A few of us were jokingly monitoring the situation on Polymarket. The prediction market gave the Knicks a 99.6 percent chance of losing. One of my friends decided he would have higher expected value in going home, so he left the watch party.

Then, miraculously, the tide shifted. The Knicks came back, possessed with electric ferocity, to win the game by a single point. At the buzzer, the entire bar was roaring at the top of its lungs, jumping in ecstasy, drunkenly high-fiving complete strangers. I can’t describe the primordial passion I felt in that moment. It was a barbaric, religious fervor I’ve only experienced a few times in my life.

Walking home through the revelry, my thoughts drifted back to the prediction market. What was the point? The main reason people watch sports is because they don’t know what’s going to happen. If the game were completely predictable, we would all follow my friend’s lead and skip the fourth quarter. Instead, we stay watching for that one-in-a-hundred hope of things going unbelievably right.

In his book The Uncontrollability of the World, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa connects sports-watching to the giddiness of a first snowfall. No matter how advanced our weather forecasts get, there’s still a delightful magic in letting that initial snowflake land on your tongue. It is the unexpected “intrusion of a new reality,” reawakening your childish astonishment in the surrounding world.

The inexorable project of modernity is to make itself legible, manageable, and profitable. With each advance in categorization, however, we make ourselves a little more boring. Ski resorts create artificial snow before the first flurries arrive; Polymarket tells you when to leave the basketball game.

Without coincidences, we numb ourselves into mathematical indifference—until a sufficiently uncontrollable event wakes us up from our sluggish subroutines. In these moments, we have the chance to realize how little we actually knew, and look around with renewed wonder.

But what if this could happen more often? I love faceplanting into the perfect sentence. I love when my friend invites me to a random movie and I have no idea what’s about to happen. That’s how you write poetry and fall in love with a cult classic. And yet ChatGPT always “knows” the next token, while TikTok always “knows” the next video I want to see. The prediction becomes reality, and I forget to notice the snowflakes.

What good is the “wisdom of the crowds” when I want to feel stupid? What good is predictive text when I want to write unpredictably?

The quant traders talk a lot about “updating their priors”—adding new information to create a more accurate prediction of the world. I find it interesting that their priors are never complete. You always have to collect new data, change more parameters, slowly refine the model as the world evolves.

Maybe there’s something to be said for downgrading our priors as well. So many of our best moments come out of inherently incomplete knowledge. It might be better to choose what to know, and what not to know—and I personally don’t want my basketball games spoiled for me.

Humans have an uncanny way of dissolving into their tools. When you swing a hammer, you don’t really conceive of it as separate from your body. It is instead an extension of your arm—what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand. Same with your smartphone. As you scroll, you melt into your screen.

Most of our lives are experienced in this state of flow. Sure, you can pause to theorize about hammers and smartphones, but you mostly just consider them when they stop working. You only perceive a table that wobbles; you only think about a television that fills with static.

We typically find these glitches annoying, but they’re incredibly powerful opportunities to understand our media. An eraser smear or ink blot disrupts the process of reading, reminding you about the writer on the other side.

The glitch calls attention to mediation. A lamp falls from the sky in The Truman Show; a cat reappears in The Matrix. Now we are aware that something exists between us and “true” reality. We can ask “why did this happen?” and the answer is often that things weren’t what they appeared to be.

My glasses seem to show me the world until a smudge resurfaces how blurry my vision really is. The written word seems to contain information until a typo points out that no, it’s actually a flattened representation of someone else’s knowledge. And TikTok seems “real” until you are left staring at your reflection in a black mirror.

Each advancement in technology is supposed to remove glitches, making it easier for us to interface with media, but it always brings new glitches for us to notice. The interval of adoption is therefore incredibly important: we can either be lulled into a new form of sleepwalking or wake up from our previous stupor.

Right now, for example, our language is glitching. People are using the words “delve” and “intricate” more than they used to, because AI chatbots are biased toward certain vocabulary, and now they’re influencing the way we speak. Incel terms like “mogging” and “maxxing” have fully become mainstream, demonstrating how we’re being shaped by social media algorithms.

It’s easy to dislike these words, and you can “fix the problem” by refusing to say them. But wiping the smudge off your glasses doesn’t change how they influence your way of seeing. Language has always been socially constructed; it’s always evolved around the technology available to us.

Glitches are symptoms of a much deeper problem: that every medium is imperfect. We like to ignore this uncomfortable truth, so we settle into mindless routine. Then a technical interruption punctures our fog of expectation, and we get upset.

Meanwhile, the best things in life are all glitches:

the entire reason we like            poetry

and humor and romance and art

is that there was a certain way things were supposed to unfold, but then something goes pleasantly wrong. We are pulled out of our trance and appreciate the flawed world around us.

Perhaps we should stop hating glitches and instead realize how they give us meaning, and the agency to change our surroundings. If a hammer is unbalanced, you can change the handle. If our language is shaped by incels, we can change the incentive structures online. Glitches show how reality is flexible, and that can go both ways.

Or we can keep stumbling around with our eyes closed, getting angry when things don't work perfectly. By refusing to sit with our tension, we’ll stay blindly irritated and accomplish nothing.

RECENT MEDIA

• I just wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post, explaining how AI chatbots are biased toward Romance language etymologies.

• I was interviewed for this NYT article on “mogging”

• I also talked about incel language on NPR’s Code Switch

UPCOMING EVENTS

• June 9: I’m recording a live podcast with CNN’s Clare Duffey at the Paley Center for Media. Tickets available here.

• June 25-26: I’m talking about slop and reality at Vidcon in Anaheim, CA.

• June 30: I’m hosting a teach-in for the NYC “Summer of Ludd” at the Penington Friends House at 5:15 pm.

The coalition includes, but is not limited to:

• New York City Neo-Luddites

• Data center NIMBYs

• Crunchy MAHA moms

• Jonathan Haidt disciples

• Post-rationalists

• Spiritual and religious revivalists

• Anti-AI populists

• Third space advocates

• Anybody refusing to use social media

• Anybody using a “dumbphone”

The revolution means different things to different people, but it can best be categorized by its refusal to be categorized. The movement rejects rational optimization to embrace the subjective, irrational, and emotional.

The revolution will not be clipped into digestible short-form video.

It will not wear Apple watches and Aura rings.

It will not track your step count.

The revolution will not be on Partiful;

It does not care who attends the function.

There will be no Instagram posts of private equity-owned boba,

No six-week financing with Afterpay.

Letters, not Letterboxd,

Good reads, not Goodreads.

The revolution will not be discounted on Uber Eats.

It will not require a USB-C adapter; it will power itself.

Roses will be given without Hinge,

Messages will disappear without Snapchat.

Tuned in, not LinkedIn,

Tapped in, not Untappd.

The revolution will not be stored in a data center.

It will not appear in an AI overview,

measuring every angle and orifice with cold metal instruments.

There will be no peptide injections.

There will be no Slack notifications,

Email notifications,

Text notifications,

New York Times notifications.

The revolution does not come with paywalls and mini-games.

It will not have Fubo or Tubi or Pluto.

It will not have unlimited storage; there is nothing to store.

The Amazon is a river,

Google is a number,

and Apples are for eating.

The revolution will not be on Kalshi or Polymarket.

It will not monitor the situation;

The revolution is the situation.

There will be no estimated time of arrival.

There will be no blinking blue location.

You won’t have to know where you are; there is nothing to know.

If you want to Find Your Friends, just Be Real.

Groups chat without groupchats,

Voices call without voicecalls.

The revolution will be liked and shared without likes and shares.

It lives without livestreams,

and is content without content.

“I” exists without “phone.”

Spotify will be deleted, not wrapped.

The revolution will not rate things out of five stars;

It is one with the stars.

There will be no Venmo requests.

There will be no two-step verification;

you don’t need proof of who you already are.

The Revolution is representation against representation. It sees our attempts to categorize meaning as meaningless. All the information in the world, compiled into a Borgesian Library of Babel, would be utterly useless. Better, then, to make your own meaning: fighting for what you want rather than what you’re supposed to want.

The Revolution will change the world, and change nothing. It bottlenecks our desires into a cathartic outpouring against the machine, but will eventually leave us adrift again—searching for the real answer within.

