I encountered my first incel in my junior year of high school. As someone who was chronically on Reddit and highly focused on college applications, I inevitably ended up frequenting the r/ApplyingToCollege subreddit group chat, an enormously helpful resource and supportive community – save for the few self-identified “involuntary celibates” who occasionally showed up to troll the chat.
Whenever the group discussion would stray from college admissions to something like personal relationships, the incels would pop in to proselytize their weirdly detailed philosophy of how our dating prospects are predetermined because of lookism – discrimination based on people’s looks. In their worldview, the sexual hierarchy was dominated by an elite group of Chads (highly attractive men), who could rely on their good looks as a form of “sexual market value” to seduce women at the expense of betas (average men who exchange loyalty to Chads for their romantic leftovers). At the very bottom rung were the incels, who believed they were unable to have sex because of their appearance.
Acceptance of the lookism philosophy – known as getting blackpilled – meant adopting very specific slang and ideas. For example, a Chad was understood to always “mog” (dominate) and “cuck” (emasculate) a beta, but the beta could attempt to improve their status through “looksmaxxing” (enhancing their physical appearance). This might take the form of working out (gymmaxxing) or even seeking physical modifications through “surgerymaxxing.”
While most of my Reddit group chat found the incels to be initially entertaining, it soon became pretty clear that their philosophy was actively dangerous. Much of their rhetoric bitterly advocated for violence against women (often dismissed as “foids,” “roasties,” or “dumpsters”) and occurred in the context of actual incel terror attacks that had killed dozens of people. Beyond that, it was just a nuisance for our chat – the incels eventually brought in other incels to disrupt the conversation – so we ended up creating a separate Discord server to freely discuss college and our personal lives without the weird interruptions.
Nevertheless, the entire concept seemed so ridiculous that it was impossible not to poke fun at it. Over the next four years, our newly incel-free group chat continued to ironically use their slang as a shared in-joke. When someone had a project due, for instance, we would say that they were “studypilled” or “homeworkmaxxing.” Although these terms were formed through analogy with the incel words “blackpilled” and “looksmaxxing,” they were understood to be humorous recombinations and nothing more. It was a stupid, silly shared reference that I never thought would see the light of day beyond our group chat.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when in January 2024 I got a TikTok meme complaining that “it’s so hard being a walkpilled cardiomaxxer in a carcel gascucked state like Arizona.” I was utterly bemused. Had my recommended feed gotten so targeted that it somehow knew to combine my interest in urban design with my unusually specific knowledge of incel vocabulary?
Within a few weeks, however, I realized that this wasn’t just an algorithmic quirk, but rather a genuine phenomenon taking root across social media. People all over the internet were beginning to ironically use incel slang in the same way that my group chat had been doing for years. Creators would make satirical “brainrot videos” about going to “Mogwarts” or engaging in looksmaxxing techniques like mewing (a dubious jaw exercise meant to improve facial bone structure).
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the trend was how rapidly it reached mainstream popularity. During a March 2024 lecture at Georgetown University, I had the opportunity to poll my audience: By that point, about 40 percent of the students were familiar with the words. When I repeated the same experiment at Stanford two months later, fully 80 percent had encountered incel vocabulary. Another four months later at Oberlin, and my entire audience recognized the terminology.
The algorithm spread these words by blowing them up as memes. Some of the more general jokes, like mewing, were pushed to, and therefore seen by, everyone. Other jokes were contained to specific filter bubbles. I only got the “walkpilled cardiomaxxer” meme because I was heavily on the urban design side of TikTok, and I love consuming content about architecture and transit. Because of how algorithms recommend similar content in filter bubbles, though, I eventually got more urban design incel videos, like one about being “fossil fuel pilled and bad to the bone” and another about being a “parking lot pilled pavement princess.” In the same way, incel memes were able to creep into many other social media in-groups. They were funny and versatile enough to be applied to any concept, from homework to public transit.
