I heard a coworker describe how she is now referred to as a "legal representative" to her children, instead of simply a 'parent'. Supposedly, and this is my own speculation, the term "parent" doesn't apply to the situation of every child, as some are orphans and have a caretaker instead of a relative in their charge, and so they decided to use the more general term.
I can see how this has good intentions, but it almost makes me think of how it reflects the fungible nature of the system we live in, a system entirely comprised of replaceable parts, not just mechanical but also institutional. It needs to integrate more and more people, processes and contexts, which means that it needs to develop language to cover all kinds of cases, and thus has to use the most generic terms possible.
Imagine a parallel reality where a man no longer says that he spent his Saturday with his wife and son playing frisbee, but instead that he engaged in a recreational activity (frisbee is offensive because it implies that you have arms to throw and legs to run) with a closely related young person (child is offensive because not everyone can have a child) and their partner of similar age (can't mention gender because that is offensive) during the afternoon of day 154 of the year 2028. (Saturday evokes Saturn, in the context of Hellenistic Astrology to give us the names of the 7 days of the week, which has now been discarded because it is not scientific enough)
Orwell was really onto something when he identified how language can paralyze our freedom, through restricting what we can even perceive as real, not just what we can communicate. A restricted, disenchanted language is a reflection of a tyrannical and dead world, where freedom and beauty are not even thinkable, let alone expressible.
People's vocabulary is increasingly limited, not just because people read less and less, but more importantly because they experience less and less, both in terms of breadth, for everyone is plugged into a screen most of the time now and experiences the same media which copies everything else, but also in terms of depth, through the act of sensual communion, experiencing the vividness of life through your direct senses.
All of this is because direct experience is utterly useless in our times. It doesn't make you a better cog to fit in the rest of the machine, a machine which is getting more and more complicated as the years go by, requiring more and more time and energy to even fit into. What work requires of you is not consciousness and mastery of your self and your tools, but simply obedience and predictable output, which is why so-called "artificial intelligence" is such a threat to office workers, because they already are artificial and replaceable to begin with.
Sensitivity to direct experience doesn't necessarily make for good subjects of conversation either, because most people cannot relate with it. They want to discuss the news, or whatever comes out of Hollywood's stinking pipes, not the beauty of simple experiences which artists endeavor to convey, or the mind-blowing reality of love shared by a couple. As the book of Chuang Tzu says very well, you cannot talk of the ocean to a frog, for it is confined to its narrow space. In fact, it prefers its confinement because it feels safe, as opposed to the wild unpredictability of the ocean.
Thus the prison we find ourselves in is not merely found in the external, through all the institutions, laws and regulations that prevent us from being free, but is also found internally, as evidenced by the simple fact that most people in their free time constantly turn to screens to numb themselves. Apathy is what rules our world, on top of all the restrictions we have to abide by. This is why most people have trouble reading anything longer than a few paragraphs, because they don't care, because they don't care about anything.
It's much easier to turn on the news, or a social media feed, or a video game, because those beam images directly in your eyes without you having to put any effort in them. Some younger people say that they "enjoy" video games, but they say this in contrast to an education system which forces them to pay attention to a bunch of lessons they couldn't care less about, and in contrast to a physical world which is increasingly neglected in favor of the expansion of the digital "reality" we have to interact with. Which is to say, people don't enjoy video games themselves, so much as they prefer it to the rest of our wasteland, as well as the fact that video games plug you into an effortless feedback loop of action and responses, 1 which our frustrating institutional world of restrictions and complications doesn't have in comparison.
It's also quite shocking to realize that even though most people spend most of their time in front of a screen, few are even paying attention to what is going on there! It's quite common for someone to boot up a movie, or a TV show, or a video, and in the meantime scroll on social media or play a video game, doing both things half-attentively. This is why so many things are made with such low effort nowadays, because the producers implicitly know that few people are even paying attention to what is going on. Why put effort into having characters who have an authentic soul and interact with one another in lively dialogues and interactions when most people don't care and just want something to pass the time?
Slop dominates in our world because the internal life of most people is, as depressing as it is to say, dead. The wasteland we live in, whether it is the cities we "inhabit", drive around in a car and stay in the same buildings for most of our time, or the cultural wasteland which brings us the movies and shows to our screens, is a reflection of the wasteland of most people's interiority.
Artificial intelligence has become (seemingly) successful for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with the availability of cheap and powerful hardware, the gargantuan amount of data provided with the internet, and not so much in terms of any progress in terms of software. But the cultural reason why it effortlessly fits into the rest is because ultimately, most of people's interior life already is slop, which is why our language is so bland and so few people are truly inspiring. They might be clever and very well-read, but the spring of life from which true geniuses drink from is nowhere to be seen, which is why artificial intelligence is indeed a real threat to our already dead world, because it doesn't have to contend with passionate men or loving women, but simply replaceable ciphers programmed to work on a few mind-numb tasks all day long.
Darren Allen has a fantastic series of essays on Neopeak, which covers a variety of subjects related to language, such as how metaphors have been hollowed of all of their vitality, how the image has supplanted the word, and the second one (available for free) specifically deals with Plastickese, which is what my piece points towards, the "plastic words which are to speech what processed food is to nutrition" as he says himself.
1 What makes video games engaging is that they present you with very few meaningful options to choose from, which means you can just keep doing, and doing, and doing, without ever slowing down or introspecting. At the core of every successful video game is a sort of addictive loop which few people, certainly not the developers or the players, want to recognize.
Some of the gems from that essay:
Man is no longer recognizable in language. He can no longer give a true representation of himself’ because he is possessed by a 'madness of general concepts.'A quote from Nietzsche in this case
On nominilisation, the process of turning words into static nouns:
Turning experience into nouns, split off from the whole flow of meaning, makes them baffling in their abstractness, a bafflement which finds itself recorded in the annals of Western philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, over and over again, that there is ultimately no such thing as the kind of ‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’, ‘morality’, ‘goodness’, ‘truth’ and ‘consciousness’ that philosophers and scientists search for. There is only life, activity and experience. When we use words we do so in situations that give those words meaning, not in order to get a series of rule-bound definitions from my mind into yours, as if the inner life of the other could be ‘sucked out through a straw’
We shouldn’t be surprised that modern philosophers spend their lives sucking at meaning through their tiny mental straws. They are just doing what any other priest or technician is paid to do, take ideas out of context in order to take possession of them. Economists do the same with land and labour. Academics rarely see a need for contextual thinking, for viewing an utterance in the milieu or even the passage in which it is made, because to do so would entail paying attention to a context that they are employed to ignore. The tunnel-vision of journalists is even narrower; one only has to open a newspaper to find a concept picked out from times past as one would a single note from a symphony, which, we are then told, makes no sense, or is boring, or, hark, is the siren call of the enemy.
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Graydystopia Language Newspeak Soup Apathy
2026-01-08