TikTok’s “trending searches” often read like an advertisement, because that’s exactly what they are. These are the things you’re supposed to look up, the things that bring in the most revenue. The search results are reliably clean, polished videos, showing exactly the content you expected to see.

As soon as you stray from the beaten path, however, you begin to encounter demons. You were never supposed to search “agd74864skgmkvc.” The old rules don’t apply here. You are in the TikTok Farlands, where horrible entities lurk in the shadows.

The Farlands are no different than the monster under your childhood bed, or a medieval cartographer writing hic sunt dracones at the edge of a map. Whenever we exceed our ability to categorize, the supernatural takes over. ChatGPT can’t stop talking about goblins, and your algorithm can’t stop spawning Lovecraftian abominations.

It certainly feels like we’ve come a long way from drawing sea dragons in the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve mapped the world many times over, and our data centers hold ever more granular information about our identity and behavior. There should be no place for monsters in this realm of logic.

And yet, when you search “agd74864skgmkvc,” you are filled with the cosmic dread of knowing that there are a billion other results like this. For every video about a Kehlani album, there is an ocean of eldritch horrors beneath the surface. The rational world we interact with is a scrim over a frightening terra incognita, vaster than we can possibly imagine.

Across the world, various religions have built their cosmogonies around the concept of primordial chaos—a disordered abyss often containing incomprehensible creatures. Eventually, meaning and order emerge from confused nothingness, creating the world as we understand it today.

Our attempts to explain online anomalies—creepypastas and SCP wiki pages and jokes about the “TikTok Farlands”—are the same as the beasts of the Old Testament or the monsters of Greek mythology. They gesture at the unknowable, creeping past the borders of reason to become our shared reality.

Each online community has its own oral tradition, and each meme is like a monster emerging from the shared folklore. Nobody can really tell you where Big Chungus or Tung Tung Tung Sahur came from. Perhaps they are messengers from the void, reminding us of the internet’s cavernous liminality. How dare we try to categorize it into neat little Calvin Klein advertisements? Here there be dragons.

Yes, the memes are absurd, but the entire universe is absurd. This is the abyss gazing back at you, reminding you that you have no more inherent meaning than a cartoon character. Of course, you have the option to make your own—so do you really want to spend your time looking at any of this?

If you can’t make up your mind, there are probably many more memes hibernating under obscure search terms, waiting to be awoken from their slumber. When the time is right, the monsters will materialize.

Media I’m enjoying

• This excellent account covering Chinese fashion aesthetics

• If you missed it, please read Eliza McLamb’s investigation of “fake fans” in the music industry

• The Call of Cthulu

• Zarbworld’s map of internet aesthetics

• I keep thinking about Moral Outrage Porn by Nguyen and Williams

The main thing that struck me about the scheme was how everything superficially looked great on paper. Each cartel miner has an official license, so the middlemen buy their gold without asking any questions. Then they legally sell it to American refineries, who melt it down and resell to the U.S. Mint, which doesn’t inquire where the original metal came from.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article, because we all take shortcuts that seem too good to be true. It’s so easy to order a wool sweater on Amazon, wait for a box to materialize on your doorstep, and call it a day. But unless you know the sheep, and you know who knitted the sweater, and you know who sold it, and you know who transported it, you can’t guarantee that you didn’t just contribute to animal cruelty or child labor.

Sure, you can walk to the local store and pay extra for that “fair trade” label, but you’re only really paying for your own peace of mind. Just like “American legal gold,” the certification probably covers up a litany of worker abuses you’d rather not know about. At the end of the day, you still have no clue where your fair trade alpaca wool cardigan actually came from.

This is a problem that will only worsen as our society continues globalizing and our supply chains grow more mediated. You order your avocado toast in a Brooklyn cafe, the waiter brings it out, and maybe you think about how the chef prepared it. You’re probably not thinking about the refrigerated semi-truck that brought it to the wholesaler, or the packaging plant that prepared it for transportation, or—oops—the fact that avocado farming is also heavily tied to Mexican drug cartels. The further we get from the source, the easier it is to ignore this inconvenient fact.

As someone who researches the online information ecosystem, I’m similarly concerned that we don’t know where our memes come from. Something starts trending, it gets chalked up to an innocent joke that’s “not that deep,” and then we don’t question it further. In reality, the meme probably spawned from some depraved imageboard full of misogynistic incel Nazis. Then it was amplified by a string of content creators trying to cash in on the shock value for their own benefit.

Other times, a meme is trending because someone is actively trying to manipulate your reality. Most new musical artists seem like they appear out of nowhere nowadays—but that’s because they’re all paying for AI accounts to artificially inflate their content. Governments are openly conducting memetic warfare against their own citizens. Gambling degenerates are mainstreaming ideas just to make a quick buck. You think a trend is popular because it’s popular, but it’s avocado toast gold bars.

We are in a crisis of taking things at face value, which simultaneously makes us civically negligent and less present in our own lives. It feels great to knit your own sweater or pick your own fruits, not only because it’s ethical, but because you’ve earned it. In the same way, nothing compares to the satisfying rush of truly grasping an idea for yourself.

The more we understand our surroundings, the better citizens we are, and the more grounded we are in our own lives. And yet our hypermediated reality makes this harder than ever, which is why I think we have to examine everything around us. Don’t just eat or wear or say something without peeling back the layers to question where it came from. Once you’ve earned it, you’ll be happier to accept it as your own.

In medieval times, your life would revolve around the few calls you got. You would wake to the rooster’s call, heed the call to prayer, gather with the town crier’s call, and occasionally be called to arms—all'arme in Italian, literally the source of the word alarm. The expectation was that you would answer the call: to refuse was to bring shame upon yourself.

Today, we are inundated with calls—friends, spam, countless push notifications—each demanding our attention throughout the day. With these calls, you are always presented with the option to accept or decline.

There is a certain feeling of guilt that comes with declining. I feel terrible when I don’t respond to a friend’s message, or leave an email unanswered. Each time we choose not to engage like this, the shame gets repressed. Somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, the unanswered obligations are probably eating away at me, making me slightly more anxious throughout my day.

With billions of people all feeling this feeling, it makes sense that we would end up with memes about receiving calls. Shortly into Trump’s first presidency, we got the “Obama is calling” memes; in 2023 we got “John Pork is calling,” depicting a photoshopped pig character. By 2025, the genre exploded, resulting in “fih is calling” and “the big leagues are calling.”

The immediate joke, of course, is the absurdity of the caller ID. There is no reason you should have John Pork or “the big leagues” in your phone contacts, which creates a humorous dissonance between expectation and reality.

Beneath this layer, however, there is the more timeless call for your attention. The phone interface makes you the real subject of the meme. Barack Obama and the fish want to speak to you specifically. This raises two questions: what could they possibly want, and should I answer this?

For Harvard and “the big leagues,” the answer is obvious. The meme ironically validates you, exhorting you to join a position of importance in society. And yet, because you have the agency to ignore them, you are elevated as even more important.

Obama achieves a similar effect, but the post-presidency timing of the meme positions him more as a character from your past, briefly emerging from that shameful place in your psyche. You already let his party get voted out of office, ignoring your previous calling when it mattered most. Now he is summoning you back to your political duty—if you ignore him, you repeat that earlier failure.

John Pork and “fih” are even more direct representations for representations in your subconscious. If you’re online enough, their calls make you recall previous memes. Like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, they emerge from seemingly nowhere to summon your engagement and redirect it to your own “brainrot.”

Both characters are visually unappealing, which is the point. They are like old acquaintances you’re trying to avoid. You are primed to want to decline, to push back the memories until they surface again. Like “the game,” they are an ongoing, inescapable infohazard always haunting the back of your mind. In this way, they call attention to the oversaturation of our memetic ecosystem—why are we getting so many more calls than we used to?

There is one final divergence which I find the most important. John Pork was always a product of the internet, originally created with digital tools to serve as a “virtual influencer” on Instagram. The fish, meanwhile, is primal. The earliest people emerged from fish, hunted fish for survival, and inscribed images of fish as sacred symbols. Fish are literally the spawn point: the word “spawn” comes from fish, and now we mostly use the word in video games.

The call of “fih,” in juxtaposing something ancient with a modern interface, doubles as the call of the wild. It cuts through our hypermediated reality, summoning us back to a more natural state of being. The very instinct to decline shows how alienated we’ve become from our own roots.

Are you going to accept the call?

