Collective Content’s words of the moment (WOTM) appear in our monthly newsletters. They are sometimes new words, or simply words having their day in the sun.

 

Our sweet spot in January was Cakeism – to want to do or have two (possibly mutually exclusive) things at the same time. A new word but not a new concept, we’ve had cakeism in politics and society forever. A form of magical thinking and sometimes magical presentation, though maybe there’s a bit of a cakeist in all of us.

 

Reality-adjacent appeared in February – a term used to describe AI outputs that appear momentarily real until you examine them closely. This applies to words as well as pictures, videos, audio and more.

 

The Enshittocene popped up in March – a development of Cory Doctorow’s 2022 “enshittification” thesis which holds that a social platform’s success inevitably leads to its decay. The Enshittoscene is Doctorow’s idea that the process will occur way beyond social platforms. Unfashionable (in some circles), but hard to ignore.

 

Weaponise for April – to adapt for use as a weapon. Mostly anything can be weaponised nowadays: victimhood; flexible working hours; milk production. And then there’s real weapons themselves. It looks like we’ll be seeing more of them.

 

Our WOTM for May was Election. Not at all a new word, but the parent of a whole lexis: gerrymandering, hustings, bellwether, politick, hanging chad, kingmaker, landslide, hung parliament, swing, marginal, turnout, stump, ballot, pork barrelling, big beasts and third rail issues.

 

As summer arrived in June, Pseudanthropy came too – AI as “counterfeit humanity”. Some emphasise that AI technologies do not actually think or feel, and because of this, we shouldn’t create faces or identities for AI tools, or describe them as “intelligent”. (We will, of course).

 

It’s July, so it must be Junk Flow State. “Flow” is full immersion in an activity you love, with intense focus, creative engagement and a loss of awareness of time and self. A beautiful place to be. Enter its evil twin: “junk flow state” – scrolling on phones for an hour when we could be doing something else. Addictiveness by design.

 

The summer flew by. Copypasta for August – a text that is shared many times on the internet, especially a text block that’s often copied and pasted.

 

Pseudoglot – a new one on us, in September: someone who knows a few basic words in many languages and pretends to be a polyglot. Yamas!

 

October, and Cory Doctorow is rubbing his hands (see earlier entry) at Slop – rubbish on the internet generated, and regenerated, by AI.

 

November’s Agentic – the next big thing, or the next phase of the hype cycle? Agentic AI is tech that can automate processes, ‘make decisions’ and operate with little human supervision. You’ll be hearing more about agentic AI soon… whether you want to or not.

 

We made it into the arms of December and Reply guy-as-a-service – an evolution of the original ‘reply guy’, who replies to (especially women’s) posts. Reply guy-as-a-service refers to the phenomenon of AI tools that automatically post inane or provocative AI-generated comments or replies to others’ posts. In an agentic manner, in fact. (We told you you’d be hearing more about agentic!)

 

 

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