I didn’t know it during my initial Reddit encounter, but the ideas in that first group chat had spread from an extremist filter bubble to a new, college-related filter bubble. Because of how memes diffuse on the internet, and because of a narrow boundary between irony and authenticity, a potentially dangerous philosophy was beginning to creep through to the general public – bringing its language along with it.
The modern-day incel is entirely an invention of the twenty-first century. Before the internet, lonely men simply didn’t have a way to gather and share ideas. That all began to change in 1997, when a Canadian student started a website called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project to connect with others over her shared lack of sex. As the name implies, the site wasn’t a place for just straight men; rather, it was used by people of any gender or sexual orientation.
In the early twenty-first century, that initial “incel” community then dispersed to several other websites. These were more male dominated and less moderated, meaning that increasingly misogynistic discussion was able to take root. The largest of these forums, 4chan, doubled as a gathering place for right-wing extremists, whose ideas began to fuse with those of the incels. This is when the modern blackpill philosophy began in earnest.
Notably, 4chan didn’t have any user accounts. Every poster was anonymous, meaning that the only way to differentiate yourself as an experienced user was to demonstrate a performative proficiency in shared slang. This unique pressure to show a sense of in-group belonging ended up giving us numerous foundational internet words, such as “troll,” “dank,” “shitpost,” and “rickroll.” Using these words was an important way to show that you weren’t a “normie” on the website. Because they had wide applicability, they eventually spread beyond the site.
In the same way, most of the highly specific incel vocabulary was built up by 4chan extremists to match their burgeoning ideology. Words like “mogging,” “cucked,” and “maxxing” became metalinguistic indicators that the anonymous poster was truly a blackpilled member of the community and not some random outsider. You needed to demonstrate a certain level of prerequisite knowledge to truly fit in.
Beyond the technological catalyst of 4chan’s user interface, incels have long faced a self-imposed social need to adopt new slang to prove their status. Those within the community fight a constant battle to prove their “purity” as incels and avoid being labeled as “fakecels” or “volcels” (voluntary celibates). Even within the deepest echelons of the incel filter bubble, many believe that most of their peers still have potential to “ascend” to beta status through looksmaxxing, moving location, or accumulating wealth. Only the bottom 1 percent of the population are truecels – incels with unchangeably unattractive features and no hope of ascension. In the online space, these truecels are able to dominate the discussion due to their purer status.
Within the incel community itself, language serves the same function as language in a cult: It’s a recruitment tool creating an “us versus them” mentality. Since incel vocabulary is used to mark “correct” blackpill philosophy, the incel feels alienated from normies – family and friends who don’t use the language. Meanwhile, truecel rhetoric pushes recruits to accept more extremist beliefs, since those ideas are associated with higher social status within the community. Those who use the language sound experienced, appearing to understand the ideology well. I personally watched this happen in my original Reddit chat: Before we split off, the incels managed to convert one of the chat regulars to accept lookism. Before we knew it, he was also spouting propaganda about betas and looksmaxxing.
Through mutual acquaintances, I got in touch with Sofia Correa, a recent University of Florida graduate who anonymously ran one of the largest incel Discord servers in the world. She calls my cult analogy “spot on.” What started out as her attempt to troll incel communities turned into a genuine fascination with their language. “It feels exclusive and exciting” to use incel terms, she tells me, especially for people who “were struggling to find a way to make themselves feel better about these faults.” Joining the select in-group validates their experiences and gives them a sense of purpose. In a perverse inversion of their initial goals, the degree of “purity” translated to higher “truecel” status. People would proudly use labels like “KHHV” (short for “kissless, hugless, and handholdless virgin”) to display their deeper connection to blackpill philosophy, just as a cult has layers of exclusivity to further draw in the acolyte.
