It’s getting harder and harder to isolate any single fume wafting from the dumpster fire that is Elon Twitter, but once in a while an especially noxious tendril reaches out and really tickles the nostrils. This weekend, apparently apropros of nothing, Musk tweeted “My pronouns are PROSECUTE/FAUCI.” This earned him praise from the usual gang of idiots, which is the coin of the realm for your terminally online billionaire. But it’s not the content of the tweet that set me off. It’s the lack of content — or maybe, more accurately, its post-content.
For some time now, I’ve been trying to find the right words to describe what I see as an erosion in the way people communicate. The Internet more broadly, social media more narrowly, and Twitter most particularly are demonstrating a fundamental change in our language (I can’t say whether they’re causing or hastening the change). I’m not talking about a coarser or meaner discourse. That may also be happening, but it’s not new. I’m talking about something else: I think the way humans use language is changing.
I’m no linguist, but I think I can roughly summarize the evolution of language like this: at first, cavemen realized they could convey ideas to one another by movement and gesture, and eventually by sound. A lot of animals communicate this way still. Dogs can’t speak but they can bark, growl, and whine, and most people intuitively understand what each of these sounds mean. Early humans went further. They were able to assign sounds to things. When I say “fire” and point at the fire, my cousin Ugg understands that the sound “fire” now symbolizes the hot burning thing.
That’s not the real advancement, though. The real advancement is that, having learned the word, Ugg and I can now use it even when there is no fire anywhere in sight, and it instantly summons for both of us a shared understanding. Fire is warmth, light, safety. That opens up many more avenues for communication. Because while there may be some use in talking about a fire that’s right in front of us, it’s even more useful to talk about a fire that isn’t there. Do we need to build one before nightfall? Is there a wildfire coming that we need to warn the tribe about? Knowing the word allows us to talk about things that have happened in the past, may happen in the future, and need to happen now.
Whether language drove cognition or cognition drove language isn’t something I can say, but it is obvious that they co-developed. Words for concrete observations — “Ugg is smiling” — lead to words for abstract ones — “Ugg is happy.” Not only does each word carry a payload of meaning in isolation, but its meaning may change and it may change the meaning of others when they are arranged in a particular order. This spins out pretty quickly into chains of thought and action with an elaborate logical underpinning. “Ugg is shivering because Ugg is cold, but if I build a fire then Ugg will be warm and then he will be happy.”
I’ve always sort of considered the development of language to be an onward-and-upward type of thing. Scholars, philosophers, essayists, and novelists have been in conversation with each other and with the entire history of the written and spoken word to create ever more thoughtful and intricate works. I think you can say without controversy that this has been a net positive for humanity.
That brings us to today, when we’re in an era of mass literacy. (I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not about to suggest that we’d be better off if fewer people could read.) If the development of language made an inevitability of mass communication, then in a way the evolution of language was like a wave approaching the beach. It built and built until it crashed, and the crash was not the creation of the Gutenberg press but the creation of Wordpress. Suddenly everyone is a publisher. And this, by itself, is neither a bad nor a good thing.
The problem is that the evolution of language is outpacing our ability to understand the changes. Not only do words no longer refer to concrete things, they no longer refer to anything. They are drained of meaning as they’re being learned by more people at a faster pace. Where once I could point at the thing and say “fire,” and Ugg could look at the thing and hear “fire,” now Ugg can’t see what I’m pointing at. But he’s already pointing at something else and saying “fire” to the next guy.
Increasingly, the goal of language isn’t to convey the content but to replicate the form. Something is a joke because it looks like a joke, not because it carries the cargo of humor. In the same way that Pacific Islanders supposedly mimicked the rituals of American servicemen in order to summon planes that would drop food and supplies — making coconut radios, for instance, or crude wooden “rifles” — we’ve become a society of people trying desperately to assemble the right combination of sounds and symbols that will conjure what we desire.
No one exemplifies this more than Elon Musk. A billionaire multiple times over, he’s hooked on the rush of likes and retweets and he’ll chase them however he needs to. Like his followers, he believes on a lizard-brain level that if he repeats what has earned attention for others, he might get it for himself. Lucky for him, in his case he’s right.
That’s how you end up with the richest man alive (probably not anymore), once hailed as a visionary inventor, tweeting “My pronouns are PROSECUTE/FAUCI” at 6 AM on a Sunday to the tune of over a million likes. The argument isn’t whether it’s a good or a bad joke. It’s not a joke at all. It just looks like one from the right angle. The familiar sounds are invoked as a signaling mechanism but any two words could have followed “My pronouns are” and the effect would have been exactly the same. His followers would applaud and his foes would gripe. And that, in a post-lingual age, is all that matters.
The definition of the word is no longer the meaning of the word. The meaning of the word is derived only from its transmission. There are a handful of people broadcasting the word to millions of people, each of whom is rebroadcasting it and hoping to shine in the reflected light. Most of them never will, but it’s not for lack of trying. Like our friends in the South Pacific, they’ll refine their marching drills and soon enough that cargo plane will come buzzing over the horizon.
To be clear, this is not strictly a right versus left phenomenon. Many popular tweets I’d characterize as coming from the left do the same thing. “Checks notes,” “send tweet,” “y’all ain’t ready to have that conversation,” etc. Rarely does this mimetic language add anything to the intended meaning of the tweet, but it serves a decorative function in attracting the right audience. The major difference, of course, is that people tweeting “checks notes” are annoying, while people tweeting “my pronouns are” want to kill you.
The lack of concern for what things mean is not itself a new phenomenon, but like a lot of these trends it feels like it’s been supercharged lately. It’s how you get breathless “Twitter Files” exposes by self-styled independent journalists who seem to consider it immaterial whether a banned Twitter account was banned for, say, posting stolen nudes or, I don’t know, inciting violence. It’s how you get signs all over town that say “LET’S GO BRANDON” without the people who put up those signs immediately dying of shame. It’s how you get wealthy, powerful people bleating at each other across state-of-the-art technology while managing to exchange less useful information than me and Ugg managed to do by the campfire.
If the wave of language has broken on the shore of reason and is now receding into the post-lingual sea, where does that leave us? (Besides mounting a one-man campaign to torture a metaphor to death, that is?) Blaming everything on Twitter is too pat, and besides, it’s naive to think that everything would improve if Twitter disappeared tomorrow. Citing a fatal flaw in humanity is too pessimistic even for me. Mandatory poetry readings would be nice, but probably not workable. I just don’t know.
This is where I would ordinarily try to say something uplifting or at least not hopeless. But I don’t like to say things I don’t mean.
