You know those euphemistic words like “muck up” for “fuck up”, “shite” for “shit”, or “unalive” for “suicide” that people use to circumvent the rules of major platforms like YouTube and Tiktok? I just thought about how people are starting to use them on other platforms and in real live out of habit. But they only make sense in this very specific context, that a majority of communication takes place on privately owned, strictly regulated internet platforms that ban certain words.

If for whatever reason the details of how the platforms worked get lost (and they might, because it’s so centralised that all it takes is for a handful of major companies to go under and take all the content they host with them), it’ll be difficult to retroactively figure out what the culture of the 2020s looked like and where all those weird words suddenly came from.