The reductive nature of incel language further casts every interaction within their sociological framework. Any dynamic between two men is written off as hierarchical (even though the concepts of “alpha” and “beta” humans have repeatedly been discredited as pseudoscience), and any interaction between men and women is thought of as inherently sexual. Now that the incel is trained to see society in terms of Chads mogging betas, their worldview is limited in a way that ultimately reinforces their ideology; if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Even though Sofia was clearly not an incel, for example, she “couldn’t help thinking this way” when she was constantly exposed to the language. Because the ideas were so catchy, she would go through her day “thinking about how other people were mogging” her. Imagine how indoctrinating this mindset can get for someone who truly believes in these terms.
Sofia also notes the perceptually limiting use of thought-terminating clichés: loaded expressions that cut off any dissonant thinking. If an incel mentioned a negative experience with a woman, he would be flooded with comments about how “it’s over” or “AWALT” (meaning “all women are like that”), which immediately stops any introspection of whether the interaction had some other explanation beyond just lookism. Conversely, if someone had an encouraging or positive experience with a woman, that would be either called a “cope” (implying that it was all in his head) or dismissed as not a “truecel” experience.
In a 2022 paper, the Canadian sociologist Michael Halpin argues that incels intentionally establish their “subordinate masculine status” as a justification for their misogynistic views. By using their truecel purity to legitimize the blackpill philosophy, incels are able to argue against women’s agency by advocating for male supremacy, rape, and “sexual redistribution” policies allocating at least one woman to every man. To the incel, these options are more humane than his own existence: The Incels Wiki page explicitly argues that “involuntary celibacy is more painful for men than rape is for women.”
Meanwhile, words like “foid” (a portmanteau of “female android”) and “dumpster” serve to depersonalize and objectify women, making it easier to remove their agency. Relationships are reduced to purely logical evolutionary processes, allowing the insertion of pseudoscientific terminology and dismissing more nuanced, emotional views of attraction. Sofia tells me that once the incels found out she was a woman, their ideology “made it very hard for them to talk to” her like a human being. Her presence made it difficult for them to reconcile the reality of an actual woman with their idea of what a woman was like. In the end, the latter won out, and Sofia had to abandon her server due to rape and death threats.
If you’re wondering why I just told you more about incels than you could ever possibly want to know, I promise there’s a point. Incels might be an extreme example, but the basic structure of the incel filter bubble mirrors all other filter bubbles online. Those who are further in the in-group are more likely to dominate discourse, creating and spreading words for those on the periphery. As users familiarize themselves with the group vocabulary, they identify more with that group, and more readily adopt language to fit shared social needs.
I would argue that, if anything, the incel example is very important to understand, for it has probably contributed more to the development of “modern slang” than any other online community. It’s precisely because of their radicalized and insular echo chamber that they’ve created so much language and have many more avenues to influence the mainstream. It is because of their extreme views that their ideas are so easily spread through memes.
We can, in fact, use the spread of incel ideas as a case study to examine how memes carry information across social media platforms. Real incels never had access to algorithmic recommendations, since their ideology was too extreme. So how did their concepts and language move from website to website until eventually arriving, in diluted form, on our social media feeds?
Let’s start where the philosophy began in earnest: 4chan. Despite the forum’s early importance, it remained a place where incels mixed with normies. The Incels Wiki page for /r9k/, their main discussion board on 4chan, calls it a “pseudo-incelospherian” space: Although it was a medium “for some genuine incel discussion,” it was never purely an incel forum, and “also served as a place for people to pretend to be incel” and troll actual truecels.
Seeking a more insular and supportive community in the mid-2010s, the incel subculture largely turned to Reddit, where subreddits like r/Incels were able to accrue tens of thousands of blackpilled followers. From there, they slowly began pushing their philosophy in other subreddits, which is how I encountered them in my college application group. Forums like these were evidently fruitful recruiting grounds, but the incels found their greatest success on “rate me” subreddits, where people would post pictures of themselves and ask for feedback. Here, incels were able to promote a more accessible version of their philosophy by disguising looksmaxxing language as helpful suggestions. Posters were evaluated on pseudoscientific lookism beauty standards like “interocular distance,” “canthal tilt,” and “hunter eyes.” They were encouraged to improve their facial structure through “mewing” and jaw surgery so that they could “mog” others. If they were interested in exploring further, the blackpill was waiting around the corner.
