had the Gen Z fingerheart, the Gen Z shake. We had millennial pause. We have all these sort of generational terms. And also, generations are completely made up. There's no such thing. There's a lot of academics who are really frustrated. Pew Research center is scaling back on what they're calling generations right now. Sure, we have, like, familial generations, but the social idea of a generation is newly constructed since, like, World War I.
- [10:43]
Kara Swisher
Absolutely. It was often around music also.
- [10:45]
Adam Oleksik
It's sort of Western bias too. Anyway, there's a lot of, like, reasons generations are made up. I, as an older Gen Z person, I feel much closer to a young millennial than a young Gen Z person. But, you know, we still get lumped into these broad labels that maybe constrain or we. Now I start trying to identify with these labels. Maybe now that I'm Gen Z, I want to use the Gen Z fingerheart I want to use like I relate more to the Gen Z stare or something. So when I coined that phrase Boomer ellipses, I did that knowingly playing into intergenerational tribalism which still.
- [11:12]
Kara Swisher
Which still persists today. It really is kind of. You're right. You're absolutely right. It hasn't been used in it and I hadn't thought about it on a global basis. Of course. Nobody in Syria my age is the same as me, for example. Or have similar things. So tell me, why do some new words develop within our social media subcultures but others don't like? It's really interesting what happens. And of course people speaking of a phrase, they try to make fetch happen and they don't. From a famous movie of another era. Still a great expression. Is there something about them and what determines whether it jumps from social media usage which can be here and gone to the mainstream use in conversation.
- [11:50]
Adam Oleksik
Right. You can't force language change. That's why the woke academics couldn't make Latinx happen or all the other kind of like ivory tower academic, intellectual.
- [11:59]
Kara Swisher
Let me just tell you, liberals didn't like that either. But go ahead.
- [12:01]
Adam Oleksik
And that's because it felt forced. It felt like the word fetch.
- [12:04]
Kara Swisher
Fetch worked for a while there. Adam. Fetch worked for a while there.
- [12:07]
Adam Oleksik
Just so you know, language will follow the conduits of what is seen as cool or funny. That's always what it's been and that's what it is now. And there's some groups that have more social prestige so they're seen as cooler. There's some groups that are good at coming up with memes so they're seen as funnier. There's another factor of which groups are actually coming up with new language. And there are some groups that are simply producing more. And the more you'd produce, the more chances it has to go viral. So a lot of Internet memes come from 4chan. 4chan has this need to demonstrate a shared performativity in this slang because there's anonymous user accounts. So to show that you're not a quote unquote normie, you have to play by their slang and then they come up with new words as it's part of their culture. There's a lot with both platform design and user culture that kind of works circularly to either create new words or not. Like why is so much of our slang Gen Z slang that's also made up? But why is so much Gen Z slang coming from African American, English? It comes from the ballroom scene in the 1980s, which is this very culturally rich space that was trying to come up with new language to differentiate themselves from the straight white norms of the English language. They had a shared need to invent slang, and that's when slang gets invented, when there is a shared need, when these communities are created, when they feel a desire to come up with new words.
- [13:17]
Kara Swisher
And some are better than others. Right. Some, like, as you were saying, if.
- [13:20]
Adam Oleksik
They are culturally cool or funny, then we capitalize on it broadly.
- [13:24]
Kara Swisher
And how do meme formats fit into this engagement rubric? Because they are. A lot of the early Internet ones were really cloddy memes, but they worked really well. And some were phrases that were attached to memes because they always had a picture with them in some way.
- [13:36]
Adam Oleksik
Phrasal templates are very important meme templates. There's carriers for ideas, like make X Y. Again, if we're already dabbling in a politics here, like, that's a phrasal template. My LinkedIn bio says, making linguistics cool again. Earlier today, I was talking to someone and they said, like, make teaching engaging again. And we say that without thinking that that happened because Trump, like, popularized that phrase. It was spread as a viral meme. And now it's just this. It's a carrier for other. Because it's so easily readaptable, remixed with other new ideas. So it keeps taking on new lives every time it gets. It gets reused.
- [14:12]
Kara Swisher
Keep calm and carry on.
- [14:14]
Adam Oleksik
Right, Right. So these grammatical skeletons, X is the new Y. Like, you know, that kind of stuff, they underlie our language. They've always been like that. Right. But Internet memes make it easier to point out and see these happen.
- [14:26]
Kara Swisher
But basic memes have pictures or videos with them or something that you could put up a picture. And like the crying person, Britney Spears, the guy crying. Does that fit in here in this engagement rubric? Like a picture? Like, is it. The minute you put up a picture, people do that to respond right away.
- [14:42]
Adam Oleksik
You know, the classic, like the distracted boyfriend meme. You could overlay different images onto him. I did a video about this recently. Every single sub meme of that died out faster than the distracted boyfriend as a whole. The distracted boyfriend kept surviving year after year, even though individual memes would just come and go. Because here's the thing. Memes are fads. They have lifespans. They're. Every single word also is a meme. It has a lifespan. Some. Some memes have shorter lifespans. I think, you know, the word yeet or the words on fleek had a shorter Lifespan, tell the people what it is.
- [15:12]
Kara Swisher
Sorry to do this to you, but.
- [15:13]
Adam Oleksik
Oh yeah, yeet is an interjection popularized by vine for when you throw something on fleek. Just meant looks good or cool. Also, those are both vine phrases and I use vine as an analogy. It's sort of similar. It's the first time we have like sort of video based on it's not personalized recommendation algorithms like we see today. So we have. Actually the current algorithms allow you to incubate a lot more different things at once because it's not like everybody's getting shown the same feed like they were on Vine.