If you can make it, I’m hosting a mass reading of Howl by Allen Ginsberg tomorrow at 5:30 sharp in Washington Square Park, NYC. Free books for the first three hundred people to arrive. RSVP here or just show up.

dissociating themselves through the enshittified ragebait clickbait looking for a dopamine fix,

nonchalant doomers repressing the AI overview of the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who Kalshi and Rainbet and OnlyFans and Doordash sat up vaping in the ambient glow of slot-machine phones drowning in the depths of 4chan contemplating memes…

I’m not going to rewrite any more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because it’s already perfect. It’s impossible to read the poem without extending it to yourself and your cultural moment. We’ve all been crushed by the oppressive machinations of conformity and consumerism. What can we do but lash out in creative fury, impaling ourselves on the palisades of modernity?

The most terrifying thing about our alienation and atomization is that it appears inexorable. No matter how we protest, our society will continue blindly optimizing itself into oblivion. With each technological advancement, the vultures circle lower, stripping away the flesh of our humanity to reveal the robotic carcass beneath.

In part II of his poem, Ginsberg portrays this culture of industrial progress as Moloch, an ancient deity associated with child sacrifice. Those who worship Moloch have access to power and prosperity, but their participation contributes to an evil demonic practice. Howl screams out that modern society is doing the same thing.

As a social media influencer, I try to be acutely aware of how the algorithm creates its own “banality of evil,” channeling our natural human impulses in a negative direction. I want to inspire people to challenge these structures and pursue meaning, but I know that I’m also worshipping Moloch, contributing to the dopamine slot machine myself.

Every once in a while, I’ll get stopped in the street by a fan. Sometimes they tell me that I inspired them to study linguistics. This is the best compliment I can get. Other times, they tell me I’m the only reason they stay on YouTube Shorts, and that’s the worst insult I can get.

To be on social media is to accept this paradox: we know that algorithms can be used for good, but we also know that the overall structure is evil. I mostly reconcile this tension by using my videos to push people toward my writings and lectures, and hopefully giving them the tools to be curious by themselves.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time with the New York City Neo-Luddite movement, who have their own way of rejecting Moloch. The Luddite organizing praxis revolves around the idea that “the event is the medium.” It’s one thing to write a substack thinkpiece about how we should build community, and it’s another thing to just do it. By hosting an event, you are making something happen outside of the oversaturated, hypermediated world of the internet, and that’s the best possible way of making more events happen.

I’ve voiced specific criticisms about the Luddites before, but I strongly agree that we just have to make things happen. Sometimes you have to HOWL, and get other people howling, which is why I’m working with the Luddites to co-host a mass reading of “Howl” in Washington Square Park on Monday, May 4, at 5:30 pm. Everyone is welcome, and if you can’t make it, please read the poem as assigned reading.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland.

-Adam

The first is an AI-generated picture of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and the second is Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico. The former is widely derided as “internet brainrot,” while the latter is widely considered an artistic masterpiece.

Depending on your digital literacy and sense of humor, you might find the first picture funny, or irritating, or confusing. You know that it is an AI meme, so you probably view it as “low art” unworthy of further inspection.

The second picture, meanwhile, invites contemplation. The long shadows and dreamlike landscape create an unsettling atmosphere. The ominous scene can spark anxiety, terror, or queasiness. The painting has clear artistic merit, so you probably view it as “high art.”

You might already be offended by where I’m going with this juxtaposition. Perhaps you’re morally opposed to generative AI, or think it shouldn’t be held in the same esteem as a carefully detailed, intentional work of human art. Or maybe you find the comparison funny and think I’m trolling.

But let’s put aside our cultural pretensions for the moment—I promise we’ll return to them—and just ask how the images make you feel. I find them strikingly alike in many ways. Both occupy a warmly lit, liminal setting punctuated by a creeping obscurity. This uncanniness threatens our sense of order and rationality, thrusting us into the realm of the subconscious. Here, we inhabit an irrational, menacing world where anything could happen, like a monster appearing around the corner.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Chirico’s looming shadow are that monster. They are there to haunt your psyche. Obviously, the symbolism of the grim alleyway was more purposeful, but starting with the “death of the author” helps us understand that the brainrot meme achieves a similar effect in the poetic imagination. This is important to understanding why the image has resonated so widely over the past year.

Even after we introduce authorial intent, Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s identity comes from the sound of a drumbeat summoning Indonesian Muslims to the meal of sahur. As the ethnomusicologist Luigi Monteanni explains, that holds its own sensonarrative power. Gongs and drums have been used in religious traditions throughout millennia to induce a hypnotic feeling of attention. Something about the repetition takes us into the present, resonating on an affective level.

Today, the call of the drumbeat still stirs something inside us, translating our previously ritualistic attention into social media engagement. In this sense, “triple T” is a harbinger of our own memetic vulnerability. He is an infohazard—an idea you don’t want to be exposed to—which nevertheless pervades your latent thoughts. This appears to be part of the unspoken joke.

From the phenomena outward, we can layer in context to gather more information. As part of a greater canon of “Italian brainrot,” Tung Tung Tung Sahur is funny for his perceived foreignness. Being one of the earliest AI-generated memes, he stands as an ironic critique of post-truth discourse. With each subsequent meme, he takes on additional life, and there is even more to analyze. Things are funny for a reason, and things go viral for a reason.

Now you can re-introduce your personal biases. There are many valid concerns we should hold about AI and social media, but we can’t let that cloud our understanding of what’s happening online. Rather than immediately dismissing a meme as “brainrot,” which cuts off further inspection, we must look at it as art: something that resonates with other human beings. And just like you don’t have to like modern art, you don’t have to like these memes either.

It’s worth noting that “Impressionism,” “Fauvism,” and “Cubism” all started out as insults before they became known as serious art movements. Each development was thought of as “low art” offending our cultural sensibilities, much like “brainrot” today.

Admittedly, brainrot is decentralized and less deliberate, but that’s because it’s part of a new, folkloric paradigm of art. We’ll have to develop novel ways of criticizing this medium, relying on phenomenology and context before authorship, and building up to describe our current moment.

Upcoming:

I’m hosting a public reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg in Washington Square Park on May 4 at 5:30 pm. RSVP for more details here, or just show up.

I remember the question striking me as flippant. We were an hour into the forum—crowded by Berkeley standards—and all the other students had been asking more interesting, earnest questions about language or algorithms.

I suppose I could have answered literally, or come up with my own glib response, but the topic was out of scope and I didn’t want to embarrass the professor sitting next to me. I chose to salvage the moment by broadly answering about how “gooning” was evolving into a metaphor for “wasting time.”

Following the event, the student came up to greet me. He introduced himself as Steve, shook my hand, and thanked me “for the clip” with a sheepish grin. I was still somewhat confused until a few hours later, when a video of our interaction began going viral on TikTok.

The entire question had been a setup, recorded from the start without my knowledge. Steve had deliberately interrupted our academic discussion to say something provocative for online likes and views.

Going through his social media, I realized this was a pattern: Steve had built up a followership of several thousand by asking random celebrities and strangers unprompted questions about gooning. I felt used.

In the grand scheme of clip farming, of course, this was relatively inconsequential. I’ve previously written about “rizz influencers” who film unsuspecting women for their pick-up videos, and Louis Theroux just released a fantastic documentary analyzing how manosphere influencers foment controversy just to build internet clout.

But all of these examples have one important thing in common: they somehow “cash in” on another person’s prestige (be that money, influence, attractiveness, or newsworthiness) for their own advantage.

I’m reminded of the philosopher Daniel Boorstin, who argued that celebrities are “human pseudo-events,” famous for being famous. The more relevant someone is, the more other people will try to demonstrate adjacency to that individual, which makes everybody appear more popular. It’s smart to cast a trendy actor for a blockbuster movie, because the movie will sell more tickets, but that inadvertently makes the actor even more trendy. The same is true on social media, which is why influencers do “collabs” with one another: they are symbiotically helping each other go more viral.

If I were to expand on that, I’d note that there are two distinct ways by which you can cash in on someone’s popularity: parasitism1 or mutualism.

A mutualistic pseudo-event is closer to Boorstin’s definition, and the lesser of two evils. When I was marketing my book Algospeak, I got interviewed by several newspapers and TV shows. These outlets only talked to me because I was relevant enough for their audiences to pay attention, but in exchange I became better known to those audiences. We both benefitted from the relationship.