Even once the incel subreddits were eventually shut down by Reddit, forums like r/RateMe continued to normalize incel jargon, making it easier to both put stock in it and parody it. In the same way that my Discord server jokingly used incel language, jokes about mogging and canthal tilts began to show up in 2021 across Instagram and Twitter, in memes that eventually became viral through TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Ironically, the first people to bring looksmaxxing to TikTok appear to have been women, who unknowingly began repurposing incel concepts from the early “rate me” subreddits. Beauty influencers on #GirlTok would demonstrate how to use canthal tilt to put on eyeliner, or post video filters rating themselves on metrics like forehead size and interocular distance. Eventually, people began picking up on the phrenological absurdity of these ideas and turned them into more memes. The deeper people poked into the underlying philosophy, the more the jokes multiplied, and words like “pilled” and “‑maxxing” were fully trending by late 2023. Most people thought that the concepts were funny and went on to spread them; those who knew the story and were offended by it also helped the terms spread through the ragebait cycle of attention.
Now that we’ve reached the point where algorithms are involved, the pattern should look fairly familiar. Once the incel terms initially captured our curiosity, they were amplified by the Matthew effect and the engagement treadmill to reach mainstream popularity. Part of their strength rested on how easily they could be recombined into other phrasal templates; part of it rested on their memetic value as catchy comedic references.
As the words took off, they spawned their own spin-off memes. Starting in 2021, for example, the term “sigma” began going viral as an ironic reference to the incel hierarchy of alphas and betas. In this particular joke, a sigma was nominally equal to a Chad, but opted to live outside the normal social structure of their own volition. The phrase started out as a genuinely idolized position within the incelosphere, but was then blown up through memes like the Rizzler song, which contained the lyric “I just wanna be your sigma.” A lot of subsequent “brainrot” content focused on similar incel classifications, like an analysis of the power dynamics between dancers in a “TikTok Rizz Party” or viral “sigma face tutorials.”
By this point, the words were out of the incels’ hands. The community never had the opportunity to gather on major social media apps once their subreddits were shut down, and instead had moved to Discord servers like Sofia’s or more specific, hard-to-find forums online.
There have been past problems with algorithmic filter bubbles leading to extremism: ISIS infamously used YouTube as a recruitment tool in the early 2010s, and the QAnon movement spread in part thanks to Facebook echo chambers. Thankfully, the big platforms had cracked down on more obvious threats by the time incel slang became mainstream. If you look up “incel” on TikTok, for example, it redirects you to a page warning you that your search term is associated with hateful content.
Nevertheless, it’s fascinating how far incel humor has reached. One of the most common meme templates on the internet is a crudely drawn comparison of a “Chad walk versus virgin stride.” In the original version, the characters are labeled like diagrams in a biology textbook, with annotations pointing out why the Chad’s behavior mogs the virgin.
Another widely shared format contrasts the opinion of a crying loser character with that of a confident Chad. Both templates perpetuate incel ideas about social hierarchies, but to the uninitiated they’re simply funny conduits for categorizing ideas. These memes – and many others, from “Pepe the Frog” to the “Gigachad” – started on incel-associated 4chan boards before reaching greater popularity on other websites for their easy applicability to everyday situations.
By now, we know that the dissemination of incel memes across platforms points to how fringe ideas can become mainstream, and that algorithms can perpetuate dangerous concepts in the name of engagement optimization. The lookism concepts from r/RateMe, including jawline angle, eye distance, and facial symmetry, are eugenics-based talking points that were already regarded as pseudoscientific by the nineteenth century. Now, with beauty influencers making content about those metrics, it feels as if we’ve reverted to social Darwinist ideas about skull measurement.