- [15:38]
Kara Swisher
Right, right.
- [15:39]
Adam Oleksik
But the point is these, these video platforms are very good at spreading memes. Where I was going with that is that some memes have shorter lifespans, some memes have longer lifespans. So the words like selfie and cancel for like cancel someone online, those were popularized around the same time as yeet and on fleek, and yet they still stick around. And another thing we hear is like, how much do we perceive this as being a mem? The more we perceive it as sticking out. When your grandma starts using, you know, yeet, it's no longer cool, but selfie. Also, it fits a lexical gap. Like if there's a need for that word in our language and so we adopt it for that reason as well.
- [16:11]
Kara Swisher
I remember my kids saying yeet. Now that you said it, I was.
- [16:14]
Adam Oleksik
Like, it's still around in the sense of like, we use it as a callback to that era of time. And I think that's where skibidi is going to go. Right. I think skibidi might be on its way out. That's just a nonsense interjection. It doesn't mean anything. You could say, what's a skibidi?
- [16:25]
Kara Swisher
That should stay. Go ahead.
- [16:27]
Adam Oleksik
Sorry. I. I personally am a huge fan. If people ask me for my favorite brain rot word, I'll say skibidi.
- [16:32]
Kara Swisher
Why do some memes or words stick around and others die?
- [16:35]
Adam Oleksik
So the questions of what makes a word stick is it's really multifaceted. Readaptability is a big one. If, if the meme can be used in a lot of different contexts, if it's easily applied to new situations, that gives it an easy chance to jump from one use to another and keep surviving. If the meme fits a cultural need. If like, like I said, a lexical gap, it's easy to survive. And let me go back, redefine meme. Because you said it's like pictures and videos. I said it's a word. It's not very well defined at all. It was first brought up the modern concept in the 1976 Richard Dawkins book the Selfish Gene, where he describes it as a self replicating unit of culture. And a lot of his ideas are, you know, it's sketched out an interesting concept. I don't think most people really agree with his sort of evolutionary scheme of how words and ideas spread, but there's definitely something to a unit of culture that people adapt across moments in time and how these stick around and they are constantly remixed as well. I think that's another thing, not unlike.
- [17:34]
Kara Swisher
Clothing and things like that, which is interesting if you think about it.
- [17:36]
Adam Oleksik
Absolutely.
- [17:38]
Kara Swisher
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- [20:13]
Adam Oleksik
Blockchain is reshaping every aspect of society, starting with finance. It's happening across industries, across sectors and across the world world. And it's happening with Ripple. With more than a decade of blockchain experience, over 60 licenses and strong institutional trust, Ripple provides financial institutions with blockchain and crypto powered solutions across payment and digital custody applications. This means secure 24. 7 transactions moving value across the world faster. Find out more@ripple.com.
- [20:51]
Kara Swisher
So let's talk about the business of language. After all, the social media algorithms are engineered to create engagement or addiction, however you want to look at it in order to sell advertising. It's a very clear way this works. So we'll start with our expert question. Every episode we get an expert descendant. It's a question for our guests. So let's hear yours. My name is Brooke Hammerling. I'm a communications advisor and a writer podcaster of a weekly newsletter and podcast called Pop Culture Mondays. And it is to help the olds understand what the youngs are talking about. What's that's breaking and unraveling and the social world like TikTok. My big question for Adam is the ownership of a word. We live in a world now where people seem to take ownership of things that they have in their minds coined. A great example is Pat Riley was able to trademark the term three peat. What is the value of a word and can somebody actually they own it? So for example, the terms that are really popular today, like Riz Cap. No Cap Dulu. There is an actual woman who made the term delulu really famous on TikTok. Does she have a chance of Trademarking that and making sure that that is her word that she owns.
- [22:06]
Adam Oleksik
Okay, I'm really glad that question was asked. I actually talk about Delulu in my book. I talk about word ownership. So let's go back to the word on fleek that was coined by Kayla Newman, a user who went by Peaches Monroe. And she was in a car and she called her eyebrows on fleek. The video went super viral. It got used by a lot of news outlets. Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj used the word. Nicki Minaj got into a fight with another rapper over that. Rapper made T shirts with the phrase pretty on fleek. And Nicki Minaj claimed that was hers and she should get royalties. And. But it was so out of her hands. Two years later, Kayla Newman trademarks of the word fleek. And by then it was dead. The meme was gone. So unfortunately, intellectual property laws can't catch up. And also there's a difference between a copyright trademark. Like, you need to have like a business associated with it. You need to have, like, proof. So intellectual property wise, it's very, very difficult to own a word. Right. So I think since the on fleek era, there's been more of an attitude of let's give credit to creators. So Jules lebron, this creator who came up with the word demure, mindful, cutesy, she had this viral moment last summer. She was able to fund her transition. She was able to afford a lot of new stuff because people gave her more recognition. I think that's a. It was. People were still figuring out the norms of the Internet back in the day. But I think there's more of a cultural attitude now toward giving credit. So you can't actually own the word. It's out of your hands.
- [23:34]
Kara Swisher
It's out of your hands. Is there any word you think that could be owned? Someone really did.
- [23:38]
Adam Oleksik
In the. In the trademark sense, if it's like a business, but once if it's like a viral Internet sensation you can't get, it's. It's just out of your hands. You can't. There's more in place now for creators to capitalize on that because there's been growth in the creator economy. There's like lawyers who immediately reached out to help Jules Lebron with the word demure. So, like, there's more of a movement toward that.
