Episode 85 - Rob Topinka & digital rhetoric

[Music] Welcome to Lexis, the podcast all about language and linguistics. I'm Lisa Casey and Jackie Glancy. I'm Radirana and I'm Dan Clayton. [Music] On this episode of Lexis we're really pleased to welcome Dr. Robbett Tepinka, who is reader in digital media and rhetoric at Bookback University of London. So welcome Robb, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So you do a lot of work around the language of politics particularly, but also you look at language in relation to sort of digital spaces. On the sort of political angle to begin with, language is clearly being a political battleground for a long time. Why is language so central to some of the political projects of both left and right do you think? Well I think if you think about what politics is, which is a kind of debate over who gets what, what the society's priorities are, what our direction is, what we should prioritize. Then politics is about relationships between people ultimately. And language is a deeply social thing. We sometimes humans are described as tool using animals. The reason we can use tools is because we can share knowledge, we can share ideas, we can share thoughts, we can share beliefs. And all of that we can do because we have language. So it allows us to have a history, to learn from one another, to learn from other cultures. So it's deeply connected to belief, which means it's political. It's connected to how we see the world. And the words we use reflect how we see the world. There's a famous example from American politics. There was this Republican strategist called Frank Lundz, who had a famous book called Words That Work. And one of his famous words that worked was refraising this democratic proposal to have an inheritance tax or an estate tax. So this would be a tax unwelty people passing along huge fortunes. And Frank Lundz framed it as a death tax and started calling it a death tax. And then Republicans all started using this phrase, death tax. And suddenly the inheritance tax became very unpopular because the way it was described connected to a different set of beliefs. Like death tax just sounds scary. It sounds like a punishment for dying. It's not a pleasant thing. So language has this ability to frame how we see things, which makes it a key battleground in politics. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, I've heard a lot of discussion around people like George Lackoff and people that sort of associated with him around the framing of maybe from left-wing framing of things and getting to sort of reframe things by getting politicians and commentators to change your language I use, but clearly the right to doing it as well. Yeah, I mean, the right, and then I'd say recently in some ways better. And there's lots of reasons for that that I suppose we could talk about. But they've been very good at framing political debates around their language. And then once you've committed to one version of one phrase to describe something, you're often sort of committed to a worldview as well once you've done that. So it can be a very powerful thing. If you can frame the terms of the conversation, you're kind of winning the debate already. Yeah. And of course the left are doing this as well. So you've got examples of sort of language policing around political correctness, what some commentators were called, kind of, woke ideologies and all of that. But I guess even using woke in that way is submitting to a kind of right-wing framing of it. Yeah, definitely. And woke is an interesting example because it has a long history in black American culture as a term to describe the way racism affects so many aspects of everyday life. But then it's gotten picked up online and applied to lots of different contexts. And it sort of lost that history and circulated as something like, as you said, sort of a way of policing language or saying, "Sert people can say things, other people can't say things. Your identity determines who can speak," which is not really the original meaning of the term, but that's how the term has started to circulate. That's another part of the politics of languages. Terms are never stable. It's always a kind of competition over who's interpretation will win out. And with wokeness, I'd say, again, this started as a term that I think could have been useful for progressives as a way of thinking about how racism works and then became a kind of insult as the right sort of took it over and used it as a way of saying, "These are liberals being too sensitive, basically," and then trying to police our language, which was not really the original meaning of the term, but in a way that doesn't matter, because that's how the term got reframed and that's how it now circulates. Yeah. And then on the rhetoric side of it, so, as I said, you're a reader in digital media and rhetoric. Low to students will have come across rhetoric as a term. They'll have probably done rhetorical questions. Maybe that's as far as they get. But how do you define what rhetoric is and how it's used? What are some of its key components and functions? I think you can't do better than Aristotle, who's a Greek philosopher, writing just over 2,000 years ago. He defined rhetoric as "the art of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." So that word persuasion is really key. rhetoric is about persuasion. So it's a kind of goal-oriented activity. You're trying to get someone to think the way you think, to believe what you believe, to change their mind. It's also important that it's an art. So it's not just abstract. It's not just philosophical. It's not something you can just talk about