Phrenological theories barely scratch the surface of how incel memes open the door to eugenics. Since much of the early incel community was heavily influenced by the alt-right community on 4chan, they’ve adopted a lot of extreme ideas about interracial relationships. According to lookism philosophy, Asian men are considered the least sexually desirable, and many “truecels” self-identify as “ricecels” or “currycels” as reasons for their inceldom. These men point to WMAF (white male/Asian female) relationships as a principal cause of their virginity – objectifying the women in these situations and depriving them of their agency to make their own dating decisions.
In mid-2024, these ideas somehow also became mainstream through the “Oxford study” meme, which referenced a fictional academic paper on WMAF relationships. Anytime Asian women would post videos featuring white men, they would inevitably get harassed by unsolicited comments calling them an example of the “Oxford study,” fetishizing and harassing them over their sexual preferences. A June 2024 article in the Guardian identifies this misogynistic scrutiny as mainly stemming from men’s rights trolls before it became a widespread meme. The men likely would not have said this to someone’s face, but they felt emboldened to comment negatively because of the online disinhibition effect, a phenomenon where anonymity makes it easier to spread negativity.
Incel slang is marked by its deeply negative views toward society, and these ideas frequently resonate with younger generations who are similarly pessimistic about the present. In the early 2020s, for instance, the catchphrase “it’s over” began making the rounds as a dejected reaction to an adverse situation. Partially a joke, partially a genuine expression of hopelessness, it was buoyed in popularity by incels, who had been using the phrase since it began making the rounds on 4chan.
In her 2024 book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, Amanda Montell identifies the rise of “doomslang” – dystopian or detached jargon mostly used by younger people. Hyperbolically negative phrases like “everything sucks” and “I want to kill myself” have become shockingly commonplace, and everyday actions like lying in bed on your phone are bleakly described as “dissociating,” “doomscrolling,” or “bedrotting.” This kind of language is especially common among incels, who were using phrases like “LDAR” (“lay down and rot”) before “bedrotting” ever became a thing. The modern doomslang phenomenon appears to have evolved simultaneously with incel-speak, in some cases even being influenced by the latter.
One of the stock characters in the Chad memes, known as the doomer, emerged as a way to voice the (frequently incel) dissociated perspective on 4chan, and eventually spread beyond those origins like all the other 4chan memes. Today, I regularly hear my friends calling each other “doomers,” as well as using other depressive incel words like “cope,” “ropemaxx” (an algospeak replacement for “commit suicide”), and “wagecuck” (someone who works a mindless nine-to-five job). Meanwhile, the term “brainrot,” now used to describe a genre of Gen Alpha humor, likely also came from incel circles, which used the expression to describe the perceived decline in intelligence resulting from their lack of social interaction.
These terms spread partially because the algorithm thrives on negativity and partially because they confirmed our existing cultural outlooks. Phrases like “doomer” and “it’s over” spoke to our disconnected reality, while “brainrot” held a mirror up to our online addictions and “wagecuck” reflected our growing disenchantment with the American dream. And since apocalyptic statements are good for engagement, the phrases eventually became a part of the zeitgeist, emergently reinforcing our pessimistic points of view. Words are memes, and memes are trends, but all are also ideas.
While it’s difficult to determine for certain the actual impact of incel vocabulary on our culture, the incels themselves certainly believe they’ve effectively spread their ideas. On incel sites, longtime truecels use the terms “Newgen” and “Tiktokcel” to describe those who only recently joined their forums from short-form video platforms. The Incels Wiki lists the looksmaxxing trend on TikTok as a primary driver of this recent incel influx, meaning that the meme pipeline has had at least some efficacy in making the blackpill more accessible.
If incel memes are so dangerous, how were they able to spread so easily? It all comes down to the very blurred line between comedy and authenticity. To most of us, these memes were just funny. We weren’t blackpilled by incel language, and we didn’t perpetuate them to promote lookism or racism or sexism. Instead, we used them as a form of dark humor, flipping the script on the incel community to ultimately satirize them. When we repurposed the “Chad versus virgin” meme template, the incels became the butt of the joke. When my friends and I used words like “-maxxing” and “pilled,” we established a new in-group: the community of young people on social media. The terms were silly jokes to connect over, signaling that we knew something exclusive about popular culture. Since everybody wanted to feel like part of the in-group, the words spread, taking them out of the incels’ hands and robbing them of their original power as they simply became “brainrot” words.
