Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Living in an immigrant, multilingual family will open your eyes to all the ways humans can misunderstand each other. My story isn’t unique, but I grew up unable to communicate in my family’s “default language.” I was forbidden from speaking Korean as a child. My parents were fluent in spoken and written English, but their accents often left them feeling unwelcome in America. They didn’t want that for me, and so I grew up with perfect, unaccented English. I could understand Korean and, as a small child, could speak some. But eventually, I lost that ability.

I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.

This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated.

It made everything twice as complicated. I shared caretaking duties with non-English speaking relatives. Doctor visits — both here and in Korea — had to be bilingual, which often meant appointments were longer, more stressful, expensive, and full of misunderstandings. Oftentimes, I’d want to connect with my stepmom or aunt, both to coordinate care and vent about things only we could understand. None of us could go beyond “I’m sad,” “I come Monday, you go Tuesday,” or “I’m sorry.” We struggled alone, together.

You need much less to “survive” in another language. That’s where Google Translate excels. It’s handy when you’re traveling and need basic help, like directions or ordering food. But life is lived in moments more complicated than simple transactions with strangers. When I decided to pull off my mom’s oxygen mask — the only machine keeping her alive — I used my crappy pidgin to tell my family it was time to say goodbye. I could’ve never pulled out Google Translate for that. We all grieved once my mom passed, peacefully, in her living room. My limited Korean just meant I couldn’t partake in much of the communal comfort. Would I have really tapped a pin in such a heavy moment to understand what my aunt was wailing when I knew the why?

For high-context languages like Japanese and Korean, you also have to be able to translate what isn’t said — like tone and relationships between speakers — to really understand what’s being conveyed. If a Korean person asks you your age, they’re not being rude. It literally determines how they should speak to you. In Japanese, the word daijoubu can mean “That’s okay,” “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” “Yes,” “No, thank you,” “Everything’s going to be okay,” and “Don’t worry” depending on how it’s said.

Some pointed out that labeling nei ge or its pronunciation as offensive, as the USC ​administration seemed to do, following the letter, only makes sense within an Anglophone bubble – that doing so portrays the Chinese language as subject to English rules rather than independent and possessing its own contexts

The Black China Caucus, an American organization that describes itself as “amplifying Black voices in the China space,” also defended Patton on Twitter. “The BCC is shocked by how USC mishandled this situation,” the organization posted. “Not only would a quick Mandarin lesson reveal that “nèi ge” is a common pronoun, but USC’s reaction cheapens and degrades substantive conversations surrounding real (diversity, equity and inclusion) challenges on college campuses!”

resist the urge to add immediate value. Instead we have to hold space for a more vulnerable, honest and open relationship with our client - to allow them to open up more fully and to work on things that are useful, even if not in scope.

While giving advice can help you be seen as knowledgeable, it doesn’t necessarily build trust.

“You should…” It’s a simple sounding phrase but it gets you in trouble more often than not. It’s problematic for two reasons: it assumes a control of client resources and it’s too prescriptive in form

We typically don’t have a complete view of everything that the company is working on, we don’t have a detailed understanding of how long things actually take or the full range of dependencies required for them.

Example: working with a client where I wanted to re-design a landing page on their site to improve it. Unfortunately I was under-estimating the number of people who need to be involved since the landing pages were still owned by the product team and are technically part of the same codebase as the full tech product. So a “small” change required detailed security scrutiny and QA before going live. Making “simple” changes was not in fact simple at all here.

Example: working with the NYTimes cooking team I suggested that they should re-tag their content. This kind of “you should…” recommendation seemed straightforward but neglected the political considerations - the team had just spent 6-figures on re-tagging all their recipes - so to ask for further budget to re-do a task they had just done would lose them face internally. A “straightforward” change that actually carried a bunch of political baggage.

Some other types of complexity that you might be under-estimating with regards resource allocation: Regulation/compliance complexity - which either prevents you even doing your recommendation or makes it slower. Technical complexity - while something might be technically easy, doing it with the client’s existing technology might be hard. Data complexity - a simple seeming request on the surface (make a landing page for every neighborhood) might actually depend on a robust, maintained data set that doesn’t yet exist. Maintenance complexity - even if the initial request to create something or do something is not resource intensive, it might come with an implicit agreement to continue to maintain it - expanding the resources allocated. Production complexity - where what you’re proposing isn’t that expensive or resource intensive to do, but the client (for whatever reason) has a higher quality threshold, making the recommendation more expensive/slower/harder than you anticipated. Narrative complexity - where what you’re recommending seems reasonable but either the company has tried it before, or a competitor has tried it before or there’s a general sense that “this doesn’t work”. Which can make your recommendation extremely hard to actually get done.

When we say “You should…” we’re essentially offering a problem diagnosis AND a solution at the same time. The consequence of this is that we’re essentially asking the client to accept or reject both together.

most of your work would be more effective at actually changing clients if you stopped to clearly separate the diagnosis from the solution.

if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.

