TikTok and Taboo: Mysticism in the Information Age

“Animism has endowed things with souls; industrialism turns souls into things.” 

— Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

It is well attested that languages across Eurasia inherit their word for ‘bear’ from a common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, *h2r̥tk̑o-. In Hittite, this root became ḫartaggaš; in Sanskrit, ŕ̥kṣaḥ; and in Albanian, ari. For English speakers, the most recognizable descendants would almost certainly be found in Greek (wherein árktos became ‘arctic,’ meaning ‘land of the bears’) and Latin (where ursus gave us our constellations, Ursa Major and Minor, or ‘greater’ and ‘lesser bear’). In this regard, Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages are notable exceptions. English, German, and Swedish take words descending from the euphemistic root *b^her-, meaning ‘the brown one.’ In Slavic languages, too, a similar origin is found in the root meaning ‘honey eater,’ and in Baltic languages, ‘one who licks.’ To account for this oddity, linguists theorize Northern European peoples once adopted a euphemism for the word ‘bear’ that overtook and displaced the original PIE root.

Finno-Ugric, also found in Northern Europe, is unlike Germanic or Balto-Slavic languages in that it is not descended from PIE. So it is significant that it yet contains a similar etymological quirk. In Finnish, the recognized term for ‘bear’ is karhu, which descends from karhea, meaning ‘coarse’ or ‘wiry,’ possibly in reference to a bear’s fur. But karhu is still considered a euphemism. It exists alongside 200 other well-known euphemisms like mesikämmen, which means ‘mead-paw,’ otso, meaning ‘wide brow,’ and kontio, meaning ‘dweller of the land.’  The original word, however, is lost to history.

It has been proposed these euphemisms originated from a Northern European taboo on the word ‘bear.’ This would surely have something to do with pagan animism, or the belief that all natural things have a consciousness or spirit. While it would be difficult to find traces of this tradition today—as the Christian campaigns to stamp out European nature worship were mostly successful—the taboo could still be seen as late as the mid-20th century in Finnish folk culture. Between 1820 and 1940, ethnographers recorded a trove of ritual songs and epic poems testifying to the ceremonial bear hunt. These are stories of ursine shapeshifters; people bewitched to become bears; and the dead transmuting into bears. In so many of these myths, the bear is regarded as a supernatural deity, both stronger and smarter than humans and with a close association to the all-powerful guardian spirits of the forest. In order to respect this deity, one avoided saying its real name and substituted in all manner of honorifics. 

Amazingly, the taboo was still active in the Ukrainian Carpathians as late as the early 20th century. The highlanders would have known the word ‘bear’ descending from the aforementioned Slavic euphemism ‘honey eater.’ Still, they sought to further displace the word. They said ‘grumbler,’ ‘growler,’ ‘bailiff,’ ‘uncle,’ ‘that one,’ ‘that old one,’ ‘that big one,’ and vedm’id’, this last being a simple reversal of the original medv’id’. Roman Smal-Stocki witnessed the practice and reported it emerged from a tradition of word magic, the belief that uttering a thing’s name could summon it. In saying the word ‘bear,’ one always anticipated the predator crashing out of the brush, and so adopted euphemisms for protection. Smal-Stocki dubbed this tradition magical suppression. 

This close proximity between sign and referent, or spoken word and thing, is the condition of a culture more beholden to nature, or rather, one far removed from scientific domination. In its pre-industrial state, society organizes itself according to the changing seasons; the rhythm of daily life is attenuated to the track of the sun. These are societies without a specified division of labor, without a rationalized production process, without, in short, a “high standard of living.” The bear taboo is prevalent exclusively in such societies and seems to uniformly drop out of use with their integration into the global market system. 

The accumulation of material wealth—which always presages the onrush of the price mechanism—eliminates the material basis for ritual taboo (and animism generally) to reproduce itself. Society loses respect for nature because nature loses mastery over society. The gun, the car, the city: each innovation further tips the scales in humanity’s favor. Time- and work-discipline (so well historicized by E.P. Thompson) is itself predicated on humanity’s material independence from natural cycles. As society individuates, the old myths begin to look more like juvenile fictions than practical wisdom; they are mummified as folktales. Tied to the 9 to 5 and the wage, the individual learns to worry about “real problems.”

Once the price mechanism successfully establishes itself, animism’s extinction is all but assured. The value-systems are simply incompatible with each other, and one must finally cannibalize the other. Where the bear taboo signifies society’s unsheltered vulnerability before nature, price expresses society’s domination over it; and where animism assigns value to the bear according to its terrifying power, the price mechanism appraises it according to the sum its pelt might fetch. In short, at the same time as economic development ends nature’s material domination over humanity, scientific rationality extinguishes the nature spirits which once haunted the psyche. 

Still, industrialization did not spell the end of mysticism. As Adorno and Horkheimer explain, “In the enlightened world, mythology has permeated the sphere of the profane. Existence, thoroughly cleansed of demons and their conceptual descendants, takes on, in its gleaming naturalness, the numinous character which former ages attributed to demons. Justified in the guise of brutal facts as something eternally immune to intervention, the social injustice from which those facts arise is as sacrosanct today as the medicine man once was under the protection of his gods” (A. and H. 21). In other words, as science rendered nature progressively more legible, the mystery which pervaded it was not really eliminated, but rather displaced onto increasingly complex man-made systems. The agent of domination, the object of mystification, merely changed. 