- [24:00]
Kara Swisher
Right.
- [24:01]
Adam Oleksik
That being said, you can't ever own a word. And words will change too. There's a sense of like, group ownership as well over some words. So a lot of the ballroom words, the slay serve, queen. These are just, you know, slang words that middle schoolers now are using. But they came from the ballroom scene in the 1980s, this queer black Latino space, and many people feel like the middle schoolers shouldn't be using those words. But I'm sorry, it's out of their hands. Like, at this point, you can't stop the words from changing.
- [24:27]
Kara Swisher
So you write that social media algorithms use language to create new identities for users, which can then be commoditized by the platforms. I'll pull up a quote from the book and have you read it.
- [24:37]
Adam Oleksik
Language plays a circular role in identity formation. If you choose to use a certain word, you are accepting that you belong to the group using that word. In the social media era, the algorithm will recognize that, push you deeper into that group and give you more access to more niche language.
- [24:50]
Kara Swisher
So why do social media platforms have the financial incentive in creating new identities?
- [24:55]
Adam Oleksik
Yeah, that's a really good question. So they run on natural human behaviors. We naturally want to pay attention to things, and they naturally create the incentive structures for influencers to try to grab your attention because they reward retention rate, how long viewers watch the video. So attention is just an example there of what they're rewarding. And I think our language is revolving around what gets attention. Humans also have a natural tendency to want to belong to groups. That's why people on the early Internet sought out other people with similar interests.
- [25:23]
Kara Swisher
That's right, very first.
- [25:24]
Adam Oleksik
And algorithms really play into that by making you feel like you're part of a group. They'll push you further into the K pop community and you'll start using words like delulu. And they have so many, like Korean loan words in that community. I'm not in this filter bubble at all. We're all separated into different consumptive kind of niches. What's really interesting here is that these are now demographics. In the past, a demographics statistic could be something like race, age, gender. Now it's whether you're pastel goth or whether you're a cottagecore, whether you're a K pop fan. These are all now labels that are used to represent you. Because what the algorithm is doing is they build a very nuanced picture of who you are. This is never actually who you are. It's a shadow representation using limited information, but it's fairly good. And they'll take all this information. Which videos you've liked, how your thumb rests on your screen, what wifi network you're connected to, what other phones are connected on WI fi network. All the usual stuff about cross app tracking and demographic information that they can, they turn that into a numerical representation and embedding of who you are as a person. Each video as it's uploaded undergoes a computer vision algorithm and natural language processing algorithm that gets turned into a numerical representation of what the video is about. And then these numerical representations get paired with each other. And that's how they know to send certain videos to certain users.
- [26:33]
Kara Swisher
Right.
- [26:34]
Adam Oleksik
These algorithms are predictive. They, they try to guess which videos are going to get the most attention by users. Because again, the whole logic is attention. How do we get people's attention so we can commodify it so we can sell more of your data. So because in group behavior is something that is good for getting attention, you want to feel like you're part of a group and the algorithm is set up to reward that behavior. It creates communities, it creates micro communities.
- [26:56]
Kara Swisher
Right. Or it creates someone goes across communities. Right. For example, because when you're saying there's demographics, you know, sex, age, et cetera, there's also demographic people who like to watch hardware hacks like myself, you know what I mean? Or something like that. And because everyone's individually moving, they can then group them together in some.
- [27:15]
Adam Oleksik
Yeah, it's predictive because you're still in this cluster of people who like hardware hacks. And it knows from other users similar behavior that you might like this video if it contains the numerical representation of a hardware hack. But where we get into identity formation is very interesting because now that the algorithm incentivizes these labels to be coined, and the same way I coined the phrase Boomer ellipses, creators go out of their way to either coin or popularize phrases as trend bait because they want to tap into this perceived algorithmic space. They want to find ways to communicate to that imaginary representation of what a cluster of people is. And so they find words like pastel goth, cottage core. There is a latent kind of desire for that word. The word is popularized by creators. Algorithm pushes it further. It becomes more of a thing. Now as a pastel goth, in the past, let's say in the 80s, 70s, if you were a goth, that was counterculture, right? It was a broad label. You could be a lot of different things if you were a goth. Now you have to be a cyber goth or a trad goth or a retro goth or a pastel goth. And now that you're in this smaller perhaps category, circularly forming your identity around this, because every time you get a pastel goth video, you're like oh, the algorithm really knows me. Forgetting that the algorithm gave you that identity. Now you circularly identify with this smaller category of what you can be, which potentially limits your true self expression. Because if you were just a broad God that contains way of a wider semantic range.
- [28:32]
Kara Swisher
A myriad of goth. Multitude of goths. Yeah. No, it's interesting. All groups do this. I went to a neo Nazi rally in Germany I was covering once and the amount of different Nazis was really interesting. And I was fascinated by. They had all had different costumes but I was thinking, oh, they're not. They were together so they got to interact with each other. But now on TikTok of course you can sell. They can sell you pastel goth clothes by the way, so that they do see an opportunity. Right.
- [28:59]
Adam Oleksik
It's one click away on the TikTok show shop. Conveniently.
- [29:01]
Kara Swisher
Sure. Which is the point of kids. Kids, in case you're interested, they want to sell you shit. It always works for the house. Just remember that algorithms haven't just led to the creation of new words and identities, led to new accents. You described three of them in your book. You mentioned them earlier. The entertainment influencer accent, lifestyle influencer accent and educational influencer accent. So explain the characteristics of these accents, how they developed and say a sentence or two and each one's or one so we can hear the differences. Let's start with the entertainment influencer. If you want to add one in, please do.
