In episode 30 of her column, Julia Friese explains what the terms “beige influencer” and “algo-speak” are all about.
Three observations:
1. neutral earth tones
The word “summer” can now be read boldly. We like the sun. Still. As long as you don’t think about the fires it triggers and that they start earlier every year, that everything will get hotter and hotter until one day it’s “Eternal Summer” (Franziska Gänsler. 2022). Without this context, however, “summer” can still be understood positively. The term is currently like “Why Am I Alive” by ANOHNI and the Johnsons. A song so soulful, if you don’t listen closely, you don’t realize you’re dancing to lines like “Watching nature swoon and sigh / Watching all the water dry”.
Sarah Manavis writes in the “Guardian” that the under 30-year-olds fell victim to so-called beige influencers in the impression of a glowing apocalyptic mood. Molly-Mae Hague and Matilda Djerf would entice their millions of followers to romanticize a simple everyday life. Breaking it down into routines of lighting candles and exercising at home. They set an example by setting themselves up in neutral tones and long-term, monogamous relationships in which one often prefers to stay at home to go out. Manavis criticizes these young people. You’re too boring for her. Too conventional.
2. sex-neutral algo-speak
The omission of debauchery is also found in the language. Sex is no longer sex on social media. You have sex there. And is le$bian. A TikTok about sexual violence sometimes goes like this: “There was a time when I was forced to wear mascara and it made me really sad. After that I tried many different mascaras but I hated every single one. Then I just stopped wearing mascara — and honestly, I’m happier now. (This isn’t about mascara)”
It is a language reminiscent of speaking in the presence of children. When they broke into the world of “S*x And Te City,” it used to be called “Mr. Big paint out, paint over the edge” – i.e. with his mascara. Now the “algo” is the child in whose presence you speak. The excesses, i.e. everything that could be filtered out by the algorithm as too hot or too indecent, are converted into fantasy language – yes, almost rewritten into neutral earth tones.
3. self-neutralizing writer
“Bad words” was the theme of this year’s prosanova festival for young literature in Hildesheim. At the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, Valeria Gordeev’s text about the meticulous cleaning of an apartment as a means of overcoming everything warlike and everything bad won. The opening speech by the author Tanja Maljartschuk, who was born in the Ukraine and emigrated to Vienna, was impressive. She sees herself “as a broken author, a former author, an author who has lost her language”.
She was afraid of language, which could convince millions of citizens to murder others. It now seems absurd to her to make beautiful, praiseworthy texts out of real suffering. Isn’t it more important to ask oneself “how to prevent the horror from happening than to ask whether one can still write poetry afterwards”? One of the most common points of criticism from the jury was that the texts of the year were too conventional, i.e. too much algo-speaking, too beige, too Matilda Djerf.
Perhaps the jury is too old on average, has lived too many conventional years to understand the longing for the conventional – the “midcult” (Moritz Baßler, 2022). Generally speaking, it is the longing for a life in which “summer” is not a bad word.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 09/2023.