The Oxford Dictionary's word of the year is "rage bait". The Macquarie Dictionary's is "AI slop". Cambridge Dictionary's is "parasocial". Dictionary.com's is "67".
There's something wrong, isn't there? So wrong that it is leaving a slug-like trace over even the words we use. The web is broken. And it's all we can talk about.
These are the words we have to do so. We have only a growing dictionary of words to describe our misery, from outright unpleasantness in the form of rage bait to fundamentally meaningless in the form of 6-7.
It wasn't always this way. For most of the 2010s, when the "word of the year" was coined, it didn't have anything much to of with the Internet. Through the part of this decade that was infected by covid, our words were inflected by it too. But, now, our freshest and most important words seem only about how miserable we are.
The words of the year seem to track our relationship with the internet as it becomes both more obsessed and more disillusioned. Last year's Oxford word of the year, for instance, was "brain rot", and 2022 was "goblin mode". But through the 2010s the words were largely about real things that were actually happening. "Climate emergency" (2019) and "youthquake" (2017). They might have their roots online but they were flowering in the real world.
The words of the 2020s have none of the grist of real life. At their least online, they are more precise ways of describing how we don't want to be on the computer; but, really, they are better ways of talking about how upset the computer makes us.
This seems to reflect a broader unhappiness in the real world. People have always complained about the web, of course, and social media has only expedited and amplified that. But recent years have brought a social media that seems quite precisely built to upset us. One can make a broad systemic argument about the ways that algorithms promote disagreement and feeds present us with quick dopamine. But it is less complicated than that, isn't it: when was the last time you had fun online?
It might just be ageing, of course. I am writing this from the grumpy seclusion of my 30s, when one is waving goodbye to a youthful supposed golden age and is incentivised to seeing the world as being in decline. But I don't think this is pure fuddy-duddyism; other glimpses of culture, from film to music, remain thrilling and fresh, and there is online content that makes me feel an old kind of joy.
This internet is turning dry just as Australia launches its long-awaited and much-discussed ban on social media for under-16s. The criticisms are many: that it won't work properly, and that banning something might not be the best way to deal with any problems even if it would work. But few people would deny there is a problem to fix.
Our relationship with today's web is often described as addictive; it's accurate, no doubt, but imprecise. Previously, it was thought of something that could be addictive but that was important and nourishing at the same time; more like food, perhaps, and indeed the screen time recommendations we use today are based on a nutritional paradigm. Today, the way we talk about the internet has changed: it is a kind of empty addiction, joyless, like being dependent on the slot machines in a casino, which is for the most part what it resembles.
Even still, the desire to get offline is mediated through online culture. Only this morning my Twitter feed was full of replies to a tweet by a man who said he wants "to be life maxing more" and the replies were all telling him to look somewhere else. "Get off your phone", started one post, which I read on my phone screen on the commute into the office.
This is, surely, the same relationship with the internet that these new words such as "rage bait" have. They are words that describe our own misery – but in doing so they don't elevate us from it, only offer us a more precise understanding of the hell that surrounds us.
Rage bait itself might be the ultimately example of this. Tell someone that you're annoyed that we have elevated such a negative word to the height of our vocabulary and someone might suggest that it is doing its job quite precisely. "U mad bro?" the internet would once ask; "rage baited", it might today point out.
And they are right, of course; you are mad, you have been successfully baited. But – as we flail like a caught fish – what does anyone have to show for it? New words, for a newly unhappy internet.
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