That’s not to say mutualistic virality is good for society. Louis Theroux highlights how redpill “alpha males” and OnlyFans models mutually benefit from appearing in each other’s videos: the alpha males get to be seen around attractive women, while the models are able to convert some viewers into subscribers. This relationship is beneficial to the individuals involved, but spreads misogyny and porn addiction to the rest of society. (Maybe the goondemic is real.)

A parasitic pseudo-event, meanwhile, happens when only one person benefits from the interaction. Tabloid paparazzi were an early example, while stream snipers are their algorithmic equivalent. Celebrities and influencers do not want to associate with these people; their lives are hijacked for someone else’s gain.

In some cases, influencers do tolerate these one-sided relationships: Clavicular has notably turned many stream snipers and swatting incidents into free content. These interactions, while closer to commensalism, are still nonconsensual. I actually reposted Steve’s TikTok video onto my YouTube channel and got a million views, so it was technically good for me, but it still felt extractive.

That’s because, if the underlying mechanism of symbiotic virality is to siphon off relevance from another person, it necessitates treating them as a means rather than an end. The entire point of the interaction is about how you can use someone else for your own online fame.

I appreciate the irony of me commenting on this as an influencer, and you’re welcome to form your own opinions about that, but I believe it’s still possible to communicate meaningfully online. The difference is intent: are we doing things just to go viral, or is there a deeper purpose?

The point of communication is literally in the word—to build community, where we treat other people like they matter. If the end goal of social media is to build interpersonal connections, rather than make content for its own sake, then we can still use a medium for good. Otherwise, we’re letting the medium use us instead.

I’m excited to announce that I’m officially writing a new book with Bloomsbury USA! The working title is Reality Drift and it should come out in fall 2027—stay tuned for more details down the line.

I’m also hosting a mass reading of Howl by Allen Ginsberg in Washington Square Park this May 4 at 5 pm. More information to follow.

At first glance, the advertisement doesn’t say anything at all. A vibe is a feeling, so I’m being encouraged to “feel more feelings,” but I’m always feeling feelings. The idea should be redundant, right?

Of course, more pragmatically, “vibe” is just a buzzword. The term has been showing up everywhere in recent years. Software engineers practice “vibe coding,” an expression coined in 2025. College students “vibe check” one another, an idea popularized in 2019. Google Trends shows the phrase “what a vibe” sharply increasing in usage since 2024, while the phrase “vibe shift” is from a 2021 Substack post.

The last time we were talking about “vibes” like this was the 1970s—the term for an “ambient sensation” was shortened from “vibration” in 1967, spawning the idea that you can have “good vibes” or “vibe with someone.” Then the vibes fell off in the 80s and now they’re back, like moustaches or bell-bottomed pants.

I’m sure part of the resurgence has to do with hip-hop culture, which continued using the word after it fell out of favor with the mainstream. Eventually, due to the sinusoidal nature of trends, the term started re-emerging: Kendrick Lamar came out with “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” in 2013, while 2 Chainz released “It’s A Vibe” in 2017.

But I also think there’s something deeper going on. Vibes are, in the words of the UNC Professor Robin James, a form of “lay phenomenology” articulating something that philosophers have been trying to pin down for over a century. Heidegger called it stimmung. Walter Benjamin gestured at it through aura. To us, it’s a “vibe,” but all of these get at the same thing: we have vague, ineffable feelings about a situation.

And, if you think about it, the 70s were the last time ambient emotions were this culturally important. The hippie movement, turmoil around the newly televised Vietnam War, and the popularity of mind-altering drugs all contributed to a greater social emphasis on uncertainty and emotion. Then society became more precise, and we had less of a reason to discuss the imprecise. Computers introduced exact lines of code; the Reagan era established a sense of authority and hierarchy.

Now, in the 2020s, things once again feel uncertain and emotional. It makes sense that we would return to “vibes” at a time when we once again need to express vague feelings.

I can’t help but notice that our two most important technological developments—AI and social media algorithms—are both based on neural networks, which process information in a way that the human brain cannot understand. Our information is no longer neat and discrete, but represented in an ever-changing high-dimensional vector space. Our only option is to interact with these technologies through background intuition.

Consider “vibe coding,” the feelings-based approach to programming that depends on our aesthetic appraisals of how large language models (LLMs) will generate code. This term emerged because we can’t possibly articulate exactly what we want the AI to do, but we can “feel it out” through the “vibes”—our vernacularization of that ambient feeling.

As a social media influencer, I also have to “feel out” the direction of the algorithm to tap into social trends. This is not something that can be put into words; I instead rely on the general sense I get of how things are shifting between algorithmic weightings and the online zeitgeist. Once again, the best way to interface with the technology is an atmospheric, aesthetic appraisal.

Everyone on social media struggles with some version of this feeling. We are forced to “train” our algorithms into showing us the content we want to see, while remaining subjected to a fragmentary, transient kind of discourse. It’s impossible to get the full picture, so we may as well embrace our animal spirits.

And yet the sign outside my local gym shows how the vibes can be captured and commodified. As soon as something starts trending, like the word “vibe” itself, it’s immediately taken advantage of by people trying to make money off of you. Then the trend gets distorted into something unrecognizable.

In tracking how ideas spread, I constantly see how easily our cultural proclivities can be bent and redirected. I’m worried that our increased emotional resonance comes at the expense of logic and reason, which makes it easier to manipulate culture. If we’re not thoughtful about interacting with the world, our conversations and politics just start following the “pulse” of what’s happening, even when that’s a bad thing.

That’s not to say we should ignore our feelings entirely. The best of humanity is emotional and rational. In the words of Francisco de Goya, “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.”

In other words, we should feel more vibes, but also remain vigilant. That means trying to learn what's happening inside our chatbots and algorithms. It means getting as full a picture of reality as possible, to see how we’re being affected, because whoever controls our feelings controls our culture.

Over the past week, an “AI Fruit Love Island” series has been racking up hundreds of millions of TikTok views for its campy parodies of reality TV plotlines. It has all the fan subculture and internet discourse of a real-life drama, even though it’s entirely artificially generated.

This phenomenon was presaged by a viral trend of AI fruits cheating on each other, a meme fad of “niche” fruits eating themselves, and an ASMR genre of glass fruit cutting videos. Many viewers seem genuinely absorbed by the content, while others watch out of absurd fascination.

So why is AI fruit slop everywhere, and what does it mean?

I’m sure part of the appeal is the same reason fruits have resonated through art history: as timeless symbols of fertility, sensuality, and pleasure. The perception of ripeness and sweetness extends to the human body; it’s easy to see ourselves reflected in something like an apple or a strawberry.

Then there’s the idea of the “forbidden fruit.” All of the AI videos are about desire in some form or another. The carnal whims of the Love Island contestants are no different than Eve and the apple, or Persephone and the pomegranate. Their cravings are immediately met with harsh consequence.

The viewer, too, is complicit in the pursuit of ephemeral pleasure. It feels good to watch a glass peach get sliced in half, but then what? Our satisfaction is fleeting. We are Tantalus reaching for the receding branch, convinced we can find happiness in the next scroll.

In this regard, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chinese concept of chī guā, or “melon-eating,” which describes a passive, entertained form of spectatorship. The idea is that you’re watching a drama unfold while snacking on watermelon seeds, kind of like how Americans eat popcorn in the movie theater.

In Chinese internet culture, references to the “melon-eating masses” have become a self-deprecatory critique of detached viewership. The melon-eater sits on the sidelines, vicariously enjoying the spectacle in front of them while not contributing anything meaningful to society. Scandals and gossip are a form of morbid entertainment—and yet this pleasure is once again fleeting.

The “melon,” synonymous with the media we consume, shows that the act of viewership is the same as any other forbidden fruit. As long as we have the next morsel, we remain in a state of distracted stimulation, but eventually we all come to reckon with post-nut clarity.

You are consuming melons consuming melons consuming melons. Then you wake from the doomscroll, cast out of the garden of Eden, facing the regret of a gluttonous Thanksgiving feast.

The beauty of “AI Fruit Love Island” is that everything happens with a knowing wink. Reality TV was already doing all of this to a lesser extent, but this is such blatant slop that it becomes absurd to look at. The sheer irony breaks the fourth wall: we are all in on the joke that we are eating melons.