- [29:32]
Adam Oleksik
Right. Influencers always communicate for their perceived audience for the algorithm as well. Again, there's a few layers of performativity happening here and identify like different types of influencer accents based on this audience they're accommodating for the entertainment influencer accent is sort of downstream of Mr. Beast and there's this term beastification that's been going around and there's a lot of influencers who are trying to mimic this, but it's basically just making like every word really pop. Like I just bought this private island, I'm giving away a million dollars. Like they. But if you look at any real interview of Mr. Beast Talk, he doesn't talk like that. Right. And it's very intentional, it's very deliberate. Last year an employee of Mr. Beast leaked a 36 page onboarding memo elaborating his exact strategies for going viral. He's extremely deliberate with it. He talks about retention every single page of that memo. He's very methodical with it. He's extremely analytical. He's good at gaming the algorithm. He didn't get there by coincidence. So Mr. Beast figured out this accent that really, really works. I'm talking to a different audience. I'm not talking to brain rotted 14 year olds. I'm talking to somewhat brain rotted nerdy people. You know, you gotta be a little bit brain rotten. And I'm using this not sort of in a jokingly way, you know, but I will talk really quickly. I'll stress more words to grab your attention because that's what works for my audience. It does. And you see a lot of influencers kind of also talk like that. Also, you gotta keep in mind that successful strategies self replicate. Sometimes people just start speaking a certain way because they assume that's the correct way to speak online. There's also a huge survivorship bias in what gets shown on your for you page. The videos that end up on your for you page are ones that are predisposed to go more viral. Now we get back into like what makes something culturally click.
- [30:57]
Kara Swisher
So I want life style influencer accent. I know this one, but go ahead.
- [31:01]
Adam Oleksik
Hey guys. Welcome to this podcast. We're talking about accents. You'll notice the rising tones that kind of like keeps the viewer hooked because it sounds like something's always coming next. It fills dead air. They elongate their vowels. It fills that air. A dead air is really bad. Especially when they're working on an extemporaneous capacity. They need to fill that dead air. And the sort of lifestyle influencer accent has evolved kind of out of all these. Evolved sort of out of previous accents. Maybe not entertainment, but like, my accent is based on early founders like the Green Brothers and Vsauce and stuff like that. I don't think I was consciously imitating them, but I sort of. I started out speaking slowly and there's a subconscious cue taking as well. And I was interviewing a lot of creators about how'd you end up with this accident? Some say, you know, I did this consciously looking at retention. Other people said I did this subconsciously just looking at what other people did. And a lot of us just there's some level of taking our cues from other people. There's some level of maybe we just get behaviorally conditioned by the algorithm as well. So there's a few layers of that.
- [31:53]
Kara Swisher
Do a sports one, or is there one that's for sports? Is there one for.
- [31:57]
Adam Oleksik
What I like to compare this to is really not that different from the broadcast voice. This just in. We've always been talking like this because you're accommodating for a certain audience, for a certain medium. I'm a strong believer that the medium is the message. Each new medium, and I think algorithms are that new medium, will affect how we communicate online.
- [32:15]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. Social media algorithms don't just affect new words and how accents, they also shape which ideas get attention. Because in order to go viral, videos generally need to communicate the most extreme and reductive version of a concept and the most confident and emotionally engaging way possible. Talk about the downstream effects because they're always confident. The expression I always use is frequently wrong, but never in doubt. A lot of the Maha ones are like that, like drive me. I'm like, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But they sound. I almost believe them, even though I know better. So talk a little bit about. And it's very dangerous in those cases. Many of the times, you know, please chug apple cider vinegar. Please don't that kind of thing. So talk about the downstream effects on our culture.
- [32:58]
Adam Oleksik
So right. Algorithms reward extreme behavior. And also the chug vinegar thing, for example, that will generate a lot of comments from people saying, hey, don't chug vinegar. At the same time, those comments are engagement. Engagement pushes videos further. In the algorithm, there's comments of like things that drive confusion, things that are on the boundary of irony and authenticity. We tend to see those ideas spread really easily because they get that extra boost of engagement, which is like really paradoxical rage bait, unfortunately incredibly good for grabbing people's attention. Something that infuriates you. You keep hate watch out of out of spite or you comment out of anger. And that pushes this stuff further. So unfortunately, when we say that platforms are rewarding things that grab your attention, that's not necessarily things you want to see. The videos you want to see and the videos you actually get have a disconnect and people constantly feel this. And there's like a lot of studies on how people try to go out of their way, spend so much time training their algorithm to show them videos that they'd rather see. Because unfortunately your base instinctual reaction to a video is not what your like higher order self is actually wanting to.
- [34:00]
Kara Swisher
No. Right, right. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump. I always said he was the greatest Internet troll in history.
- [34:06]
Adam Oleksik
I have a lot of thoughts on how Donald Trump is uniquely suited to the algorithmic medium. If we're talking medium is the message.
- [34:13]
Kara Swisher
Well, please go ahead, tell me.
- [34:16]
Adam Oleksik
Well, you know, it's historically been thought that different mediums affect candidates electability. Like it's believable that Kennedy outperformed Nixon in the 1960 election simply because Kennedy was more photogenic on TV and this was when TV was introduced and Nixon was more of a radio candidate or whatever. It seems probably true that attractive candidates have a better chance of getting elected because of television. In the same way, more memeable candidates probably have a greater chance of getting elected in the algorithmic era. The fact that Donald Trump's phrases make X Y again, this has been the worst X in the history of Y, perhaps ever. The fact that these phrases can be so easily remixed and so easily adaptable. He talks differently in a way that is algorithmically compelling because it's one, it's extreme, two, it's readaptable. All of these mimetic qualities that make something stick, perhaps normalize his ideas, perhaps, like, cause him to dominate. In the same way, he dominates the news cycle fairly well, he also dominates the Internet cycle through his memeable character. And I think that if it wasn't for the algorithms, I don't think he maybe would have been reelected.