and come up with ideas about how to practice it. You actually have to go up and do it. But it's also not something like a recipe where you can follow it step-by-step. So you have to adapt to the situation you're in. So it's somewhere between philosophy and practice. You need skills, but you also need to be able to, and this is another part of that definition, observe the available means of persuasion. So you have to observe what kind of occasion is it. For Aristotle, it would have been probably like a political speech, a speaker in front of an audience. But you could be giving a speech out of wedding or at a funeral, on television, speaking on YouTube. All of these situations would alter the occasion and then change how you speak. Like right now, this is a podcast. I tend to speak with my hands, and that would help maybe in public. You could see me trying to engage with the audience by gesturing and emphasizing certain points, but that doesn't work on a podcast. So I have to really rely on my voice. You also have to think about the audience. What is the audience expecting? What do they already believe? What kind of emotional state are they in? So you can see quickly how rhetoric becomes about history. It becomes about philosophy, it becomes about sociology. There's all these different factors you have to consider. And right now, our technology is really important to rhetoric. We're communicating increasingly through technologies and technologies are shaping how we speak in all sorts of ways. Like I already mentioned, the podcast is very useful for some forms of communication. Maybe less so for others. We have character limits. We run up against on X. We have things like disappearing messages on Snapchat. We have algorithms shaping how things circulate. So there's all these technological factors shaping communication today. And rhetoric is about all of that and tries to take all of it, all of that in at once, and then still find ways to be an effective communicator to persuade, to connect with people. So that's what rhetoric is about. So that's interesting. You bring it into the digital age because I suppose Aristotle was probably, as you say, talking about spoken language initially. You can still apply rhetorical frameworks to the analysis of written texts, I guess. And multi-modal ones, as you say, which are a bit closer to speech. Do we see rhetorical analysis of written texts in the past? Do they approach that analysis in a similar way to the tools of spoken rhetoric? Yeah, written texts certainly have a rhetoric. And there's a history of literary scholars thinking about the rhetoric of novels, the rhetoric of Charles Dickens. And instead of just thinking what kind of story is he telling, thinking about what tactics and strategies is he using to communicate his readership. So there is definitely a lot of rhetorical study of texts. There's a lot of people who study rhetoric who look at written speeches to try to understand rhetorical communication from events that maybe they couldn't witness in person. So Abraham Lincoln is widely studied in the field of rhetoric. Frederick Douglass, who was a former slave, who won his freedom, and then was a campaigner for abolition, and was an incredible speaker. And of course, his speeches weren't recorded, but they were written down. So you can study them in that way. But in some way, one thing that's interesting about what's happening with social media now is, in some ways it's becoming more like oral communication again, partly because of podcasts and YouTube channels, but also because of how fleeting it is oftentimes. So like I mentioned Snapchat already, but you know, Snapchat is an interesting example because so much of what happens on Snapchat is disappearing. It's appears for a moment and then it's gone or you can think of an Instagram story, which isn't really archived anywhere. It's communication in the moment that disappears later. So it's this kind of in rhetoric, there's this word chyros, which means timeliness. So are you posting at the right time? Is someone ready to receive your message? Are you posting at the opportune moment? And a lot of these issues are coming up again with digital media. So there's some ways that digital media and social media sort of take us back to oral culture, even though of course a lot of it involves textual communication as well. Yeah, it seems to be somewhere in the middle, doesn't it? I mean, it's kind of bridging that gap between the kind of, you know, those sort of old fashioned modes, if you like. Yeah. And I mean, you do a lot of work on that in terms of looking at particular spaces, don't you? Digital spaces. But you've been particularly interested in looking at kind of language of extremism in, you know, recent years, I think. I'm given the kind of of current political moment we're in. As you said, the kind of right seems to be doing quite a lot of work on this and the far right seems to be entering the mainstream or being mainstream depending on how you want to look at it. They're often leading the agenda. I think I first came across some of your stuff in an article about the language of in cells and the manosphere. There's the kind of meme culture of 4chan, which lots of people will be familiar with. You've got all the stuff that came from sort of game-a-gate and all of those kind of online places. What's going on with all of that? It seems to be it's a binfire, isn't it? In some respects. Yeah. I'd hear, I mean, here's where there's lots of different things as often happens with rhetoric. It's lots of factors coming together. But I think one thing that's worth thinking about is to sort of what are the logics of