I see a glimmer of hope in this subversion. The more we are self-aware, the more we can meaningfully engage with our world. I don’t think it’s inherently bad to look at slop you know is slop. It’s a far greater danger to be unaware, because then you consume mindlessly. At least now you can question how you’re engaging with fruit—what you’re getting out of it and how you’re participating in it.

Upcoming events

• March 27—I’m talking at the Ohio State University. Details here.

• I’m going to organize some public readings in New York City in April and May. Stay tuned.

What I’m consuming

• The TalkingCities TikTok account is posting some banger architecture videos

• The movie Synecdoche, New York

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf, by Niggle”

I’m sitting in a Buddhist temple, listening to monks chant the Heart Sutra. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. The words technically have a meaning, but I find myself carried away by the rhythm instead. The mantra washes over me, connecting me to the present moment.

I’m scrolling on Twitter, seeing the same words show up in every post. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. These terms also have a definition, but in practice they’re only funny because they’re funny.

Incel brainrot might not be the path to enlightenment, but there is an important connection between these examples. Any time we repeat a word too much, we become desensitized to its meaning. This phenomenon, called semantic satiation, causes us to attend to form over content. All that matters is how we experience an utterance.

As dictionary definitions dissolve, we make meaning for ourselves. The word “eraser” is more about how the consonants feel in my mouth. The Heart Sutra is a ritual inducing a meditative mindset. “Clavicular” is an ironic critique of the social media ecosystem.

The funny thing about algorithms quantifying and categorizing every aspect of society is that they can only do this on a legible, “objective” level. Measurements only work when we agree there’s something to measure, like the shared definition of a word.

Semantic satiation, meanwhile, is subjective. There’s no way to assign value to your individual sensation. Nobody can pinpoint whether you experience a word as beautiful or funny or sacred. “Brainrot,” as an aesthetic of nonsensical repetition, therefore subverts the algorithm. It creates an emotional meta-meaning that will always be absent from a vector space.

That which cannot be quantified cannot be commodified. Language is only profitable when we believe that meaning can be “captured” into words. A social media platform might be able to make money off the keyword “Clavicular,” but it is blind to the raw feeling of being inundated with the term. And yet there’s still a message happening on that embodied level.

If anything, it’s more authentic to feel meaning as a subjective, emotional thing. The kind of “objective meaning” we identify through definitions and embeddings actually emerges from our all-encompassing sensory context, expressed collectively through our interactions over time.

The Heart Sutra teaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no fixed interpretation of language, but it is precisely in its unfixedness that language reveals its meaning. The beauty of semantic satiation is that it destroys the “containers” of denotation. Instead of using words to connect to something else, we connect to the words themselves—revealing that it was all form, and none of it.

What I’m consuming

• This Harper’s article on “agentic” Silicon Valley culture by Sam Kriss

• Harry Miller’s tutorials on walking, standing, and making shit happen

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

Where I’m speaking

• Austin, TX - March 13 presentation for SXSW

• Columbus, OH - March 27 lecture for the OSU Linguistics Department

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Harlow monkey experiment as the internet obsesses over Punch-kun, a socially anxious Japanese macaque that returns to his stuffed monkey whenever he struggles to interact with the other macaques.

It’s easy to see why Punch is captivating people’s hearts. We’re literally monkeys ourselves. Everybody can project their own stories onto him; all of us have sought out comfort in difficult situations.

However, the Harlow experiment is a warning about how our monkey instincts can be used against us. When I look at the photograph of the wire and cloth mothers, I see the physical and digital worlds we’re moving toward. One is stripped bare of everything but the basic resources for survival, while the other is an ersatz source of comfort.

The cloth mother is an AI chatbot or a social media influencer. She looks real enough to comfort your monkey brain into feeling a minimum amount of social connection. We turn to her when we can’t find any actual monkeys.

The wire mother is the self-checkout lane in a grocery store, or the sleek grey fast casual restaurant. You get what you want, without interacting with anyone, and then the space practically begs you to leave.

The more our physical spaces are optimized and transactionalized, the less the real world will look like the real world. At the same time, the better our technology gets, the more our digital world will appear like it’s the real thing. We’ll increasingly find ourselves clinging to it in anthropomorphic consolation while everything else withers to wire.

Following the surrogate mother experiment, most of Harlow’s monkeys turned out severely socially impaired, struggling to bond with other monkeys. I worry the same will be true for us, because artificial connection can never replace actual connection.

Punch, meanwhile, symbolizes how things could still go right. His stuffed animal helps him develop social skills and learn to interact with the other monkeys. The zoo is carefully designed for him to thrive; resources aren’t separated from community.

It’s a basic human instinct to seek the cloth mother. We need to feel connected to people and things. Arguably, this is what makes us human in the first place. But the things don’t have to come at the expense of the people. It’s possible to develop both our real world and our technology in a way that cultivates warmth and meaning.

This starts with carefully building our environments to augment the best in ourselves. We can’t focus on just the online, or even just the offline. Society now depends on both, and neglecting either would lead us into Harlow’s dystopia.

Cute animal videos will always go viral, but I’m sure there’s a reason Punch resonated so much in this current moment. He’s a lonely monkey, and we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. We’re all drawn to the “stuffed animals” in our own lives, but we should recognize that these are means to an end, rather than the end itself. Instead, we must use our tools to build community where we can, understanding that we are monkeys as well.

Upcoming speaking events:

• This Wednesday 2/25 at CU Boulder - details here

• This Thursday 2/26 at UC Berkeley - details here. Event is currently full but they might move to a bigger room

• March 13 at SXSW, Austin - details here

As always, if you liked this essay, please consider buying my book Algospeak! Thanks for your support :)

By early March, Polymarket is planning on rolling out attention markets, where speculators can bid on how much “mindshare” ideas will have in the future.

The markets draw on social media data to quantify changes in public opinion, making it possible to bid on questions like “Crypto Twitter mindshare by March 31, 2026?” and “How high will Polymarket’s mindshare go by March 31, 2026?”

This development means that speculators now have an active financial incentive to manipulate public opinion. All you have to do is invest in an idea, spam it across your AI slop accounts, and pocket the profit. If social media was trading stocks on your attention, prediction markets are now trading options—and you can easily tilt the odds in your favor through information warfare.

We’ve already seen this kind of extractive practice in action. I’ve written about how memecoin investors will popularize racist memes to inflate the value of their cryptocurrencies, and we’ve clearly seen that people on Polymarket are willing to manipulate the internet for profit, like falsely editing the battle lines of Ukraine or tampering with existing prediction markets to cash out on derivatives.

The stated goal of these prediction markets is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” and we’re clearly moving in that direction. Every word and idea will be wagered on. Within the next decade, we will see literal hedge funds emerge around memetic investments.

An uncomfortable fact about humans is that we have a tendency to blindly follow the structures set out for us. If Polymarket has a bet on whether a piece of misinformation will get more popular, and people are invested in that, more people have a reason to spread the misinformation. Then society will suffer.

From a linguistic standpoint, this means that even more of our words and memes will become pseudo-trends. Language is already so sensitive to the observer effect. The more we comment on something, the more it alters the “natural” course of how a word would evolve. So what happens when we have people sitting around desks trying to figure out which terms are about to get popular? And what happens when they inevitably try to “fix” the market? At the end of the day, your reality will be shaped by these financial actors.

Much like the rise of clip farming, attention markets are going to tie our tangible lives to the biased metrics of social media. The old rules of social interaction are going to dissolve into callous, transactional contentmaxxing. Nothing will matter other than internet success, especially when it’s synonymous with financial success.

In a way, this mirrors what private equity has already done to the American landscape. When a system is in place that exclusively rewards short-term profit, we will be left with a disintegrated husk of the internet that could’ve been. The map will consume the territory.

I wish we could all just touch grass, but that won’t be enough when our offline reality is culturally downstream of the algorithm. The “real world” and the internet are deeply intertwined, and we have to fight to preserve both at once.

What I’m consuming

• I deeply enjoyed this deep dive into Wojak and Soyjak culture by Frankie Fey.