- [35:15]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, I would agree. One of the things that I said this on a show the other day, I go, he's so good at it, and he's so appealing and this and that. I got so much pushback. I'm like, it's factual whether you like it or not. I didn't say I liked him. I said that he's excellent at it. And people don't want to give him.
- [35:30]
Adam Oleksik
That credit, intentionally or not. There could still be a survivorship bias, but I think he probably knows what he's doing.
- [35:36]
Kara Swisher
No, I think he does it naturally. I think some people are intuitively good. I think Kennedy was intuitively good at tv. I think Roosevelt was intuitively good at radio. You could go back. Hitler was excellent at radio, by the way, FYI, and speaking in groups. And Trump is very good in public settings with rallies. And he's very good in this. And I'm not giving him credit. I'm just saying, you can't. I did a column once where I compared him and aoc and I said, they both have the same qualities. And I was comparing their qualities and people lost their minds. I'm like, but just look at it. You need to be this to be in politics going forward.
- [36:08]
Adam Oleksik
There's a bimodal representation of what political views we're getting right now, which I find highly concerning. Right. AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene have more extreme beliefs, so they're more likely to get pushed by the algorithm. The congressman I grew up with in Albany's 20th congressional district, Paul Tonko, he. He's boring. Nobody. Like, if he says anything, it's just the mainline democratic kind of idea. He's not interesting. His ideas are never going to go viral because they're not algorithmically catchy.
- [36:33]
Kara Swisher
We'll be back in a minute.
- [36:41]
Adam Oleksik
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
- [36:42]
Kara Swisher
Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of.
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Adam Oleksik
Unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month back. So I thought it would be fun if we made 15 bills, but it.
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Kara Swisher
Turns out that's very illegal.
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Adam Oleksik
So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new.
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Kara Swisher
Customer offer for first three months only.
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Adam Oleksik
Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com the summer is heating up.
- [37:13]
Kara Swisher
With Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four. Light them up, Johnny. This Friday, time to save the planet.
- [37:21]
Adam Oleksik
What's the plan?
- [37:22]
Kara Swisher
Trust me, I hate that. Bad plan. Come on. Terrible. That's a stupid plan. Prepare for fantastic. We will face this together as a family. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps only theaters Friday. Ring PG13 some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Get tickets now. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. So one of the things that you write, quote, we've been conditioned to consume information only if it's somehow funny or relatable. Talk about Zoran Mandami. Incredibly relatable. Incredibly funny. Incredibly, I would say substantive. Also, he manages to really get some very substantive messages out there. Talk about him in particular and how it's changed the idea of being funny, relatable, or just you break through and then you compare it to what Cuomo put out the other day. And I just wanted, I was like, no, stop. I almost, I don't even know his number. I know his brother. I was like, please get him to stop.
- [38:41]
Adam Oleksik
What does he even do to this?
- [38:42]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, stop. Like stop making videos. At least at the very. You can run all you want, but videos are not your forte.
- [38:48]
Adam Oleksik
As someone who lives in New York right now, you can really feel the actual energy. So there's, there's a few things going on here. One, there's that meme as carrier idea that these videos are carriers for. His actual message and he was actually very good at being intentional with both playing into this. This format of the algorithm and at the same time holding something within it, this actual message about affordable housing. He was very consistent with that. He was very good with that. The other thing is authenticity. And this is just a classic buzzword in the creator economy that people want authenticity. Mandani seems like a real guy. Every time, like, some new clip surfaces of him. It's just like, this guy's, like, down to earth relatable. Like, he seems like a good dude. And I think we're so tired of. We all know that the politicians are performing for algorithms. And how do you give off that vibe of authenticity? I don't know. That's sort of like also maybe a memetic thing. Just like, what. What naturally feels right.
- [39:41]
Kara Swisher
Or they're. Or they're authentic in a way that's unattractive. Like Joni Ernst and the dead thing with the thing. I was like, oh, my God, I'm.
- [39:47]
Adam Oleksik
Certainly not attracted to Joni Ernst.
- [39:49]
Kara Swisher
I know, but she actually stressed it to me. I was, okay. You really are a terrible person. Like, you managed to authentically get through that. You're a jackass. Like, it was really interesting how she did that. Mandani's a particularly gifted communicator. Absolutely. In the online space. And you watch his. They're not tricks. I don't wanna call them tricks. Cause Trump has them too, in the way he uses all caps versus Mandani. Who does? I think his smile is part of it. Yeah.
- [40:17]
Adam Oleksik
Even the visual kind of language, like walking out of the beach with a suit on, all that. Like, he knows that that will generate comments. Probably. Or at least his media team does. I think he probably knows. He seems very savvy. He knows that people are now gonna be commenting about the suit dripping with water, and that's gonna push it further in the algorithm.
- [40:34]
Kara Swisher
Right. So a lot of Americans see progressives as language police, in part because the right has done a good job framing content moderation as censorship. I think this is much more complex, as I'm sure you do. The voters seem to have punished them for him. As Brock Collier reported in New York Magazine, former Bernie Voter told him that Trump inauguration party that wanted the freedom to say faggot and retarded. I'm sorry to say those, but I just did. Why do taboo words hold so much appeal to some people? And how have social media platforms reacted, especially with Donald Trump and the cultural change he's brought with them?