digital platforms? What kind of communication do they incentivize? And there's a kind of, like, just to do a very sort of quick history of it, right? It used to seem there was this moment in sort of the 2010s when it felt like social media were going to benefit progressives. And that was when we had the archipy movements, the air spring. Yeah. And the hope was, oh, the gatekeepers have fallen. And so this will allow people who didn't or previously have access to the means of communication to communicate. And that was the air spring story, right? Like, people who lived under regimes that censored their speech now could be a Twitter or Facebook communicate and reach an audience. And that did happen and was really powerful. But then what happened was you had these kind of like networks of people communicating. But then as they came to rely more and more on social media, they were also relying on these companies that were trying to make money in certain ways, right? Yeah. And so Facebook and Twitter started trying to keep more of the communication on the platform. And they started to introduce things like suggested content into our newsfeed, the infinite scroll. It's hard to remember now. And maybe people listening to this will never experienced it. But it used to be you could go on your social media account, Facebook or Twitter, usually in the 2010s. And you could just get to the end. You could scroll down. And there would be no more posts or updates. And you'd say, okay, I'll come back later. Then they introduced the infinite scroll so that it never ended to keep you on the platform longer. And they also introduced suggested content, which was really controversial, particularly on Twitter and Instagram when it first came out. So you started getting content that wasn't from people you followed and wasn't from your network. So it started pushing content in. And then what that what happened then was what happened was whatever was most likely to get a response would be what circulated more widely. And as I think we're used to now, that tends to be emotionally charged content. So content that identifies an enemy, a content that attacks someone, content that maybe taps into your insecurities. And that changed the kind of tenor and the style and the way we communicate on digital platform. And into that shifting context, stepped what was initially called the alt-right. And this was a group of people who primarily initially were on 4chan, which is this message board that is very much committed to free speech, but also to being offensive to often, you know, kind of playful communication, but like, playfully offensive. And that started to get organized into a politics of let's make fun of liberals. Let's attack the progressives. Let's mock them. And then that sort of style of communication worked really well on social media because it was attacking someone, so it would get a response from them. But also it was edgy. It was sort of pushing the boundaries. So it invited people to engage. So that became a strategy that worked really well for the right, which was basically to go and own the lips, to troll the lips as they would call it. And the kind of algorithms we use encourage that kind of behavior because it basically gets a response. And we've gone even further in that direction now with things like TikTok, which on TikTok, it doesn't even matter who you follow. You don't have to follow anyone. You can just start scrolling. And whether you scroll or don't scroll, we'll determine the kind of content you get. But again, what tends to resonate on TikTok is something that is emotionally appealing or emotionally offensive. Either way, it works. This long as you're responding to it. So that's also why the manosphere I think has been so successful because what they tend to do, what manosphere influencers tend to do is tap into people's anxieties and insecurities. So for like teenage boys, it's like, will I be attractive? Am I strong enough? Am I going to be a proper man or not? I don't know how to do that. So these man is for influencers will tap into that insecurity, but then they'll also give you or give their audience someone to blame. So they'll say things like there's a war on masculinity or like feminism has gone too far. Or they're trying to stop you from being the man you could be. So it's that rule of identifying an enemy, someone to kind of post against and then giving you a kind of emotionally appealing solution. And all that stuff works partly because of how humans work, but also partly because of the way the platforms incentivize certain kinds of communication. Yeah. And of course, that old sounds very much like it's playing into kind of the moves of rhetoric in many respects. You know, the timeliness, some of the kind of persuasive techniques, understanding the audience. So I guess all of that stuff that you've been looking at with kind of more traditional rhetoric, classic sort of rhetoric applies directly to online spaces in that way. Yeah, it really does. And I think one of the things that can be kind of confusing or overwhelming about social media is just the the the churn of it. There's so many phrases that pop up. Memes are like we used that word chyrus before. They're timely. They work for a while and they stop working. So you can feel like overwhelming or hard to get a sense of it, particularly if you're not already involved in this space. But then if you step back a bit, you can look and say actually a lot of the techniques people are using are very much classical rhetorical techniques, knowing your audience, knowing what will get them emotionally engaged, giving them a story that is coherent and that can