A good mental exercise to ensure you’re doing the work here is to ask yourself: what happens if the client takes no action? What is the consequence of the current trajectory, or the null case of no investment?

By showing what’s possible, clients are able to feel more invested in designing the solution with you, rather than just being told what to do.

clients deeply appreciate you clearly separating out expert opinion and judgment from evidence-based analysis.

A good process for the advisor to follow is: Give them their options Give them an education about their options (including enough discussion for them to consider each option in depth) Give them a recommendation Let them choose

Taking a collaborative stance with your client is powerful. There are many aspects of consulting that are almost combative by nature - like pointing out problems the client has (that the client was complicit in creating!).

I find in my own work that senior executives are often blocked by some inability to see what’s actually going on - and that telling them is useless! Instead you need to help them see it for themselves.

Because of their distance from the day to day work, senior executives are especially prone to replacing some version of reality with a compressed narrative. And when this compressed narrative is wrong in some key way you need to return to first principles to show them (not tell them!).

Your sense of “what’s going on” with a client is intermediated by your point of contact and it turns out that your client is an unreliable narrator.

When a client comes to you asking for a “content strategy” or support “hiring a VP marketing” it all seems so straightforward, rational and well defined. But as you unpack the layers of the onion you begin to realize why it’s been so hard for the client to help themselves. And that’s when the emotional and political complexity of the problem starts to come into view.

if the work is done effectively, it requires that the consultant be both involved enough in the dynamics so as to experience their impact and detached enough so as to analyze what is transpiring. These demands make imperative the use of oneself as tool.

always work on the next most useful thing. This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.

I delivered what I think is good quality work with a deeply researched and evidence-based 66-page strategy for producing content and…. Nothing happened? They were happy enough with the work product but it didn’t lead to any material change in their strategy or an ongoing consulting relationship. In hindsight the key mistake here was not asking myself enough what the next most useful thing was. I think if I’d been more honest about what would add value and show momentum for the client it would have been either a) condensed one or two slide summary of the content opportunity for their fundraising deck and/or b) supporting their VP marketing recruitment effort.

Either you’re telling the client “draw some circles” and the client is frustrated the advice is too basic and high level. Or you’re telling the client to “draw the rest of the fucking owl” and are ignoring the detailed reality of the situation and the limitations of teams, resources and capabilities.

Or worse, the client asked you for help drawing owls but what they’re really doing is painting a woodland scene…

Think about this image next time a client comes to you for help drawing owls - your first response shouldn’t be “Oh, that’s easy, first you draw some circles”, it should be “Show me how your owls look today. What do you think is holding you back from drawing better owls? And why is drawing owls important to you right now?”

Remember - it’s about adopting a collaborative, trusted stance with clients. And that might require resisting your initial urge to give advice. Instead you need to listen to the full emotional and political situation and then work with the client to re-examine reality in new and surprising ways. Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.

When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history.

Tone Work is not new. But technological advances that promised to allow us to communicate more efficiently have, in practice, also allowed us to communicate more, and created an expectation that all others communicate more in return. Hence: overflowing email accounts, proliferating group texts (and group text guilt), hours if not days dedicated to catching up on Slack. Dealing with that communication is exhausting, in part because it involves so much tone work.

I started grading, which meant I had to figure out the “compliment sandwich” at the end of the essay. The first sentence would start with praise, then an em-dash, then the real news: what needed work. A short list of things to refine, ending with encouragement, almost always capped with an exclamation point. This is a fantastic first draft, and I look forward to seeing the second! An embodiment of my teaching style, really: I’m so happy you’re here, I want us to talk seriously about how to become better writers and thinkers, but I also don’t ever want you to leave a conversation or class or piece of feedback from me feeling like shit.

If you think someone’s written communication style is off, or wrong, or bitchy: see if it’s possible to clarify their intention without asking them to change their tone.

When Banks is able to establish sufficient shared vocabulary to ask why the aliens have come, they answer with a statement that could be translated as "offer weapon". China interprets this as "use weapon", prompting them to break off communications, and other nations follow. Banks argues that the symbol interpreted as "weapon" can be more abstractly related to the concepts of "means" or "tool"; China's translation likely results from interacting with the aliens using mahjong, a highly competitive game.

If you are using emotionally independent language, it may trigger some insecurities in the other person who may think that you aren’t as interested or invested in the relationship. It may be helpful to let the other person know that you are working on your emotional reactivity and trying out new approaches, to help minimize the potential perceived threat on their end.

Becoming emotionally independent can be a challenging journey, although there are numerous potential benefits to reclaiming your own needs and desires and decreasing your emotional reactivity to other people (i.e., managing your own insecurities or unproductive relationship expectations).

By engaging in self-soothing strategies prior to starting the conversation, you can begin to neutralize your anxiety so that you don’t start the conversation prematurely in an emotionally reactive way. You want to be able to hear what your loved one is saying to you without reacting from a place of fear, sadness, or anger. This is part of creating emotional independence. The objective is to create some distance between you and your loved one so that you can understand their experience independent of it being seen as a reflection of your value or the stability of your relationship.