- [41:08]
Adam Oleksik
Right. Well, I want to start with breaking down like progressive versus like woke. So Mamdani is like the new kind of progressive maybe that the left should be modeling off of. Where doesn't feel like he's policing you. Right. He's just, he's rating out good energy. And I think the traditional woke ivory tower academia radiates out bad energy. They're saying if you're not with us, you're racist. And that feels really bad to hear. And so you start thinking, I don't like these guys. They're making me feel bad about myself versus if you just send out positive vibes. So it's sending out negative vibes versus sending out positive vibes for the left. And that's how I think the left should be communicating more, by sending out positive vibes. The right, funnily enough, like you think, oh wow, they're intolerant or something. Their language is more inclusive. They are more willing to use all kinds of language. They're not telling you, oh, you can or cannot say this. The left will tell you that. The left will be exclusive with language. And it's that attitude of inclusivity that allows them to trojan horse through ideas, use those memes as carriers.
- [42:07]
Kara Swisher
That said, you get then get permission to just be an asshole. Like I had someone say a similar thing to me. Like now we can say these words, you know, now we get to say this, this and this. And I said, you know what, you're right. But you're still an asshole. And then he like, shut up. And I thought, well fine, go ahead and say them. But it means I think you're an asshole. So here we are. As I noted, I do think President Trump is a genius at creating or co opting language that not only builds identity, it's a recruitment tool. It communicates an entire worldview. And he uses terms like globalist, deep state, swamp, fake news, liberal elites, America.
- [42:42]
Adam Oleksik
First sounds like SEO language.
- [42:43]
Kara Swisher
Honestly, especially fake news and deep state. I think he really pushed those were around. But he, he also absorbs other subcultures. Crypto bros incels Qan followers.
- [42:52]
Adam Oleksik
Well, there's a whole like dog whistling kind of like rabbit hole. Yeah.
- [42:55]
Kara Swisher
Why haven't Democrats been able to do the same successfully? And if you were advising them, what would you tell them to do differently? I know they have groups together to discuss how to talk to young men, which makes me cringe. If I want to use a term, it's cringe. What would you tell them to do differently?
- [43:11]
Adam Oleksik
Start thinking about how to trojan horse through ideas. There, there's always going to be a group that doesn't want to hear your ideas, you need to push it through by packaging it inside a carrier meme that is more funny or more compelling. Look at the men of manosphere. Look at their language. Like sigma, which is now sort of a viral phrase. Middle schoolers will use it, explain what it is. Yeah, sigma refers to like, it's complicated in the. In the manosphere refers to an idealized man outside the sociosexual hierarchy of alphas and betas. But practically it can be like a synonym for like dominant man. And that's how it spread. It spread through sigma wolf memes, which were just funny. It spread through carrier sentences like what the sigma, which just sounds absurd in a way that middle schoolers are ready to admit adopt. Not just middle school, but it sort of became a brain route word. And they package these words through funny concepts, but with it, they carry their hierarchy of looking at the world, their lens of perceiving all dynamics between people as power structures. I think some degree of it is lost when you package it. Of course, I don't think middle schoolers are really thinking about incels when they say what the sigma. I think they're just using that word to relate with each other. But a lot of people find incels really repulsive and wouldn't want to use their language. So how did their language hit the mainstream? They're extremely good at weaponizing memes. Some of it was taken inadvertently. Some people use that language to make fun of incels. And there is that boundary between irony and authenticity that generates more comments that I was talking about. But in many cases, there's four chan trolls and radical incels intentionally repackaging their ideas as memes to spread them further. And a lot of meme templates, there's this gigachad or crying wojack memes that kind of push their ideology. The Chad Stride versus virgin walk. You don't have to really know what that is, but it's like a sort of a categorization of people that's pushed. And with it, their way of thinking is pushed. But people see it as a funny meme, a way of labeling the world. But now you're also right.
- [45:10]
Kara Swisher
And so they don't realize they may suddenly be recycling Nazi ideas. Right.
- [45:15]
Adam Oleksik
For example. And so my advice for progressives is, well, one, don't. Don't do exclusive feeling stuff. Package things through good vibes. Maybe listen to some more Stevie Wonder. I've been listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder recently, and I'm going somewhere with this, this man, you listen to his album songs in the Key of Life. It's amazing. He spreads such joy in that algorithm, in that song, not only in his words, but in the melodies. He talks about things that are very important to him. He talks about hardship and pain and loss and kind of poverty and discrimination, but he always turns it into this funky, upbeat 70s groove. And it's just catchy, it's vibey. You want to dance to it, and then maybe you connect with the song more and you actually take heed of his message that he's trying to spread out in this. But the songs always feel positive. They always feel like anybody could dance this song. I don't care if you're a Republican. I don't care if you're a Democrat. Let's vibe to some Stevie Wonder.
- [46:06]
Kara Swisher
So going back to the previous question now, how social media platforms reacted to the election of Donald Trump and cultural change he's brought with him, which is astonishing given how old he is. Have they changed how they weight their algorithms?
- [46:18]
Adam Oleksik
Yes, this is very important. And such a wonderful question that you asked immediately in the wake of the 2025 election. I mean, we saw that, you know, picture of all the CEOs lined up behind Trump, and we saw that meta loosen their content guardrails. They now allow for a lot more AI content. They now allow for a lot more. Like they took away all their kind of woke stuff. So there's some really racist AI slop on Instagram right now. I did a piece recently about, about there's a reel with 30 million views about a swarm of shirtless black men running towards a KFC and eating fried chicken. And the underlying audio was the N word repeatedly. That's not something you would have seen under Joe Biden. Right. And so the election of Donald Trump, the platforms are, you know, they're going to mold themselves to the political regime as well. I'm sure if there was a huge left wing backlash, they'd go back to doing the DEI stuff or whatever.