motivate them, encouraging them to do things, right? Like a lot of a lot of successful influencers will get their audience to post. So you'll see one strategy you'll see a lot is someone will have a post revealing something about like a health hack or like an exercise tip and it'll often be framed as I bet you don't know this or here's one easy trick or here's something they don't want you to know. And then it'll they'll give you a little taste of it and they'll say comment some word to find out more. And so then you'll see like on Instagram, everyone will have commented the word and then the influencer will then send them some advice or a tutorial or a link to some course they can pay for. Yeah. But that is that is a good strategy because it's getting someone to comment, it's getting them to engage with the influencer and that also then boosts the content from the algorithm's perspective. Because if you're posting something that's getting loads of comments, that's driving engagement, that's what these algorithms want and that will push it further. So it's like in some ways, a very old human story about how to tap into people's emotions and then on top of that, there's this technology that's shaping it in ways that are outside of our control, but that are incentivizing us to do certain things and then not other things. Yeah, and they're not neutral. And we've seen increasingly, particularly in the US, I guess, the big tech in alignment with particular political ideologies. Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the issues for people who are maybe on the progressive side of things is that the platforms are owned by people who have very specific worldviews, often worldviews that we dig into them are pretty alarming, like Peter Teele, who was recently asked in an interview if he thinks humanity should endure and he didn't have a response, he wasn't sure what he thought. And they're also, I mean, they're very hyper-capulist. They believe in this pure competition and, of course, they see themselves as the winners. And the rest of us are just there to drive content on the platforms. So you've seen, of course, with X and Elon Musk, Elon Musk putting reinstating the accounts of really extreme figures like Nick Fuentes, who is Holocaust denying neo-Nazi and is now an important account on that platform. Andrew Tate has been reinstated. He has 9 million more followers than Kierstharmer. So Kierstharmer has more power in some ways, but in other ways, Andrew Tate has maybe more power to shape conversations online. And then as Trump has won a second term, all the major tech platforms have pulled back from content moderation and deprioritized it. And Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how we need more masculine energy on social media. And part of what that's doing is saying, okay, we're not going to stop Hates Beach. We're not going to do anything about the misogyny. That's all of our platforms. But this goes back to the power of the algorithm and the way these platforms don't really care what we post as long as it gets engagement. So the fact that we're posting is more important than what we're posting. And algorithms are these sorts of alien technologies. They don't, you know, machine learning algorithms don't understand meaning the way we do. They understand signals like, is it getting likes? Is it getting comments? Is it getting reposted? And then if it is, then it will get boosted. Unless someone comes in and says, okay, yeah, you know, circulate what gets engagement, but not if it's H-beach, not if it's misogynistic, not if it's deep fake pornography. But now that the platforms aren't doing that anymore. So it's turning platforms into these increasingly awful spaces, I would say, for people to communicate hand. Yeah. And I mean, as you say, it's we become the sort of content on those as well. I was having a look back through some of the sort of papers you've done in recent years. And you've got, you know, you've obviously got quite a range of interests in the kind of spaces, but also the kind of language it's used. So you've looked at things to do with Reddit. You've had a look at kind of conspiracy theories online. You've looked at it. to sort of memes as well, the NPC meme. You've looked at things that loads of people are terminally online would love. So can you tell us about one or two of those that maybe you know, particularly interested in or we think would be really relevant for students? - I think the NPC meme is an interesting one. And the history of that is, and for those who don't make it play video games, NPC stands for non-player character. So it's someone, you know, a character you would encounter in a video game that would have a sort of set number of responses to whatever you do as the player character, the person is actually controlling the game. And there was this story that circulated on Forchan that a psychologist had written saying that lots of people don't have an intermonologue. And that's disputed in psychology. But it circulated on Forchan and people on Paul, the politically incorrect message board on Paul, which was the kind of home of the alt-right. This originally started circulating before the alt-right was really the alt-right, but they started to have a debate about people who don't have an intermonologue. And they started to say, wait, is everyone else an NPC? Are we surrounded by non-player characters, people who sort of have a set of stock responses to events and not really thinking things through? And so this became, it was kind of a philosophical debate on Forchan because Forchan can be a horrible place, but it can also be kind of interesting and people