“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

The philosopher Jane Bennett noted that matter is vibrant—everyday detritus, even trash in the gutter, can emit its own vibe that capitalist consumerism encourages us to ignore. The year’s most poignant piece of trash was a wrinkled face mask, paper or cloth, left strewn on the ground, its strings tangled, its symbolic hygiene demolished. There’s an abjectness to the mask; it’s the kind of detail a future movie would pan past in order to evoke the time period’s general despair.

“Liminal Spaces” VibesOffice-building hallway. Dead-end street. Loading dock. Nighttime hotel atrium. @SpaceLiminalBot is a Twitter account with more than four hundred and eighty thousand followers that tweets photos of “liminal spaces”: disused, off-hours, haunted. The mood is spooky but also calm; in these spaces, nothing happens. By definition, “liminal” means “transitional,” a threshold. (What qualifies, exactly, is hotly debated on the r/LiminalSpace subreddit.) But it became a meme in 2021, the year of liminality, its meaning expanded to describe pretty much anything empty and weird. Examples of liminal vibes include the Twitter account @gameauras, which collects “video game images with elegiac auras” and tweets screenshots of virtual liminal spaces, and the TikTok account @pineacre, which films montages of mundane institutions (laundromats, grocery stores) in the Arkansas Ozarks.

There is no better reminder of the combination of convenience and ennui of working from home than a mug of coffee going cold. You get up to microwave it, then repeat the process thirty minutes later. Even the mug seems exhausted.

There is the "just asking questions" rhetorical trick, where someone asks something that sounds a lot like an outlandish assertion, and then defends themselves by suggesting they don't actually believe this thing — they're just asking if maybe it's worth considering.

There is also the “firehose” trick, which essentially amounts to saying so many untrue things in such a short period of time that refuting them all is nearly impossible.

Much more difficult, for all of us, is to engage the best ideas you disagree with, think about them honestly, and explain clearly why you don't agree. And even more difficult is to debate honestly, discover that the other person has made stronger arguments, adapt your position and grow.

Omitting key information in arguments, or omitting counter-evidence to central claims, is just one bad argument style that is common in politics.

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it'd take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed.

Bothsidesism: Naturally, this is what I get accused of the most. I'd describe bothsidesism as a cousin of whataboutism. Wikipedia defines it as "a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports." An example might be presenting a debate about human-caused climate change and giving equal air time to two sides: Humans are causing climate change vs. humans aren't causing climate change.Given that the scientific consensus on climate change is robust, arranging an argument this way would lend credence to the idea that scientists (or people in general) are evenly divided on the issue, even though they aren't.

A straw man argument is when you build an argument that looks like, but is different than, the one the other person is making — like a straw man of their argument. You then easily defeat that argument, because it’s a weaker version of the actual argument.For instance, in a debate on immigration, I recently made the argument that we should pair more agents at the border with more legal opportunities to immigrate here, a pretty standard moderate position on immigration. I was arguing with someone who was on the very left side of the immigration debate, and they responded by saying something along the lines of, "The last thing we need is more border agents shooting migrants on the border."Of course, my argument isn't for border agents to shoot migrants trying to cross into the U.S., which is a reprehensible idea that I abhor. This is a straw man argument: Distorting an opposing argument to make it weaker and thus easier to defeat.

"The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat."

This is classic moving of the goalposts. We went from “there weren't classified documents” to “they were classified but not that serious” to “they may have been classified but the raid was unjust unless there were nuclear secrets” to "okay, but he wasn’t selling the nuclear secrets to Russia."

The "prove a negative" argument is when someone insists that you prove to them something didn't happen or isn't true, which implies that they have evidence something did happen or is true — but they don’t actually present that evidence.For instance, if I asked you to prove that aliens don't exist, you might have a hard time doing it. Sure, you could argue that we don't have an alien body locked up in some government facility (or do we?), but you’d have a hard time listing the contents of every government facility. And if you could somehow do that, you haven’t proved that aliens don't exist at all, or even that they've never been to Earth. But the burden of proof isn't on you to show me that aliens don't exist, it's for me to show you evidence that they do.This was, in my experience, one of the most frustrating things about some of the early claims that the 2020 election was stolen. A lot of people were alleging that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes from Trump to Biden, and then insisting that someone must prove this didn't happen. But the burden of proof was not to show that it didn't happen (proving a negative), it was to show that it did happen. Which nobody ever did.

“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people.

Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in

woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real

Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today.

The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits.

Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly

The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy)

You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.

The fixation on emotions fits snugly in the assumption of the individual as the basic unit of politics. It also ensures that woke politics assume the possibility of a frictionless universe in which everyone feels good all the time.

Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.

Problems can’t be solved gradually through small steps over time, but only through revolutionary change, which itself will inevitably be blocked by the white-cis-male power structure. Everything sucks all the time, which incidentally justifies yelling all the time for people who enjoy yelling

I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.