- [47:05]
Kara Swisher
Yes, that's what I used to joke. If Kamala had won Mark Zuckerberg, we'd be using the terms they them. But go ahead.
- [47:10]
Adam Oleksik
Literally, I think that's it. But the platforms deflect the current political situation. They're. At the end of the day, they're just trying to make money. And always those racist AI slob videos do make money for them. In fact, they make more money. The more they push the AI slop, the less money they have to give out to real creators. And I interviewed Some of those racist AI creators, and I try to, you know, like, you know, be impartial and ask them, hey, why are you making these videos? What's the underlying motivation? And you know what all of them said? They said, I'm doing it for views, I'm doing it for likes, I'm doing it for followers. They didn't say, I'm racist. You know, and, you know, they are, on some level, but I don't think they're doing this out of genuine malice. They're doing this because. And a lot of these are AI hustle people as well. They're trying to get people to do their AI stuff. There's a banality of evil here, banality of the algorithm that you create an institution and people will fit themselves into that institution looking for reward, looking for. Just complacently perpetuating the bullshit that these platforms set up to be there. And there are changes in waiting. Definitely. Like, we see that. Why did Grok go racist on Twitter? There is some. We don't actually know what happens with algorithms. I do want to caveat that even engineers don't know. They call it a black box, because once you program it, it has so many parameters, you don't know what's happening. You put in an input, spits out an output, you're like, I don't know how that got there. You have a general idea, though. They clearly tweak something because Elon Musk asked them to tweak something. And then Grok goes racist, goes like pro South African farmer or whatever.
- [48:33]
Kara Swisher
Wonder who's like that? So we're training on his stuff. That's what I heard. That's what they were doing.
- [48:39]
Adam Oleksik
Okay, so you have something going on with the inputs, you have something going on with the reinforcement, learning the training data, and then you have this. This crazy output.
- [48:46]
Kara Swisher
Well, let me just say this is why I have dubbed Mark Zuckerberg the most dangerous person in the world, because he doesn't care. Any way he can make money. He does.
- [48:54]
Adam Oleksik
He's here to increase net worth.
- [48:55]
Kara Swisher
Exactly. So we know people are changing the way they write to avoid the perception that their work is actually created by a. At the same time, a lot of people are going to use AI to do their writing for them, including the influencers. Generative video will become increasingly good, and it is becoming all the memes about horses jumping off of diving boards or zebras. Fantastic.
- [49:14]
Adam Oleksik
I've seen those. Yeah.
- [49:15]
Kara Swisher
And there was one the other day that was so good. I was like, this is fantastic.
- [49:18]
Adam Oleksik
There's Full text, there's five fingers. Like we're in the era where we can't really tell what's real, what's not real.
- [49:22]
Kara Swisher
You know what was interesting? When they were bad, someone was like, oh, see, they're bad. I'm like, they're not gonna stay bad. Just go look at the early Internet. So I mean, if you look at the early Internet, you wouldn't recognize it was so bad. And now it's not, you know, so will we get to a place where AI generated influencers become populars? And if yes, what does that do to our language?
- [49:41]
Adam Oleksik
So, okay, we know that they want this. We know that Meta is experimenting with AI generated comments, AI generated profiles. They're actively incentivizing people to create AI generated accounts. I've come across a lot of AI generated accounts on Instagram that at first glance, really do look like real people. I think there will always be a need on the Internet for just raw humanity. And there's this aesthetic called Internet ugly that anytime you try to impose a word world of smooth gradients, we're going to come up with something messy. Look at the Italian brain rot memes in earlier this year, which was a series of AI generated animals with absurd kind of torsos. And I think that was a serious cultural reaction against AI. It was like we had this new, like, smooth kind of software. AI is finally getting good. Let's make the most ridiculous thing possible. And that was an absurd human reaction. And we're going to continue doing kind of ugly, gritty, authentic feeling things with the Internet because that's what we crave real humanity. AI representations of reality will always be a necessary, necessarily a flatter version of reality. It's a map. The map can never be the territory. They'll never be fully caught up to the way we use language. We use slang, particularly ask, ask ChatGPT to talk to you in slang. It's. It's gonna sound clunky, it doesn't sound real. Because they don't actually understand pragmatics. They don't understand how language is used in context. So I strongly believe that humans will always find a way to creatively be one step ahead of AI. And yes, yes, AI is here. There's a real reality that we won't like, know what exactly is certain. There's sort of this epistemic kind of confusion going on. At the same time, I feel optimistic for. And there might be like, another thing is we might see a cultural backlash against our algorithms. We're definitely seeing a cultural backlash against AI but there will be more people seeking out these decentralized platforms, Blue sky, substack, individual groups, discord. I think the algorithms will remain the underlying infrastructure of mass communication on the Internet. And it's very important we talk about this. I think this book will continue to be relevant because it's. That medium is going to continue affecting.
- [51:36]
Kara Swisher
Us, the bulk of it. It's a bulk of it.
- [51:37]
Adam Oleksik
Right, right. But individually I think we're going to be seeking out more of that anti stuff and the stuff that does go like popular on the Internet will always have a messy humanity underlying it mostly we'll see.
- [51:47]
Kara Swisher
I think they'll get very good at it.