were debating ideas and sort of talking about what this means. And that sort of fed into this idea that, you know, liberals are NPCs, liberals will respond with a sort of set of stock phrases with whatever you say, they'll call you racist, they'll say that's problematic, they'll tell you that's not woke. And then, of course, people on the right are the real free thinkers who aren't sort of bound by tradition or willing to be the kind of heroes who see the truth. So then it became this kind of ideology about what it means to be on the right, which is to be according to them, to be a free thinker, to be a radical, not to be bound by what others think. And so then it slipped from Forchan, and this used to be what often happened where something would start on Forchan and they'd get taken up elsewhere. So then unread it, users on this forum called the Donald, in particular, which was a pro-Donald Trump forum, started creating fake Twitter accounts, posing as progressives. And so it would be like, oh, when with blue hair, that kind of thing, or tattoos. And then they would start posting the same message over and over again, pretending they were NPCs effectively. So it became this kind of way of trolling liberals and pretending to be liberals, mocking liberals. And then the phrase sort of became controversial, because then mainstream media started picking upon it. So the New York Times wrote a story about it. And so then on Forchan, they were laughing, saying, look, our silly debate became something liberals were really concerned about. And then for them, that also proved that liberals were NPCs because it was so easy to offend them. You could just trigger them. Pikes them and then they would trigger them. Yeah. Yeah. In the same way you would trigger the NPC to speak in a game by going up and pressing the button, that's how liberals act according to them. And that one's an interesting one, because it still circulates widely. There's all these accounts on TikTok of people pretending to be NPCs and acting like a video game player in public space to sort of get a reaction. You'll see videos where someone responds to a streamer or a poster and they'll respond and get angry. And they'll say, oh, look, NPCs, they don't know how to think for themselves. So to become this term we all use, and it's sort of like, it's not necessarily right wing anymore, but it has that inheritance of like, I'm the free thinker and you're not. And it's sort of like the phrase sheeple where it's like, I'm the one who can see the truth and you can't. It's like another way of saying that. And I think a lot of people don't probably know that history. But there is a kind of like, you know, like a soft reactionary view that comes along with that. Where like if you think you're the only one who can see the truth and everyone else is kind of deluded, that can kind of lead into right wing politics a little bit because it's like very individualistic. It rejects like consensus, it rejects debate and deliberation and like learning from other people. So there's that kind of like soft ideology to it. And completely rejects any sense of empathy as well. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah. I mean, that's, they're quite interesting is, you know, that's an interesting example coming from that sort of area. And I think some of the stuff that I'd seen you'd written about, you know, where you were thinking about kind of words that came from the kind of fringes on the internet. Are there any other sort of examples maybe from sort of in-sell culture and manosphere that you think of a cross-stiver and why they might be, you know, particularly person? - I mean, one that's similar is the idea of the Red Pill or peeling in general, Red Pill, Black Pill. So the Red Pill metaphor comes from the Matrix where the character Neo is offered the blue pill where he can sort of stay asleep in his pod or the Red Pill where he's awakening to the fact that his whole life is a lie. And this is a phrase that has been popular on the right and on in-sell communities as a way of describing waking up to the reality that you're being lied to, right, that masculinity's under attack, that feminism is a lie, that progressives are lying, that you've been deluded. And so that circulated widely, that's something that the infamous Andritate uses, he talks about the Matrix and about taking the Red Pill, waking up to the reality that you need to be like a real man. And that means, you know, hating women effectively and being offensive. So that's one that you see circulate widely, including amongst, you know, progressive circles. Now people talk about peeling as a kind of phrase of changing your mind about something is when you get peeled. So you can be black pill, which means you give up all hope for the future. That's very popular among in-sells, because in-sells, you know, is short for, of course, for involuntary celibits. So they feel like they are never gonna have a successful relationship. So first you take the Red Pill and realize that feminism is a lie and that men are under attack. Then you take the black pill when you realize, actually I have no hope of ever having successful relationship. And then in between that, there's all that language of maxing, so like looks maxing, which is about this idea that like, you know, it's a very kind of cynical view of a human relationships, right? And it's the idea that we have our kind of natural capacities, your natural attractiveness, and then you can try to increase that. And the reason you increase that is because you think women or members of the opposite sex or members of the sex you wanna attract, whoever that is, are