Skip to main content

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

A linguist explains the history and semiotics of internet communication. While some chapters sing out more than others, this book offers tremendously helpful insights about communication in the post-post-modern era.

Thanks to the internet and texting (and all of the irony, subtext, and various other linguistically subversive nuances one can communicate via those media) modern culture is experiencing what I consider could be the first stages of a hard fork in written communication. An early example might be a concept like Poe's Law, which arose to explain how entire demographics fail to see irony or sarcasm when clearly intended. The growing political bifurcation in the USA seems to be giving rise to noticeable differences in dialectic and language style. 

Even the "language" of Bitcoiners with their rhetorically powerful memes and extensive use of vocabulary designed to be unintelligible to outsiders (e.g.: "few," "gradually, then suddenly," "hodler," US trash token" and so on) gives us a concrete example of how language can signal--and even serve to define--group membership. 

When we've come to the point where the use of an eggplant emoji in the wrong context can be deeply embarrassing, I think it's safe to say that we are starting to see the development of an entire taxonomy of proto-languages online. This book will help you navigate these new frontiers.

More Posts

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...
Read more

Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more