- [51:48]
Adam Oleksik
Well, even with the AI generated stuff that feels like, you know, that is AI generated, it's still prompted by somebody who like knows how to tap into the zeitgeist. And there's absolutely. But maybe there's still something human about that.
- [51:59]
Kara Swisher
So when we're talking about this though, the people in charge, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is ultimately answers to the Chinese Communist Party. Instagram is owned by Meta, which is controlled completely by Mark Zuckerberg. YouTube is owned by Alphabet, which is still controlled by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And X which is much smaller and is still influential as owned by Elon Musk. Does this mean that this small group holds some of the greatest influence over however English language evolves?
- [52:26]
Adam Oleksik
Language and culture, the Algocracy, I guess. Guess all these platforms are going to continue monetizing our attention and they found the most addictive way to do that. Short form vertical video run through personalized recommendations that will continue like even as however many people try to go offline, like that's always like until they find a more addictive medium that's going to continue dominating our culture. And yeah, they kind of buy these baked in platform incentives that in the sort of banality of algorithm the sense creators will replicate. I unfortunately do think that we will continue seeing language evolve under their kind of auspices. However, I end the book on a positive note. I do think language is a reflection of how humans relate to each other and we will continue being human and continue using language in a way that makes us human. And we might spend time less on these platforms but at the end of the day we are human and they can't take that away from us.
- [53:22]
Kara Swisher
I'm gonna push back on you because you won't even know. You don't even know they're doing it. That's the thing, that's where we'll get.
- [53:26]
Adam Oleksik
To I think we need radical awareness of what they're doing. Yeah, that's kind of like, one reason I really care about this book, because it sort of exposes this stuff. And I'm hoping I'm working more stuff with this, with media theory, going down the McLuhan route and stuff. But we need to be very, very aware of what's happening, and then we can make our own choices in the same way. You compare this to, like, cigarettes or. But, like, people just didn't know, or, like, sugar or whatever. Like, there's been a lot of times throughout history where there's this, like, really addictive product and people just weren't aware of how bad it was. And once we become more aware, we can make our own decisions.
- [53:58]
Kara Swisher
Except in terms of sugar, we're never been fatter. We've never been more unhealthy as at least the United States. So we know, but we don't care. And that's the problem. So you say social media is neither good nor bad. It's messy. I have a different opinion.
- [54:11]
Adam Oleksik
Well, I think it's a tool. I think it is.
- [54:13]
Kara Swisher
Yes. Yes. The thing itself. Yes. So it can be tough to. You wrote this. It can be tough to tell who wins and who loses in the outcome algorithmic era of the language change. And that's fair, but it's a bit of a comment. I want you to push you who wins and who loses when algorithms designed to increase engagement and addiction have an outsized influence on the words we use and the way we talk to each other. I think we can make a very easy argument that it's a cruder culture.
- [54:37]
Adam Oleksik
Because of this, I want to say that culture and language are similar but different. Language is a proxy for culture here, and I explore a lot how culture bleeds in and how language influences culture. Culture. I don't think there's anything ever bad with language itself if I'm just talking from a linguistic perspective, not a cultural theory perspective. With language, no such thing as, like, brain rot. For example, no word neurologically is worse for your brain than any other word. At the end of the day, language is a way that humans have to identify what's happening in the world and talk to other humans about it. So the language is fine. Culturally, I do agree we have a lot of problems we got to sort through.
- [55:15]
Kara Swisher
So who wins and who.
- [55:17]
Adam Oleksik
Well, I think humans do sometimes win when we have memes and this sort of stuff I was talking about with Italian brain. I think there is, like, a positive way that we reclaim our own Agency. And when we do move to other platforms and I think we should be mixing our media as much as possible, I don't think algorithms are completely bad because they elevate some voices that haven't had voices before. I think we should be mixing our media totally enjoyable.
- [55:41]
Kara Swisher
I sometimes am like, I love some of this, and I realize some of it is really dangerous. So you talked about Stevie Wonders, which makes me love you now. That's from my era. That's my era. But which words are on their way out and which are super popular?
- [55:56]
Adam Oleksik
Skibidi's got another year left. That's my call. It's gonna die out in the way yeet died out. Which words are growing in popularity? We have words that are more under the radar that are gonna stick around in the same way. Selfie stuck around in the same way. Cancel stuck around. So, like low key, for example, side eye. I talk about these in my book as examples of words that don't stick out as, like, quote, unquote, brain rot, but have recently been popularized by algorithms and are maybe going to remain in place in our language. And I don't think those words are bad at all. And in fact, I don't think.
- [56:25]
Kara Swisher
Can Riz go? Can Riz please go?
- [56:28]
Adam Oleksik
Riz might have more of a chance to survive in Skibidi, honestly. But I love the word.
- [56:34]
Kara Swisher
Oh, God, what is wrong with people? Riz something.
- [56:36]
Adam Oleksik
You're individually defining culture from a subjective perspective right now. That is correct.
- [56:41]
Kara Swisher
That's why I'm so famous. Adam, this is a fascinating book, and you're a really incredibly erudite and smart guy in thinking these things, and it's great that people are looking at this, and I really appreciate it.
- [56:51]
Adam Oleksik
Well, I really appreciated talking to you. Thank you for pushing back a little bit.
- [57:00]
Kara Swisher
On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor, Russell, Kateri Yocum, Megan Birdie, Allison Rogers, and Caitlin Lynch. Nishant Shot Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Kate Peterson. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, all your basses are belong to us. If not, you're unalive. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at on with Kara Swisher. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media podcast network and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.