Why the words of the year show us the internet is in a death spiral

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 “6-7”.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. They run from outright unpleasantness in the form of “rage bait”, or content made specifically to upset people; through parasocial (our imagined connection with celebrities and other people who live in our phones) and AI slop (the illusory and low-quality content turned out by generative artificial intelligence); all the way to complete meaningless, such as “6-7”.It wasn’t always this way. For most of the 2010s, when the “word of the year” was coined, they didn’t tend to have anything much to do with the internet. Then, through the first part of this decade that was infected by covid, our words were infected by it too. But, now, our freshest and most important words seem only about how unhappy we are with the web.Last year’s Oxford word of the year, for instance, was “brain rot”, and in 2022 it 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 meat of real life. Instead they describe either how we don’t want to be on the computer or how upset being on a 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 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 there is a more brutal truth at the heart of that analysis: being online isn’t much fun anymore.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, although without the opportunity to win a jackpot.Even still, the desire to escape that flashy and overwhelming casino and get offline is mediated through online culture. X, formerly known as Twitter, is filled with posts by people asking how they can be “life maxing” and doing things away from the internet. “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 sorrow that surrounds us. Words can work like maps, helping us better understand the contours of our concepts; but these new words don’t point us towards the exit, just give a higher-resolution topology of unhappiness.Rage bait itself might be the ultimate example of this. Tell someone that you’re annoyed that we have elevated such a negative word to the height of our vocabulary and they might suggest that it is doing its job quite precisely. Rage bait is its own rage bait, looping around like one of Escher’s staircases, carrying us down into hell.A version of this article appeared in the Independent’s tech newsletter. You can subscribe to it and the rest of our newsletters here.