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Viral Language
Helena Aeberli looks for rizz in Adam Aleksic’s “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.”
A vernacular that developed in the context of systemic racism and the struggle for power and belonging has now been memeified into “internet slang,” a form of “digital blackface” that Aleksic links to a long tradition of racist stereotyping including 19th-century minstrel theater. This particular iteration of DOGE, once an innocent misspelling of “dog” used to refer to a particularly shifty-looking canine before being slowly co-opted (like Pepe the Frog) by the online Right, has been responsible for the systematic dismantling of American DEI programs, Social Security, and USAID. Copy link to article LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public.
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