entirely superficial, right? And they'll only date you or wanna have sex with you if you sort of have the right score on these looks maxing charts. - Yeah, and cells have these really complicated scoring mechanisms for all sorts of different body parts and facial features and so on. And they believe that women are, 'cause they're interested in women and girls, that they're sort of hardwired to look for high value men. So there's nothing about like, you know, who you are as a person or like what your values are or like your ability to empathize with someone, it's all about this hyper competition and this kind of very cynical view of the world as just Peter competition. - An essential monkey. - And total hierarchy. - Sorry. - An essential monkey, it's like, where are you from? - As a body. - When it's a capitalist, yeah. - And a bodyology. - Yeah, and they talk about that, right? You're a sexual market value. And yeah, so it's like a very capitalist way and like hyper competitive way of viewing the world. And it's also a view that, you know, there's nothing you can do to kind of solve that. You couldn't have like, you know, a better welfare state or you couldn't give people more time to socialize and like, you know, more, you know, better childcare or like better healthcare. Like none of those things will help. It's all just like pure competition and pure hierarchy all the way down. And that's a classic like reactionary view, right? Which is that there's a natural hierarchy. And that's where it's actually kind of like. - It is very essentialist. It's very, it fits into the racist ideology as well. 'Cause that's what racism is about. At its core is a hierarchy of people. And like you can't, for people who are blackpilled, you can do anything to try to adjust that hierarchy. It's like hardwired into us and there's no way around it. So even like a little phrase like looks-maxing which is kind of, you know, it's not so horrible on its own. But again, going back to what we're saying at the start, which is how language asks you to adopt a certain world view, looks-maxing and believing in looks-maxing and thinking about the world in that way starts to commit you to viewing the world as this kind of natural hierarchy that can change. - I guess that's kind of the heart of the issue of some of this, isn't it? Certainly with a kind of more linguistic focus is if you're using some of that language, even ironically, are you somehow kind of buying into that world view? And is there a kind of inherent danger in people sort of picking up on it as this sort of throw away language, but then sort of been inculturated into a kind of world view where, you know, it's like people who stay on Twitter. They think they're fine. And they say, "Well, I'm here because, you know, that's where everyone is." But gradually their brains are being fried and they're turning in, you know, they're being pushed further and further in one direction without necessarily realizing it. The frog in boiling water kind of thing. And I kind of wonder if if there's something in there about, you know, even, even ironically, using some of that language is a real danger in it. Or is that just a kind of, you know, I'm being a triggered lip thinking like that? You're in a sort of dilemma with it all, a lot of the time, aren't you? Do you take it seriously? Is it, you know, can it actually affect you in that way? Or is it something we should just kind of brush off a bit? - Yeah, it's really difficult. And this is the kind of other aspect of, you know, language is social and the words you use commit you to a world view, but also language sort of speaks us, you know? - Yeah, yeah. - So we're not in control of it. And that's always the case. Like, you know, we're stuck in our language in a way and it can speak for us. And that's really hard to avoid. And I think one of the things that I think, you know, liberals in a general sense, sort of like mainstream consensus liberals, the mistake they've made is they see the rise of this reactionary language in terms like redpilling and blackpilling in cells and chads and stasis and what's maxing. And they try to police it and say, or call it disinformation like with conspiracy theory. theories, they say, if this information, we should debunk it. And that is a losing strategy, I think, because it plays right into the sort of the idea of the NPC, which is if you offend them, they'll try to, you know, they'll respond in these predictable ways. And so, and also it plays into the whole red pilling narrative, because if I say I'm red pilled and you say that's misinformation, it kind of proves my point, right? So it's, it's this effective trap they have, right? And this is like, you can see this on like, manuscript influencers, they often set themselves up as educators and they say, I'm going to tell you what you won't learn in school. Yeah. So then if your teacher comes along and says, well, what they're saying is wrong. It's like, okay, maybe they proved, you know, exactly. It's not like it's such a trap and it's hard to avoid. But on the other hand, yeah, you don't want to just sort of like happily go along using this ideologically charged language. So it's a very difficult situation to be at. I think, I think what, what, what, the best strategy, if you could have a strategy, would be to develop and for the left and for progressives and just people who aren't reactionaries, to develop their own effective words, their own words that kind of capture a worldview. I actually think, you know, wokeness has sort of been lost. But I do think it was a really effective one initially. And it has, you know, almost a century of history in Black