Spicy Content

Algospeak is coded language designed to circumvent the automatic content moderation of social media algorithms, which flag or restrict posts deemed inappropriate or harmful. Language necessarily must change alongside culture, but when the evolution is fueled by a pressure to become more consumable and advertiser friendly rather than to foster a new means to connect, what do we lose? When we euphemize suicide into un-alived, sex into spicy content, or lesbian into le dollar bean, we create a barrier into conversations about death, mental health, and queer experiences and declare them not for polite spaces, something to hide, to mask. As online spaces have gone from the wild west of the early internet and early dialects of algospeak like 1337 5P34K to its current, much a more corporate internet where over a third of the average person’s time online is spent on a social media site and advertiser friendliness is a concern for even a non-monetized user who simply wants their friends to see their post, trends in how we treat social movements have followed a similar trajectory. The advances in conversations around sex positivity that characterized the 2000’s and early 2010’s online with pioneers like ScarletTeen have been progressively pushed further underground by a national rise in conservatism over the last decade. So, too, has the ability to discuss queer experiences. Since celebrating the bright point that was Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, we have seen the systematic attempts at re-closeting trans people, campaigns to exclude queer people from daily life, and the delisting of their content and art in online spaces. Algospeak is far from the sole force in this shift- it is mainly a symptom that makes it that much harder to connect understanding between each of us.

Watercolor on Cotton Paper