• This “Corner Talk” series by abby.architecture changed how I look at buildings

• This NYT article on desire paths by my friend Anna Kodé

Where I’m speaking

• February 25: CU Boulder linguistics society

• February 26: UC Berkeley discussion with Nicole Holliday

• March 12: SXSW lecture on vibes and technology

As always, you can also support me by buying my book Algospeak.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom calls this an information hazard—a risk arising from the dissemination of a piece of information that might enable harm. If nobody told the government about nuclear fission, the world would be a safer place. Perhaps it’s better, then, to limit certain information (which is exactly why it’s so hard to find bomb-making instructions online).

You can probably think of several other modern infohazards, like Roko’s Basilisk, the hypothetical superintelligent AI that will punish you unless you help build it, or the Columbine Effect, where infamous mass shootings have inspired copycat attacks.

Today, however, I’m writing about a new class of infohazards in the social media ecosystem, which I’ve been researching for several years. I’m describing it because I think our only shot at fighting it is to become aware of the root cause, and because all the wrong people are currently in the loop. I will first illustrate it through several examples.

The crypto hustlers

One month ago, I wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times explaining how cryptocurrency cabals are pushing racist memes to generate attention for their shitcoins. The more their meme gains traction, the more “mindshare” is diverted toward the coin, and the price rises.

Immediately after the article was published, the cryptocurrency I used as an example tripled in value. The fact that I mentioned the scam in a prestigious newspaper immediately translated into profit for its racist stakeholders.

The alt-right

All throughout January, I’ve been struggling with doxxing and swatting threats from a far-right forum after describing how they push certain slang into the mainstream.

Interestingly, the harassment wasn’t intended to silence me, but to elicit a reaction. Several of the forum’s users explicitly mentioned hoping that swatting me would get me to talk about their website, which would draw further attention to their ideology. Meanwhile, my local police were powerless to take action against an anonymous message board, meaning there was nothing to disincentivize their behavior.

The clip farmers

Aidan Walker just published two fantastic essays about Clavicular, a psychopathic looksmaxxing streamer known for viral stunts like running someone over with his car or clubbing with white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Clavicular is deliberately provocative because he wants you to criticize him. His brand is built on controversy, and discussing him is like scratching a bacterial infection—any interaction will cause it to spread further.

Same with Fuentes, or the ragebait slop accounts, or the streamers making Meta Glasses rizz content. These people have built their careers pissing people off. If we get upset over them, that’s the point. Our discourse becomes their engagement, financially rewarding them for their harmful behavior.

It’s already quite clear that attention-seeking behavior is profitable online, but the crypto hustlers, alt-right forums, and clip farmers have identified a new exploit on social media: that negative attention can be endlessly profitable and self-reinforcing. The more outrage you generate, the more money and power you receive, which enables you to generate more outrage.

In doing so, these people become human infohazards. Mentioning them is like mentioning school shootings or Roko’s Basilisk: they are made more available in our minds, at the expense of social harmony. Meanwhile, the meta-strategy of becoming an infohazard also spreads, which is an infohazard in its own right. Now more people are aware that they can personally benefit by hurting everyone else online.

Parasitic memetics

Traditionally, we’ve used the model of a virus to describe how ideas spread. I’ve already written about memes as if they can “infect” new “hosts” along an epidemiological network, and we literally use the phrase “going viral” to describe internet popularity.

I don’t think the idea of viral memetics is quite right to describe what’s happening here, so I’ll be referring to these infohazards through the framework of parasitic memetics. Unlike a virus, which just replicates and moves on, the parasite lives inside the host of the internet, feeding on the resources of our attention. There is a clear formula to a parasitic meme:

1. Do something terrible

2. People criticize you, bringing you attention

3. Attention brings profit and influence, making it easier to do more terrible things

4. Repeat

There is currently no mechanism to stop the parasitic memes I have described, which is part of what makes them so dangerous as infohazards. As long as the bad actors are shielded by anonymity or technical legality, they can continue extracting from our online spaces without repercussion.

If anything, the parasite actively exploits the host’s defensive response. If we even mention what’s happening, we’re giving the bad actors free publicity, which brings them further fame and fortune.

And yet there’s a fundamental difference between this problem and the atomic bomb: one infohazard is an irrefutable fact of nature, and the other is entirely dependent on the current structure of social media platforms. Parasitic memes are only possible online because everything is optimized around attention metrics. Beyond easily circumventable terms of service, there is no measurement rewarding kindness or social cohesion. This means that, if you disregard your own morality, the internet becomes a game you can optimize, where you “win” through any content possible, especially if someone criticizes you.

Parasitic memes are uniquely enabled by the ease of distribution. Newspapers and television channels had plenty of problems, but at least those forms of media had institutional gatekeepers preventing obviously evil content from being transmitted. Those barriers are now gone, and more people are finding out that they can use the disconnect to their advantage.

I’m aware that some people could read this as a playbook, but I think the only way to get rid of the parasites is understanding that the medium has the power to affect society. I don’t think it’s plausible to get rid of the tech platforms entirely, or get everyone offline. Nor is this something we can truly fight on the individual level—it feels silly to “not engage” when these ideas are clearly getting more popular. So we have to change how the ideas are diffusing.

If governments can stop bomb-making information from spreading, we can also create new regulations and algorithmic designs that stop ragebait from spreading. But that begins with holding the tech companies accountable. All of our communication unfolds in the structure that they set up for us—we need to recognize that and fight for change.

If you liked this essay, please consider buying my book Algospeak, on how social media is changing language. Thank you for reading!!

Each of their videos demonstrates a different type of machine. A box travels across the conveyor belt and falls off the side, as European electronic music plays in the background. It’s simple and beautiful, and it’s clearly resonating with other people as well—as I write this, the account is about to pass 100,000 followers.

I think part of the appeal is that the account is upfront about what it is. The 123rollenbaan website is clearly advertised at the bottom of each video, and the captions get to the point: “beltconveyor for sale.” “beltconveyor in action.” The link in the bio actually sells conveyor belts.

What you see is what you get, which is so rarely the case nowadays. Digital marketing has gotten to the point where interesting videos often turn into advertisements halfway through, and it’s become exhausting having to constantly parse who is and isn’t trying to profit off you.

I also think it’s important that the account is foreign. It’s uncomfortable to be an American right now, and the Dutch hashtags feel like a refuge from everything that’s happening back home. Same with the unsophisticated editing style and the 2010s Avicii remixes, which elicit a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time. Perhaps this is the European equivalent to the “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” memes. Both reject American norms in favor of a different cultural tradition.

But the real appeal is the absurdity. I shouldn’t be the target demographic for these videos. I’m not a conveyor belt consumer, and yet the algorithm recommended them to me anyway. 123rollenbaan is literal proof that Instagram is incorrect about me as a person. For all their sophisticated user classification technology, something somewhere got incorrectly represented and now I’m getting Dutch industrial advertisements.

It’s usually so hard to identify when the algorithm is wrong, because it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the “For You Page” is really “for you.” And yet little things get caught in the cracks. A Chinese glycine manufacturer goes viral on TikTok. A local public library gets hundreds of thousands of views for its public service announcements. These videos are funny because they’re not meant for you. They are evidence of a misalignment between the self and the “algorithmic self,” that shadow-construction of your identity existing in a social media computer server.

But the map always bleeds into the territory, and your algorithmic self inevitably affects your actual self. Even if I wasn’t the initial audience for 123rollenbaan, I’ve really begun to enjoy their videos and look forward to seeing them when I open Instagram. An entire community has sprung up in their comments section, always brimming with positivity: “I love this account!” “this is so peak.” Then we all parasocially nerd out when the account posts a Christmas message or accedes to fan demands for a POV video.

Over time, in the same way that guys get really into trains or automobiles, I’ve felt myself develop a genuine fascination with the different types of conveyor belts. They come in spirals and short semi-circles. They have different inclines and treads and heights. More than once, I’ve found myself longingly staring at different products on the 123rollenbaan website, wondering how the aangedreven rollenbanen would look in my living room.

No, I’m not joking. I’m really into conveyor belts now, all because of this account I wasn’t ever supposed to see. It definitely started out ironically, but became more real with each subsequent video. To me, 123rollenbaan is simultaneously my happy innocent internet niche, and just really fucking cool, and a monument to how the algorithm has changed my identity.

That last point terrifies me, because if a mistake in the algorithm so easily sucked me into a conveyor belt echo chamber, what else is happening that I can’t see? This was an obvious misalignment, but there’s always a disconnect between the real self and the algorithmic self, meaning that every video changes me somehow. Other people, too, could just as easily be pulled into dangerous ideologies. Harmful ideas can be accidentally recommended, ironically enjoyed, and then genuinely adopted.