In light of this, it seems algospeak, or the practice of self-censorship now common on Tiktok, represents another kind of ritual taboo. ‘Kill’ becomes unalive, ‘sex’ becomes seggs, ‘sex worker’ becomes accountant, and so on. This is a kind of slang, its use seamless, its meaning unintelligible to those not in the know. And, like all slang, it has a material basis. In order to maintain a positive (read: commerce-friendly) environment, Tiktok deploys a strict content moderation algorithm which suppresses distasteful topics like death and sickness. Users flagged by this algorithm may see their content suppressed in the recommendations, have their videos demonetized, or may even be banned. The algorithm thus stimulates the organic development of a kind of magical suppression.

It’s true that algospeak bears marked differences to the bear taboo. Namely, no one believes uttering ‘kill’ instead of unalive will literally visit death upon them. But we must adapt for the modern context. Following the disenchantment of the natural world and the exorcism of spiritual meaning, divine punishment takes the form of market discipline. And the invisible hand of the market acts in mysterious ways. It works through commercial entities, in this case Tiktok, to exact impersonal and heteronomous behavioral norms. It does not discipline with the threat of death but with the threat of financial destitution—the only legitimate punishment in the market system. This punishment is serious. For those whose livelihoods depend on social media, demonetization may well spell death. And for the rest, a ban or suspension is akin to being struck with muteness. Worse yet, shadow banning inflicts the curse of Cassandra. One keeps their voice, but they speak in vain. 

We must understand, then, that, at the most fundamental level, the bear taboo expressed the individual’s deference to impersonal forces with arbitrary authority over them. It was a form of appeasement. Algospeak is the same. Deference to the algorithm, to TikTok, to the market.

Now, while taboo springs from practical concerns, it quickly assumes a more specific social meaning. To illustrate, Rupert Stasch, in his study of the word avoidance tradition found among the Korowai of West Papua, identifies a number of functions served by taboo. He writes, “At the level of interactional meaning and effects, the main relational quality indexed by word avoidance is a speaker’s stance of restraint and careful discriminateness, toward an interactional other who is designated by the avoided form… There is thus a paradoxical quality to the relatedness created by avoidance: it makes relatedness through relational restraint.” In a concrete example, Korowai mother-in-law and son-in-law pairs often “avoid referring to each other in the singular, touching each other, catching sight of each other, or eating from the same food bodies.” In this case, the verbal taboo is only one piece of an array of avoidance practices which, while separating individuals, discursively constitute their relationship. Adherence to the taboo is a form of politeness and respect for the other. At the same time, these avoidance practices generate a whole territory of social norms which may be transgressed for the sake of comedy or intimacy. 

While the case of the Korowai obviously cannot be used to explain the universal function of word avoidance, it yet demonstrates the socially productive nature of taboo. In the case of algospeak, I suspect word avoidance serves at least two similar social functions: care for the other and in-group/out-group formation. For example, some Tiktok users deploy grape as a stand in for ‘rape’ and unalive for ‘suicide.’ They claim that, beyond warding off demonetization, the terms of artifice may avoid triggering traumatized individuals. We should put aside the question of whether these substitutions actually achieve their purported goal or if they serve to condescend. The people who use the terms do believe they are exercising care for the other. Moreover, this particular form of care signals one’s position in the ongoing discourse on mental health, thus encoding speech with a socio-political valence. 

We see, then, that algospeak is not reducible to economic determinism. It contains a certain social excess. Even as the economy moves to encroach on every aspect of life, human sociality yet survives. Beneath this heavy regime of market discipline, we still find humans carving out space for care, subversion, and politics. Therefore, algospeak is, like any tradition of word avoidance, as much a phenomenon of intersubjective recognition as one of personal protection. 

Still, we must not be under the impression this social excess evidences a happy existence. While the bear taboo also constituted a rich tapestry of cultural meaning, its origin-point was fear and insecurity. Whatever particular instances of social coming-together it enabled would not have negated the universal experience of alien domination that produced it. Eliminating this condition of domination would amount to human emancipation.

Algospeak is the symptom of a society under the thumb of its own economy. This society has allowed things to dictate values, the circulation of commodities to determine social life. The economic edifice is so complex as to defy comprehension. Algospeak thus joins the wider displacement of mystification. Where the bad harvest once punished society for its moral depravity, the economic recession now signals the state’s failure to manage the over-accumulation of capital in this or that sector. And where spurning priestly authority could lead to one being smote by the gods, failure to show due deference to one’s boss puts them at risk of being selected for the next round of layoffs. In each case, one hears the obvious justification for their punishment. Failure to be virtuous, failure to be fiscally responsible, failure to respect the gods, failure to respect one’s superiors. All the same. At base, the assumption of moral accountability to an alien power. A vast, unaccountable, domineering power. The most capable economists will admit they don’t fully understand this behemoth. In lieu of understanding, it calls forth mysticism.

References

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

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Jake Neuffer is a paralegal and writer. He is currently researching the relationship between market and society in the information age.