I suspect that the vast majority of people sharing the memes probably didn’t even know they came from incels. The most disturbing concepts – like calling women “foids” or Asian people “currycels” – remained in-group, because these are far too offensive to become mainstream. But for other concepts such as mewing, there was simply no reason to assume the underlying idea would be problematic until you really looked into it.
Some time after the serious philosophy was turned into a joke, though, it began to be treated seriously again by some of those out of the loop. At least some of the beauty influencers talking about hunter eyes and interocular distance misinterpreted the ironic context of the lookism words and spread them as genuine beauty standards, which spawned more jokes, leading to more serious reinterpretations. After the jokes about canthal tilts and mewing went viral, we began seeing increases in canthal tilt eyeliner demonstrations and Google searches for “jaw surgery.” On the one hand, that just made the jokes funnier; on the other, incel ideas about attractiveness became more culturally relevant.
Again, how did this happen? Well, it’s famously difficult to discern tone on the internet, to the point where there’s an adage about it called Poe’s law: “Any sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views,” and vice versa.
Poe’s law explains how dangerous ideas spread as memes. If something is meant genuinely, but it is also crazy enough to be interpreted as a joke, people may reward it with “likes” and other engagement because they find it funny. Meanwhile, if something ironic is interpreted as genuine, people will be offended by it, which then also drives engagement as a form of ragebait. Either way, “edgy” humor is able to worm its way into the mainstream via the algorithm.
The “Oxford study” meme is a perfect example of Poe’s law. Many of the commenting “trolls” seemed to be normal people who didn’t have any knowledge of the meme’s origins. They thought the serious blackpilled talking point was a funny joke about relationships, and they used it without understanding its harmful effects on Asian women. Later, more people assumed the study was real and interpreted the Oxford study jokes as serious, simultaneously furthering its unironic use.
Incels themselves often introduce serious topics as jokes, which can normalize their idea until it is revealed in its entirety. You start out laughing at how funny a “walkpilled cardiomaxxer” meme is, and then all of a sudden your For You page is dominated by incel memes, bringing you closer to the ideology.
You can see this in how their language has spread. I think it’s pretty clear that the word “Chad” started out as a humorous archetype, but at a certain point incels began using it as a genuine classification to parallel the “beta” and “incel” social tiers. Then those tiers appeared so ridiculous to outsiders that they were able to spread as memes beyond their serious usage. Now we have people using the “Chad” and “virgin” characters as if they were stock characters in a new commedia dell’arte.
Poe’s law has created a dangerous game of hopscotch. We’re jumping between irony and reality, but we’re not always sure where those lines are. Interpreting words comedically helps the algorithm spread them as memes and trends, but then interpreting them seriously manifests their negative effects.
I want to make clear that the trend toward incel language is more than an extreme case study: It’s an indicator of the linguistic changes happening on modern social media. The pipeline from 4chan to Reddit to TikTok is a perfect demonstration of how words move across platforms in ways that don’t seem initially obvious.
Most of the algospeak examples from the first chapter had their own histories before being adopted to evade algorithmic censorship, and many of them followed the same path. For example, the earliest known mention of the word “seggs” was in a meme shared on 4chan’s Pokémon discussion board in 2013. It was on that platform where the word began trending, before eventually spreading to Twitter and getting adopted on TikTok in 2020.
Meanwhile, the word “unalive” also started in 2013, coming from a widely shared Reddit meme drawing on a scene from Ultimate Spider-Man. These terms are popular in social media algospeak today only because of the early confluence of media and memes on other platforms that eventually diffused to mainstream TikToks.