Admittedly, books and TV hold the same insidious potential to change our minds. But social media uniquely presents itself as if the message is already coming from you. The algorithm is supposed to “know you,” which lulls you into a greater sense of complacency. Really, they’re conveyor belts of identity, moving you from point A to point B even if you don’t feel a difference.

Upcoming events

• January 29: Albany, NY - lecture for the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany
  February 25: Boulder, CO - lecture for CU Boulder Linguistics Department
  February 26: Berkeley, CA - conversation with Nicole Holliday through the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, the Berkeley Forum, and the Berkeley Center for New Media

Please also consider buying my book Algospeak, on how social media is changing language!! Thanks for reading - I hope to be the 123rollenbaan of my own corner of the internet :)

On top of the jazz, the park plays its own music. The drumbeat of stoners doing skate tricks, the chorus of chanting Hare Krishnas, and the harmony of college students chattering on picnic blankets all swirl together in electric symphony. The air is alive with human connection.

I remember one such day a few months back, the last before everything got cold, when I was distracted from my book by a guy trying to hit on some girl. I remember looking on in amusement as she turned him down, then watching him walk back to his buddy a few benches away.

Then he took off his Meta Glasses.

It was like someone had interrupted my concert with an airhorn. The two men were clearly filming rizz content—the kind of videos that get posted with the caption GOTH BADDIE GIVES ME HER NUMBER to millions of likes and views.

As I kept watching the pair, I observed them repeat the same interaction dozens of times, with the second guy often recording from a distance on his own camera. There’s no way any of the women were told in advance that they were being filmed for social media, and I could see a few of them get uncomfortable as they realized what was happening. Others didn’t seem to suspect anything.

These videos, which have dramatically increased online in recent years, fundamentally erode the magic of places like Washington Square Park by farming real-life interactions for digital content.

I’ve written before about how there are two types of communication: the ritual kind, meant for connecting with other human beings, and the transmission kind, optimizing for distribution of information. Every new technology since the telegraph has continued to prioritize transmission at the expense of ritual. All that matters is how much you can communicate, to how many people—everything is done for views.

But ritual is what gives life meaning. There’s a reason it feels better to talk with a friend on a picnic blanket than watch your friend’s TikToks for the same length of time. Either way, you’re getting the same amount of information about your friend, but only the picnic feels special.

And yet more of our in-person moments are now being optimized for later virality. Politicians give brainrot speeches on the legislative floor, speaking not to their fellow lawmakers but to an imagined online audience. Social media influencers scream on airplanes or outside bakeries, disrupting other people for their vlogs. This rise in clip farming culture cannibalizes present moments for the future, turning our reality more transactional.

These are only the most obvious examples. I think the viral Sydney Sweeney ad last summer was another example of clip farming, just less on the nose. The real advertisement wasn’t the weird genetics joke, but the subsequent discourse around the advertisement. The purpose of the campaign was to make people uncomfortable enough to talk about it online, and now American Eagle stock is up 100%.

The more we rely on the transmission view of communication, the less incentive there is to treat other people with care. Companies like Cluely can raise millions of dollars by promoting academic dishonesty, and crypto scammers can inflate the value of their shitcoins by popularizing racist memes. If the point is distribution above connection, it’s okay to hurt other people as long as your message gets across.

I think we can fight this on an individual basis by communicating with as much intentionality as possible, preserving meaning even if you have to make a tradeoff. We should stigmatize transactional communication in the real world, and not engage with ragebait online, since the hydra will simply grow more heads.

But these are stopgap solutions for desperate times. The real problem is structural rather than individual. We should be questioning why all of our online content is distributed based on metrics that can be gamed by bad actors. I see a brighter horizon, where the internet is more like Washington Square Park, but that starts with recognizing our unquantifiable humanity and fighting for it where we can.

Upcoming events

• January 29: Albany, NY - lecture for the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany
  February 25: Boulder, CO - lecture for CU Boulder Linguistics Department
  February 26: Berkeley, CA - conversation with Nicole Holliday through the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, the Berkeley Forum, and the Berkeley Center for New Media

As always, if you liked this essay, please consider buying my book Algospeak, on how social media is changing language.

To be alive is to wade through a sensory totality of sights, sounds, thoughts, and fleeting emotional states. This sheer, all-encompassing everythingness is incomprehensible in its entirety, but we can attempt to gesture at individual ingredients of our soup, even if we fail to truly capture the whole.

Over the past year, I’ve slowly been trying to answer the question of what it means to experience social media, and I’ve found this to be a soup in its own right. The phenomenon can only be pointed at from all sides, with each angle sketching in more of the picture.

I’ve written essays about how social media can be understood as a physical space, a religious ritual, and a form of subjugation; I’ve explained how we hold implicit assumptions about “content” and “platforms” and the “For You Page.” I stand by all of these observations, but each framework is reductive when taken by itself. Instead, you must understand these as ingredients in the everything-soup of scrolling.

We begin with the phone as a physical object, which we already encounter in so many dimensions: as a source of comfort and security, an object of veneration, a black mirror reflecting you back to yourself. Everything that happens on social media is preceded by the fact that it first happens on your phone—this individual, intimate extension of yourself.

Then there’s the phone interface, which has conditioned you to think and act a certain way. It has taught us to summon entire worlds with the graze of a finger, melding your consciousness into the delicate haptic experience of touching a screen. Each world holds a unique oneiric potential, captivating our imagination and expectations before we even open an app.

The app itself is pre-defined by what Aidan Walker calls “platform presence,” and I call another layer of soup. Just as your home screen shapes your ambient understanding of what’s happening, so does the “always-already thereness” of TikTok or YouTube. These have their own spatiality and imaginative possibilities. Likes are displayed on the side of a video, telling us that “this is good” by signaling collective approval. The comments section is a place of both retreat and consensus, bathing you in effervescent refuge from the video itself.

As you gaze through the scrim, you project your internalized ideas that you are watching “content” “on” a “platform.” The very peripherality of the user interface haunts your interpretation of what’s happening—all before you get to the video itself. Here you devote your sustained attention, encountering yet another thick stew of sensation, subtly conditioned by everything: who you are as a person, the conversations you’ve previously had about social media, your pre-formed opinions about individual influencers, and so on.

Each experiential layer, between the phone and the “content,” is like a nesting doll, recursively casting itself onto the next layer. The medium of the phone has a sense of spatiality, agency, and liminality that gets echoed in its operating system, which gets echoed in the app interface, which affects how you look at the smallest matryoshka. Meanwhile, each embedded layer also resonates upward. The fact that you use your phone to look at TikTok helps define what you think a “phone” is.

The first step to understanding soup is realizing that everything is completely mixed together. This is a blessing and a curse. You can’t take any ingredients out, but you can put new ingredients in. The more we challenge what we see and change our background assumptions, the more we can shape our perpetual stew into something we enjoy.

If you missed it, make sure to check out my new TED talk below:

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“Gradualism” refers to small variations that spread on an individual level over time. The Great Vowel Shift, for example, was a slow shift in pronunciation that took place over two hundred years. This is a more “natural” kind of evolution that happens without any direct interference.

“Punctuated equilibrium” is a sudden upheaval, historically sparked by some kind of societal disturbance, like war or new technology. The Norman Conquest of 1066 is a perfect example: the sudden invasion of England led to the adoption of a lot of French vocabulary that may not have been borrowed “naturally.” While gradualism is associated with slow, person-to-person development, punctuated equilibrium typically involves an authority suggesting what words or definitions to use.

It’s normal for language to cycle through both phases. Once an equilibrium is punctuated with a new word, the term is incorporated into our everyday speech and continues evolving through gradual means.

Of course, very little is known about the origins of language, but it makes sense to speculate that etymology used to be a lot more gradual than today. Back when we lived in small groups of a few dozen hunter-gatherers, there must have been fewer opportunities for punctuated equilibrium to occur.

The more our technology advanced and the more we began centralizing into states, the more our language experienced punctuated equilibrium. The introduction of the printing press allowed for mass distribution of text, implicitly legitimizing certain words to a broad audience. The simple fact that these words could be seen by more people is a mild form of punctuated equilibrium, since it reaches an audience beyond the individual, gradualistic level.

