Adam Oleksik

So I have friends who are middle school teachers.

Sometimes they let me sit in on their middle school classrooms, and that's where you really learn the culture.

And then like Gen Z older people parody their language, and then it becomes brain rot.

But it starts with Gen Alpha.

Chat is funny.

And that's definitely a phenomenon that's gotten way more popular this year.

I definitely started seeing that around 2023, sort of as like a general vocative, what do we think, chat, you know?

And yeah, it sort of reflects the rise of streaming culture.

And I've seen a lot of words come out of Twitch spaces.

Back when Riz was popular, that came from Twitch.

Yeah, it's addressing an unknown audience.

You know that there is an audience, you don't know who's in the audience.

Chat is a catch-all.

There's a sort of collective unity to it.

And then there's also a sort of, yeah, the strange dynamic of digital surveillance where we really don't know who's going to see a message, where it's going to be distributed.

It

Even on the surface level.

So right now this will go somewhere.

But then what if it goes viral?

And then that will then go in directions you don't know.