American culture. Yeah. I was. Yeah. Staying woke. And like, there's this famous Erica Badoosong from like 2007 or 2010, something like that. And the song is not about policing language. It's not about like what we now call identity politics or like the idea that only certain people could speak in certain moments or like your identity determines whether you can talk about this or that subject. It's more about staying aware of what's going on. It's sort of like a redpilling, except for it's not about like everything's a lie. It's about you have to be, you know, alert to the way power works. Yeah. And that could that could have been, I think it's probably too late now, but that could have been a really effective one as a way of describing how power works, you know, how it shapes everybody lives. So I think you can't police it certainly because that just backfires. You shouldn't use it uncritically. But I think really the strategy would be to develop alternative phrases that help capture a worldview. And that's not impossible to do. It can be difficult. But there are phrases. I mean, you see, you know, right now, and maybe this is just like the social media, I see, but even phrases like like eat the rich, right, which people don't mean literally. I don't think it's not a cannibalistic phrase, but it's just saying like that suggests a worldview, right? It's the pride it identifies a problem. Rich people exploiting us and says you should do something about it. So there are there are phrases that that sometimes circulate. But I think so far, partly because there's been this reliant some sort of policing language of framing and as disinformation, there hasn't been a great response sort of from progressives and from the left to the rise of the right. But I think that is what's needed. If you want to combat reactionary language, you need an alternative way of speaking, basically. Yeah. I mean, there is also that problem though, is there when you, if there is an argument saying, you know, that policing language is an issue and I think there is, you know, there is a problem there, isn't there? Because you appear to be a kind of like skull, the kind of woke skull, he's telling everyone else how they should be behaving. There is still that kind of argument and certainly, you know, in linguistics that speech is action as well and that words can cause harm. It's more than just, you know, sticks and stones break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Words are a formal action. And so there, there is an argument there, I think a fairly reasonable one that you can say, okay, there are some words that we shouldn't be using because they have these effects on people. What do you make of that argument? I mean, yeah, I think that's true. And there's, there's some, I mean, you have to be able to draw, draw some boundaries, right? You know, using the phrase redpilling is different from using like hate speech, you know, you know, and there are some words that I just think like if you were going to give me power over the platforms, I would absolutely increase content moderation. You know, like I would go on X and I would ban all these accounts that are using hate speech. And I wouldn't really have any qualms about that. I mean, I do think, and this kind of goes to like questions about freedom of speech. And I think part of part of the issue we're dealing with is the platforms that are framing our language are American platforms. And there's a specific American version of freedom of speech that is kind of absolutist that basically says you can't limit any speech. There's a famous example of neo-nazis asking to do a march in this Jewish neighborhood in west of Chicago and the Supreme Court ruling. They had to be allowed to do the march there, even though they were clearly targeting a Jewish community. Didn't the civil liberties union actually support the American civil liberties union supported the Nazis because they said the right to free speech is more or less absolute you can't limit speech. And like in Europe, there's a different model that that that there's a kind of more attention to the social harm speech can cause. Yeah. And even though I'm American, I tend to agree with the European model, which is to say if someone is using speech as a weapon to harm someone, you should be able to limit that, I think. And so I do think, I mean, one of the phrases the right is using now, which is, you know, trigger warning. It's a form of hate speech is the word retard. Yeah. And they want to be able to say retard as much as possible. And I just think like that is clearly purposefully harmful language. And I think it would be fine for platforms to moderate it. I don't think that it's a winning strategy like in the political sense for like liberals to make that their main focus. Ultimately, I actually think it makes the right look foolish to use that language like that particular term. I don't think is a winning story. I don't think they're really like going to mobilize mass support by using that. I think it makes them look immature. But I do think it I do think it's harmful. And I do think, you know, like in different contexts, they're absolutely a scope to say that's not allowed here, you know, because because part of part of like what rhetoric about is about as well is it is it's an art of politics. It's it's about deliberation and communication and about like forming a consensus about how the world should be and how it should function. So it should be something that's opened to everyone and words that explicitly try to exclude people like, you know, racial slurs like the word retard, like hate speech. That is anti-democratic, you