A review of Algospeak by Adam Aleksic
Heya! So, we're doing a new thing over at the gazette, said thing being a book club!
...If that link is dead right now: It'll be up somewhere near the end of this month.
Anyways, for this months book, we decided on Algospeak by Adam Aleksic.
Bottomline up front: Would I recommend this?
If you're online enough to be reading this post on bear - absolutely not. That's part of the problem the book has. I can imagine it being mildly entertaining to someone mostly unfamiliar with the origins of modern online slang, but if you've been on the english speaking web for any meaningful amount of time, a good chunk of what gets talked about will be stuff you already know.
Another big problem here is focus. The book never really commits to any one thing. There's a bit of actual linguistics talk, there's some general web history, there's some parts where Adam talks about his story as an influencer, its all very unfocused, the book really lacks any sort of narrative throughline. Its very meandering and never really goes in-depth into any one topic. Despite being a book "about" linguistics, Adam Aleksic never really digs particularly deep into the subject. For every slang word we get a couple of terms thrown around, some basic ideas are explained, and then we move on. It feels more like a really big essay that quickly overstays its welcome, than it does a book.
Thats the problem, I think. Adam Aleksic is a tiktoker, and this book very much feels like fifty or so tiktok video scripts ductaped together to make a book. The writing is incredibly forgettable in a way that makes it genuinely hard to read the book for more than a couple of minutes at a time. In the end, the only way I managed to finish the whole thing was by forcing myself to on my 8 hour flight back from Japan.
I think what made it especially difficult was that I had read "This is for everyone" not long before starting this book. Its an incredible autobiography written by Tim-Berners Lee and is written absolutely phenomallly well. You learn some really interesting things about the history of the internet, and it was genuinely hard to put down when I was reading it. Contrasting it with Algospeak, just made those weaknesses stand out so much more.
Every chapter in Algospeak follows more or less the same structure:
There's a silly chapter title that usually contains an internet slang word.
Adam Aleksic talks about where the internet slang word comes from.
This takes up, if I had to say, maybe 200 or 300 words of the chapter.
The remainder of every chapter though, is him then connecting that to various random concepts about how social media influences our lives, which, just is not interesting at all. Mostly because the things he talks about are all very basic stuff you'd know about if you spend even a bit of time online.
This book is at its best when he talks about etymology, the evolution of language, all that good stuff. I actually had some fun reading the chapter about ballroom culture and the homogenization of language. Thing is, he never does enough of that, any and all etymolygy talk that happens is only skin-deep. This book really would have benefitted immensely if he'd just cut the personal anecdotes and the meandering and just focused way more on linguistics. And, most importantly, gave the book an actual narrative throughline. All of the chapters feel vaguely disconnected, they're just a new opportunity for Adam to talk about a new thing. This book, I feel, would have been one thousand times better if it was structured as a journey through the history of internet slang and its etymolygy. Start out with leetspeek or whatever, then go forward through time and explain the etymolygy of how language on the web evolved, and what pressures led to that.
As-is, I wouldn't call the book actively awful, but it is very very forgettable, and boring to read. Where it not for this book club, I wouldn't have read past chapter one. It just feels like a worse version of Adam's short videos. And if your book makes me think "I'd rather be watching Youtube", then you really have a problem. All in all, This is feels very much like it was a book made so Adam Aleksic could say he made a book. The medium here felt completely unnecessary and just dragged everything down. I'd rather the writing be redone completely with more of a connecting narrative throughline, or that he'd just make this book into like 50 shorts instead.
I'd give the book a 3/10. Not unreadable, but god knows I wouldn't recommend it.