The establishments of language institutes (like the Académie Française in 1634) or reference books (like Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755) were more concrete events causing the standardization of language. They punctuated the equilibrium by creating “correct” forms of speaking—and thereby “incorrect” forms which we deride as “slang.” Language could never quite evolve “naturally” from this point onward, since there was always a prescriptive source pushing it in a specific direction.

Mass media created further opportunities to introduce words at scale, without the terms having to percolate slowly through a population. The phrase “stock market crash” would’ve taken a lot longer to get adopted if not for radio and news commentary using the expression in 1929 (and then further artificially inflating its use in 1987). More of our language is being suddenly introduced, rather than incrementally.

I’m using adjectives like “natural” versus “artificial” to distinguish between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, because these moments of interference alter what would otherwise be a “normal” trajectory of language change. I’ve previously called this the linguistic observer effect: simply using a word in a mass context will affect its trajectory, by ambiently endorsing it to an audience beyond the scale of organic diffusion.

And yet the increased frequency of punctuated language change has created new possibilities for literally artificial words to be inserted into our vocabularies. With the greater ease of mass communication, marketers were able to get us to use phrases like “aspirin” and “escalator” in our daily lives. I call these pseudo-trends: social phenomena created for the purpose of creating social phenomena.

Unlike the Norman Conquest, a pseudo-trend is deliberately engineered as an attempt to manipulate our language, often to generate “mindshare” in a population. And pseudo-trends have only accelerated with social media. We are more connected than ever, consuming more mass communication than ever, and are accustomed to memes appearing from thin air. The linguistic environment is newly malleable. It barely registers as suspicious when a new phrase like “sweet treat” starts showing up everywhere, even though the term was clearly buoyed by food marketers trying to normalize snacking culture.

But this goes well beyond marketing. I just published an op-ed in the Financial Times about memecoin traders who are intentionally pushing new memes to the mainstream in order to hype up cryptocurrencies, and I’ve written before about racist AI slop creators who are making content purely for the sake of making content. These people are also pushing pseudo-trends—hacking into our collective reality by promoting a more profitable reality for them.

Then there’s the discourse about the discourse. We’re increasingly commenting about language as it occurs, creating a self-aware direction to everything we say. Satirical accounts like H00PIFY purport to document trending memes, yet have actually become a vector for meme diffusion in their own right. The “67” meme is essentially an extended parody of how people are parodying it. Everybody has a vested interest in viral popularity, so we’re all complicit in manufacturing pseudo-trends.

What do we do when all of our language is becoming hyper-language? We can’t abandon pseudo-words entirely, nor would it be effective. The simulation would just keep marching on without us. But we can act with awareness. I find it oddly comforting to accept that “authenticity” is a construct, and then build up from there. I can choose to accept the contradictions in my language, or ironically distance myself through “brainrot,” but knowledge gives me agency. With awareness, I can decide who gets to influence my vocabulary.

“Etymology” in Greek means “the study of truth.” I believe that if we study where our ideas come from, we uncover something true about ourselves and society—and then we can use those truths to reclaim power over how we speak.

They just published my TED talk about ChatGPT, labubus, hyperpop, and language. You can watch the whole thing here:

• Here is my Financial Times op-ed again

• Here is a link to buy my book if you want more of my writing!!

A “place,” according to the French anthropologist Marc Augé, is a space with symbolic importance. It builds your identity, defines your relations with other people, and contains a sense of history within it. Some examples are your home, your school, and your local dive bar. These all have different rules about who you can be and how you can interact with others.

A “non-place” is a transactional space that only exists for efficiency. You are not supposed to express your identity or interact with others in an elevator, airport, or hotel hallway. These are locations of transience, loneliness, and anonymity. There are no meetings or common references in a non-place.

Places change over time, while non-places are liminal. Even if you don’t agree with a change, you find it meaningful. The more graffiti that gets added to my dive bar bathroom, the more special it feels, because I have lived through a part of its story. The airport, meanwhile, has no story. Reality is suspended, and I am disconnected from my surroundings.

Many people have noted the decline of “third places” in our society. This is connected to technological advancement: as we attempt to make our lives easier, we design places for as little friction as possible, but these become “non-places,” because real places are defined by their friction.

The fast food restaurant, for example, used to be a destination. People were once excited to go to McDonald’s. It had giant swooping arches, bright colors, and a ball pit. Now it is a gray rectangle with screens at the front to place your order. I wouldn’t ever go to McDonald’s to meet a friend, and I don’t feel any sense of community or history there. It is a non-place meant for you to get in and out as quickly as possible.

This creeping loss of place-ness also extends to our media consumption. Before the invention of the telegraph, you would get your news from the town crier, or by gathering in the agorai of Ancient Greek city-states. Dissemination of information was deeply tied to community and physical space.

Once it became more efficient to transmit ideas, we developed newspapers, and our shared spatiality instead became fragmented. You would read the news on the park bench or the breakfast table. These places are already more liminal and private than a location specifically designated for collective news consumption. Along with the TV, which restricted information to the confines of your home, the “places” of news began to shift closer to “non-places.”

Phones were the final nail in the coffin, completely severing news from any physical location. You could still share a moment with someone while reading the paper on a park bench or watching CNN from your couch. Now we learn things about the world in a deeply individualized way, untethered from our surrounding geography.

Paradoxically, however, the further we abstracted from real places, the more we began to cast our feeling of place onto the medium itself. A newspaper literally takes up space in a way that a town crier’s announcements do not. A phone screen opens up entire worlds within it, purporting to show us the same kind of discourse that we lost in real life. It is the “digital town square,” a place where it appears like conversations are happening because of the comments section—but you don’t really know anyone in the comments section. It is the hotel hallway equivalent of news: you still accomplish something functional, yet you are doing it void of identity, communal experience, or history.

In a previous substack post, I started to build up an idea of how our phones inherently contain a sense of place. The “home screen,” for example, creates an illusion of domesticity, as a private and personalized refuge where you can “choose your wallpaper” and “lock” your screen like a front door. Through design metaphors like this, each part of our phones simulates a place, triggering our natural human reflex toward spaces without actually providing the material benefits of those spaces.

Even within a single app, you usually confront different “locations” that harbor unique realms of imagination. When I open Instagram, I am also immediately sent to their “home page.” This feels like the most comforting part of the app because it has content uniquely curated for me, just like a real home is uniquely my own. It is indoors while the “explore” page is outdoors. To venture beyond “home” is to adventurously foray into a more uncertain world; the “home page” therefore takes on a sense of tranquility and coziness (but also privacy—showing someone your social media feed is like showing them the inside of your house).

All the while, your subconscious projects a feeling of place, even though you are in a non-place. A real “place” has static elements that are gradually shaped by environmental changes, but Instagram posts are ephemerally encountered in a liminal stream. There is no bathroom graffiti. The user interface is the closest thing to a constant, but it is shaped by app updates rather than real history.

Perhaps “likes” and “comments” give a post a semblance of shared reference, hinting at our coexistence in this “place” with other people who have left their marks over time. Yet these are weird alienated references that can’t parallel the emotion of seeing all your fellow citizens gather in the agora. It is a simulacrum of place masquerading as the real thing.

The internet will never replicate the immersive richness of a real, physical environment, but it’s still possible to have more authentic “places” online. I’ve been in a Discord server with some friends for over five years, and I feel a deep sense of community and history to each conversation channel. Discord is a bounded space where I have repeated encounters with the same people, which makes it feel more “place-like” than the continuous stream I encounter on social media.

I’m also thinking back to how the original websites were literally called “sites” because they were meant to be destinations. If you contrast the early idiosyncratic Y2K-era websites with today, it’s like McDonald’s before and after they embraced gray rectangle architecture.

The culprit is the same one that gave us elevators and airports: a desire for efficiency. The more we streamline our lives, the more our places turn into meaningless non-places—merely meant for you to pass through rather than connecting with yourself and others.

If anything, social media is even less of a place than the airport or elevator. We are completely anchorless while scrolling, with nothing to do except cast our desire for space onto the user interface. Perhaps there is a better future for the internet where that desire isn’t stifled, and we can actually experience the history and community we crave. In the meantime, the best we can do is interrogate our place-making instincts: be aware when we’re being exploited, and cultivate real “places” where we can.