know. So I do think there is scope to to rule things out. It's just that when politics becomes about policing language instead of trying to argue for a worldview, that's when it gets difficult. Yeah. Yeah. No, interesting argument. Yeah. And I guess with these there's another one that's often used, which is that if you kind of use the language of the right or the far right to mock them, that can often be seen as a way of undermining their power because a lot of that power depends on an impression of like a strong man kind of confidence. It was a really nice example. I saw on social media a couple of weeks ago where clavicular was appearing on TV in Australia and the guy interviewing him kind of asked him about morging and he said, are you morging me now with a kind of knowing smile and clavicular had no no response to it. It was like his whole thing with the ridiculousness of his whole kind of worldview. It was just kind of a divine with one kind of narrowing look and, you know, just the ludicrousness of the language being used. Yeah. Yeah. And rhetoric people sometimes call that calling out the frame or pointing to the frame. And so a lot of reactionary language, the frame of it is, you know, liberals are trollable. They're ownable. They're NPCs. It's easy to trigger them. So if you if you don't get triggered and instead have that kind of rye smile, you're aware of the game that's being played, that can diffuse the power of it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So again, and that's a good example for rhetoric because it's very situational. Right. So like if you ask someone in the abstract, should liberals be using or progressives be using morging? Well, let's say, well, probably not because it commits you to this whole kind of view of natural hierarchy. Like I said, but in that situation, that was a very good use of the term because it was used in a particular context at a particular moment in a way that kind of pointed to how ridiculous this speech is. Yeah. And then clovicular to not to say, right? Because his frame was called out and then he didn't have one. He didn't have a frame to work from anymore. The look on his so ridiculous. He looks maxed face to something to behold. Yeah. So I guess one sort of final question. I'm not sure this really has an answer, but it's worth raising perhaps obviously working in educational settings. It's incumbent on us as educators to be neutral, unbiased in partial. You know, there are various restrictions placed on what you can and can't say and offering balance. I find it virtually impossible to be unbiased on an issue like this when you're thinking about how it's, how dangerous some of this is. I mean, what's your kind of take on this? Yeah. I mean, it's difficult. I mean, I'm also an educator, but I'm, you know, I teach at the university level. And so I mean, I also have to be unbiased, but it's a different sort of situation. The students have chosen to be there. They're not required to be there. Right? So there's a different kind of connection to this sort of society we're building. And like as a, you know, when you're in school, you're learning to become like a proper citizen of the country. You're in and be like a productive member of society in all sorts of different ways. So you don't want to kind of like rule people's views out of discussion. Certainly, but I do think a lot of this language does make it impossible to be neutral. Like there, there's not really a neutral space because so much of it is about identifying an enemy. And there's no kind of space to be objective in response to it. So I think I think one way to approach it in, and I've done some of this work in schools where I'm working with the school helping teachers respond to digital rhetoric. Part of it is about to teach it as a rhetoric and to say, look, there, you know, if someone starts using like red-pilling language, you could try to unpack that and say, like, well, who's an amide that's being named? What's the worldview we're describing? And then you can start to get to things like, you know, like in British schools, British values, and one of those is democracy. And if you're using language that sort of rules people out of democratic life or rules out democracy, then It's not so much about left to right. It's about like, these are our values as a society. And like, this is not, this doesn't qualify. Like, this is not acceptable. But it's really tricky too. Because again, that trap we talked about earlier where like the language stems from this idea that there's a conspiracy to silence men, to silence. Anyone who doesn't agree with like the matrix viewpoint and then you seem like you're silencing it, it can feed back into that rhetoric in the first place. So there's also some traps. But I do think it's, I think it's impossible to be neutral about it. But I think if you want to teach it and understand it, I think the first thing to do would be to teach it as a rhetoric and to look at the techniques it's using and try to show that it has a specific context and that it's doing certain kinds of work and not other times of work. And then then you're not so much like in this political battle anymore, you're looking at it as a rhetoric, something that has an impact on the world. And then you can look at what kind of impact there is. Yeah. Right. Now really interesting. Thanks very much. The world of the family has been an interesting conversation. We'll share some of the links to your work, some of the articles you've written contributed to in some of the papers in the show notes. But really interesting. Thanks very much. Thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)