The new language of the feed
The historic shift from an oral to a written tradition ushered in a new way of thinking about the world: does ‘algospeak’ mean we are now at the cusp of another revolution?
To the online uninitiated, people seem to be speaking in code. On TikTok, “unalive” has replaced “death.” Sex becomes “seggs,” porn is “corn,” whilst a vast array of emojis stand in for words that are at risk of being flagged. What at first sight seems to be playful slang is, in fact, a form of survival, as users shape language to evade algorithmic detection.
At the same time, when people use AI tools, there is another quirk — the sudden proliferation of em dashes. What was once a somewhat bookish punctuation mark, it it is now the ‘fingerprints’ of Gen AI text. The anachronistic em dash appearing in the midst of the latest tech feels like a ghost from another age.
These are not unconnected, as, taken together, they hint at the way our everyday language is being reshaped, not just in the usual human way but by machines. These shifts are not merely stylistic; they change how we think.
The medium has always been the message
Our communication has always been determined by the medium through which it is carried. For example, in oral cultures, knowledge is endured through rhythm and formula, thereby embedding it in our memories. For example, to modern eyes, Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” looks like a poetic flourish. But Walter Ong, in his famous book, ‘Orality and literacy,’ suggests it was in fact a stock phrase that made long stories easier to recall. Oral thought worked differently from ours, in that it built ideas by adding one thing to another, always tied to the situation at hand, and always circling back with repetition, thereby keeping stories alive.
A storyteller describing a hero might say he was “strong and brave and wise,” piling traits on top of one another rather than distilling them into an abstract category. In Homeric epics, battles are narrated blow by blow, with stock phrases for weapons and wounds repeated across episodes. The point was not about precision but keeping the rhythm moving and, with that, the tale memorable. So, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” offered scaffolding, stabilising the speech in a world where memory was fragile.
In a way, algospeak works similarly. “Unalive” or 🍑 are today’s stock phrases, but instead of being born from the constraints of memory, they are the result of the constraints of algorithmic detection. Both are formulations created under pressure, repeated until they stabilise, and shared because they help communication survive. They show us that when language is under threat (whether by memory or algorithm), solutions emerge to hold it together.
But to understand the significance of this, we need Ong’s analysis of the profound shift that occurred with the invention of writing. To “lock words into space,” as Ong put it, was to make them permanent and external, encouraging abstraction, categorisation, and criticism, fundamentally different to the more fluid, performative, and memory-bound character of the oral tradition. Importantly, this meant that thoughts could then be more easily debated and rearranged. Print intensified this change, creating cultures of commentary as words had become much more stable objects that could be compared, contested, and preserved.
Ong also suggested that the broadcast age layered on a “secondary orality”: speech that was immediate and communal but shaped by microphones, mass audiences, and the knowledge of being overheard. This didn’t just change the format; it became more self-conscious. Politicians and performers began to craft their words for the microphone, adopting slower pacing, lower pitch, and catchphrases designed to resonate across millions. Families learned to experience themselves as part of vast, simultaneous audiences, gathered around the radio or television set. This, argues Ong, meant that everyday speech itself grew more cautious, carrying an implicit awareness that one might be speaking to an unseen wider audience.
The next wave of change
The question we now surely need to be asking if Ong’s analysis needs to be updated, as another shift appears to be underway. Social media seems to reintroduce many of the traits Ong associated with oral cultures: posts and memes are endlessly repeated and remixed so that they lodge in memory through sheer frequency. They rely on ‘stock phrases’ such as catchphrases, hashtags, and soundbites that can be slotted into different contexts but all the while still carrying shared meaning. And they spread through communal uptake, gaining force when echoed, liked, or stitched by others. The parallel with earlier oral cultures is striking, but where oral traditions relied on formulaic techniques to embed memory, today’s digital cultures rely on formulaic techniques to sidestep algorithms.