When I talk about the linguistic “innovators” and “majority adopters” in diffusion-of-innovations theory, this is it. The innovators are always niche communities with shared interests and shared needs to create words. The reason we have so many words from incels is that they had an imperative to come up with new language for their common experiences, just as 4chan at large provided us with the terms “shitpost,” “seggs,” and “rickroll” because they had their own community with a need to invent slang.
In meme circles, it’s a common aphorism that “all internet culture is downstream of 4chan,” and evidence suggests this is at least partially true. In 2018, researchers at University College London used a technique called pHashing to trace where visually similar online images come from, and they found that a plurality of internet memes come from political forums on 4chan and Reddit. They theorized that these communities are so prolific at disseminating ideas because they intentionally weaponize memes as a form of “attention hacking,” mixing funny templates with certain messages to further their ideologies. If this is the case, then it’s not that surprising that incel words have become so widespread. A huge part of their online virality was designed that way to spread the blackpill. Misery loves company; that’s why the incels in my Reddit chat were so keen on converting us. When you combine their evangelizing zeal with their unique need to create words, the influx of extremist memes simply makes sense.
The incel moment in our pop culture is a testament to the power of memes in spreading words and ideas. By this point, we’ve been conditioned to consume information only if it’s somehow funny or relatable. Studies suggest that nearly 90 percent of millennials mistrust traditional advertising tactics, and the numbers are even higher with Gen Z. The kind of messaging that worked on older generations is a tactic of the past: Anyone trying to push an idea or agenda today must rely on comedy. The best advertising is being done either through influencers (lending products a more organic feel) or through “unhinged” corporate accounts like Duolingo’s, which openly leans into the meme that its mascot will hurt you if you don’t complete your daily lesson. Through meme marketing, the company has been able to establish itself as one of the largest corporate presences on Instagram and TikTok, because it understands exactly how to hack into younger people’s attention. The same is true for extreme ideologies like lookism: They diffuse best through memes.
Ironically, Duolingo has even leaned into these memes on several occasions: It has posted videos of its mascot mewing, joked about making a “brainrot” course to teach you the word “sigma,” and published Duolingo “Chad” fan art. It had to play into these themes because that’s how you connect to viewers today. I’m guilty of the same thing: Some of my most successful videos talk about words like “sigma” and “Chad,” because I knew they would do well.
The unique spread of incel language further speaks to the power of the internet in enabling these ideas in the first place. In researching this chapter, I stumbled across an almost self-aware post on an incel forum that perfectly captures what I mean. “Imagine if the internet was never invented,” the anonymous user begins. Then he goes on:
I mean think about it no internet means you never ever visit this forum, which means you never get to become blackpilled and will probably be bluepilled and cucked and a beta simp for the rest of your life like how you were before you entered this forum…. And of course without the net incels would have no way to stage an effective incel rebellion because there would be zero alternative effective mass communication methods.
Although I don’t plan on making a habit of agreeing with incels, I think this poster got it right on the money. The internet first provided a medium for this community to form. It then gave them social media platforms to spread their ideas and attempt to start their “incel rebellion.” The internet, and the engagement optimization algorithms that control it, have fomented stupid misinformation, extremist rhetoric, and dangerous frameworks that push their way into our everyday thoughts and speech.
The underlying linguistic process is nothing new. We know that K‑pop groups use language to show in-group status and belonging. Even anime fans have a murky boundary between satirical and genuine slang, which is how phrases like sussy baka could spread, making fun of the anime community. Swifties, too, are stronger because the internet gave their subculture a space and helped their concepts spread through emergent trends.
But the internet has a shorter memory on short-form video platforms than ever before. We forget when we’re joking and when we’re telling the truth. We consume and disseminate memes without knowing where they originally came from, potentially furthering harmful ideas through our ignorance. The same patterns are playing out across all filter bubbles on social media – and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, this doesn’t just mean that communities can harm us. It means that we can harm communities.
Excerpted from Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Andre Aleksic (“also known as @EtymologyNerd” [sic]; New York: Knopf, 2025)