algospeak

2025-10-21

For this month's Grizzly Gazette Book Club¹, we picked Algospeak by Adam Aleksic to read and blog about. I was very much dreading writing this post as I knew I was going to be very harsh in it since i didn't enjoy reading the book itself.

Initially, I was excited to read this book as it promised to explain the rapid invention of words and development of language on social media, which frankly it did, although it didn't go far enough. 15% into the book, the author was still trying to convince his readers that Algospeak was real. Nothing against arguing for long about the existence of anything, however, if your book is 200 pages and you spend 30 of that simply repeating yourself over and over again, we're having a problem, namely that you're trying to fill up whitespace without really saying anything.

It seems like he had a page cap he had to reach and ran out of anything evidence-based to write about towards the end so he went back to the beginning to add more examples. If he hadn't spent all those pages giving anecdotal examples after anecdotal example, I wouldn't have been as unsatisfied as I was. Algospeak is such a complex socio-linguistic development that can't be satisfied with the equivalent of a TikTok video series in written form. It needed more, much more.

I wish he had explained his methodology in surveying parents and teachers, the conditions for inclusion in the survey, and maybe a chart to show the results. I wish he hadn't focused so much on individual cases and instead zoomed out to show the big picture. Mostly, I wish he wasn't such a blindly techno-optimistic Silicon Valley plant trying to whitewash the extreme effects algorithms have on language development in particular.

Instead, the author mostly supplied anecdotal evidence for very complex phenomena while supporting that same anecdotal evidence with personal experience as a "Gen Z" TikToker.

Verdict: Such a waste of time; wish I had pirated the book, lol.

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