Blessed and emoji-pilled: why language online is so absurd

Forget words! Don’t think! In today’s digitally-mediated landscape, there’s no need for knowledge or understanding, just information. Scroll the feed and you’ll find countless video clips and posts advocating this smooth-brained agenda: lobotomy chic, sludge content, silly girl summer. A sensory overload of visual and sonic stimuli floods our screens through incoherent phrases and soundbites: ice cream and gang gang! Luh calm fit! “Historians in the year 2437 listening to old TikTok sounds trying to understand our culture,” says one meme. Another urges users to “embrace the divine beauty of pure sound” in a clear-pilled serif to the chorus of Pinkydoll and a hundred glittering hearts, prompting some deeply online communities to go as far as to declare, ironically or not: language is so over.

I’m not trying to say that language is over – it’s clearly so not. The fact that I’m writing this article is enough evidence that it will be a long time until we see words dissolve into a characterless void. To entertain this idea, we need to ask ourselves, what do we mean when we say language? “There’s the language of official power – often rendered in archaic or colonial languages across the world – and then there’s the subaltern language of the so-called streets: patwa, vernacular, miscegenated collages of broken sources,” says Shumon Basar, the co-author of The Extreme Self. Maybe it’s easier to understand language, in this chronically online context of social media and internet-speak, as a form of digitally native dialect; one that is growing increasingly peculiar, spiralling into absurdity faster than you can say skibidi.

Anyone who’s ever been in a group chat with 500-plus people can tell you that it doesn’t take much for neologisms to enter our vocabulary. On our screens, images become words, words become emojis: “Pre-existing words and expressions are hijacked, reversed, toxified, appropriated and modified as never before,” says linguist Tony Thorne, “and we all​ now have the power to do this via electronic media – we don't need permission to publish our thoughts and indulge our playful, mischievous or creative new usages.” Whether you’re sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler or you’re cuh dey board, these sounds are literally that: human imitations of cartoon noises and seemingly meaningless soundbites of language that only make sense for those logged-on individuals who’ve fried their brains on TikTok, who are familiar with the nuances of Opium bird, and can name at least five girl-coded trends on rotation right now. Basar agrees: “Words are shorn of their strict content and act as sensory special effects that, when followed to their root, are very close to nothing.”

The same goes for images. “With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” says writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, who specialises in programming language critique. For the meme-fluent, the form isn’t important, but rather the message it carries. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.” To understand this way of “speaking writing posting” means we must embrace the malleability of language, the ambiguities and interpretations – and free it from ‘real-world’ rules.

@theeflea I made this in Miku V4 English using Piapro and Studio One! Animated with Flipnote Studio on Nintendo 3DS! Please enjoy this epic cover!!! #hatsunemiku #vocaloid #miku #skibidi #stickingoutyourgyattfortherizzler #fanumtax #flionotestudio #flipnotehatena #animationmeme #animation #pixelart ♬ original sound - Flea

Some users believe this pivot towards signs and symbols is an indication that we’re returning to times of old, where memes and video clips better resemble a Lascaux cave painting that only the based and esoteric would understand. But symbols have always functioned as placeholders for what we have yet to understand. Whether it’s the climate crisis or conspiracy theories, the algorithm or information overload, there’s a lot we can’t make sense of in the world right now, let alone put into words. The same absurd-isms that drove the dadaists to proclaim ‘dada means nothing’ are echoed in Pinkydoll’s robotic prose: “Yes yes yes. Mmm, ice cream so good. Ooh, you got me feeling like a cowgirl.”

This uncanny online rhetoric reads like an AI text-to-image prompt, as detached and dissociative as lobotomy-core. Hey guys, I just got an order in from Sephora – here’s everything that I got. Get ready with me for a boat day in Miami. Come and spend the day with me – starting off with coffee. TikTok influencers engage in a high-pitched and breathless way of speaking that over-emphasises keywords in a youthful, singsong cadence. For the Attention Economy, it’s the sort of algorithm-friendly repetition that’s quantified by clicks and likes, monetised by engagement for short attention spans. “Now, we have to speak machine with machines that were trained on humans,” says Basar, who refers to this algorithm-led style as promptcore.

But language will always adapt and mutate along with our social needs and technologies. As algorithms digest our online behaviour into data, we resemble a swarm, a hivemind. We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases. I’m reminded of the Tower of Babel; the biblical story of an entire world with a singular language isn’t too dissimilar to the networked one-mind we see playing out across our feeds. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, perhaps it’s inevitable. There’s a playfulness here; we can experiment and express ourselves without limitations. But it’s no secret that language shapes how we think and act, just look at targeted ads. So, before you hit the vow of silence pen and go non-verbal, there’s more at stake than silly phrases and hypertext.

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