Linguist Adam Aleksic calls this phenomenon ‘Algospeak’ (and has a book of the same name). On TikTok, he points out, people no longer die but instead become “unalive.” Sex becomes “seggs,” porn mutates into “corn,” and suicide collapses into a string of emojis. These might seem like amusing distortions, but in fact Aleksic suggests they are survival tactics, words chosen to evade filters that suppress flagged terms. In this way, algospeak is speech bent by constraint. And in the oral tradition, where words and phrases were repeated to preserve memory, today words are chosen that allow the social media user to escape deletion.
And to Ong’s point, these traditions influence how we think: to call death “unalive” means we subtly reshape the concept itself. “Death” is blunt and final, while “unalive” softens it, turning into the absence of life rather than its end. The grammar also displaces agency. Someone can be killed, but to be “unalived” seems to happen without a subject, blurring responsibility and cause. This can serve a helpful purpose for some communities, such as reducing stigma around suicide or violence. However, this shift also risks vagueness at a time when clarity is crucial.
Aleksic argues that the word only exists because a machine’s presence has entered the conversation: when people anticipate suppression, they invent detours. This is what Ong meant when he said technologies “technologise the word”: they reorganise the categories through which we understand experience.
But algospeak is not much bigger than euphemism it is also a signal of belonging, just like African American Vernacular English or Cockney rhyming slang before it. To use and understand “unalive” or 🍑 is to demonstrate membership in a group attuned to algorithmic constraint. Just as “rosy-fingered dawn” showed mastery of the oral tradition, “unalive” shows mastery of the digital one.
Yet this adaptive creativity is highly vulnerable to appropriation. Aleksic notes that much contemporary online slang originates in marginalised communities before being absorbed, diluted, and mainstreamed. Algospeak repeats this pattern. The very groups most at risk of being silenced are the ones who create the codes, but this is quickly taken up by the mainstream and, with that, sometimes stripped of context and political edge. This cycle of resistance and appropriation is perhaps a marker of this “new orality”: it is inventive and rebellious, but also unstable and easily commodified.
The em dash ghost
But perhaps the em dash points to something else — the persistence of print. ChatGPT’s punctuation habits can feel odd, not because they are incorrect but because they belong to another communicative order, one built on permanence and polish. This feels like an example of philosopher Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology. He might suggest that this is like the ghost of print culture haunting digital speech: as trained on the archives of print, it drags stylistic residues of book culture into a world dominated by fragments, emojis, and immediacy.
Perhaps these analyses are telling us something more about how we see the world itself. If oral cultures stabilised knowledge through formulae because memory was fragile, and print cultures stabilised knowledge through writing because permanence was possible, our present condition seems to stabilise knowledge only provisionally. Words are used in a tactical rather than eternal manner, given they survive until the algorithm notices, or until another code takes their place. And as words shape how we think, then the world surely looks less like a set of fixed categories than a shifting landscape in which survival depends on agility.
Conclusions
In the early 90s, before widespread use of social media, the sociologist Anthony Giddens described the time as being marked by reflexive doubt. Even in an era of expanding science and expertise, knowledge could never be fully settled: it was always provisional, subject to revision, constantly reinterpreted in light of new evidence and shifting contexts.
Social media has accelerated this condition. In feeds where words can vanish overnight, where meanings shift with each update to the algorithm, reflexive doubt is no longer an abstract sociological diagnosis but an everyday experience. So, on this basis, “Unalive” is not just a euphemism but a hedge against algorithmic erasure, a stopgap word until the rules change. To speak today is to anticipate misrecognition and adapt in advance, to live with language that is permanently in beta.
We might then see algospeak and even AI’s em dashes as small signs of a much larger condition. If print culture taught us to see the world as fixed and analysable, algorithmic orality teaches us to see it as provisional, tactical, and always at risk. Ong showed us how orality and literacy reshaped human thought, ‘algospeak’ suggests a new stage: an algorithmic orality that makes language, and the world itself that it is naming, as provisional, tactical, and always in flux.