Make Language Dangerous Again

How to reanimate creativity by reintroducing drama.

When Girogio Moroda harnessed the Moog synthesizer to fuse funky futurism with Donna Summer’s ethereal voice in ‘I Feel Love’ disco didn’t die and musicians didn’t panic, handing over the reins to synthetic music. It grabbed the tools by the electric horns and cranked out Heart of Glass, Gary Numan’s Car and Don’t you Want Me. It made more soul and more funk as man and machine went to work together.

50 years later our stomach for this duet of tech and talent seems to be weaker. In the age of antagonism we play it safe - viewing every opposite with suspicion. So the latest technology is quickly tagged as an existential threat to creativity and all human agency. Yes, something big definitely is happening. But it’s not just about LLMs displacing McKinsey grads, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting convincingly (despite the plagiarism) or muggles dictating websites with ‘vibe coding’. It’s about how we non-technical types have fallen in behind AI, meekly awaiting further instructions. It’s how we’ve forgotten how to be boldly human. And how a larger language muddle must be averted before we start Gofundme’s for our coder mates.

AI Panic

This month the internet nearly broke after Matt Schumer posted an essay on X entitled ‘Something Big is Happening.’ In it he ‘magnanimously’ claimed that he was compelled to share the reality of AI’s imminent lockdown moment - asserting that we’re at the technological equivalent of February 2020 and still unaware of COVID’s catastrophic implications.

COVID is an interesting analogy, but not for the reasons he states. Rather because this moment is prompting a reawakening of our humanity - just as the pandemic reminded us of the compassionate parts of us that had been sleepwalking. I spend a lot of time thinking (worrying) about this topic, ably assisted by a close friend, who works with engineers and raises the specter of humanity’s demise on a daily basis. But what about the humans that don’t live in or around code? Because Matt Schumer is a computer engineer who spends his life coding, talking about coding or reviewing code. Naturally he and his peers dominate the doomspreading, so we hear from experts in code more than experts in humans or linguistics. When you live in a world of commands, UX and GitHub deployments language is narrow and structured with strict definitions. This is unlike the language most humans use, which is fluid, embodied and even chaotic. Commentators like Matt also live by well-defined patterns and rules, so they’ll have a different view on what constitutes AI success. So, despite being experts in their domain they might overstate the abilities of AI. I too feel the AI revolution palpably, including the existential plight of my coding brethren, but I do suspect Matt’s day job may skew his perspective on the demise of non-coding humans.

So I’d like to widen the debate, by exploring a fuller definition of ‘language’ because, while the engineer class has been speaking, the linguists, storytellers and creatives silently and politely listened. But it’s time for them to re-enter the chat and make it messy again.

A Large Language Misunderstanding

The creative community hasn’t merely listened to tech’s words, but it has swallowed their language and rituals hook, line and sinker. Because humans have a funny habit of dressing up in the culture of that which they worship. There’s even a term for it. The 'linguistic founder effect’ is where a new platform or culture births new linguistic patterns which are adopted by those wanting to share in its success. This happened when influencers copied speech patterns of early reality stars like Paris Hilton, or further back when movie stars all cultivated trans-Atlantic accents like Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. The irony of LLMs’ naming is that they only take into account the smallest part of language - syntax. A linguist would be quick to explain that human language is way vaster than the small category of written words in an LLM. In fact LLMs don’t strictly model language at all; they are textual sequence prediction engines. Human language is far deeper. It is embodied, social, inferential, emotional, even moral. And it deploys context, tone, touch, sight and feeling. Already this separates us humans from the world of AI, but you can see why AI may not look too different for the likes of Matt and his colleagues - who work entirely with text-based code.

Language has always evolved as new ideas and technologies reshape the world. But in the last few years tech-speak has saturated our lives. As it did so it replaced our rousing humanity and agency with sterile, mechanical terms that leave you cold. “Wanna double-click on that, bro?” While I grudgingly expect to see this in the efficiency-hungry boardroom and the divisive politics of Trump, Farage or Musk’s DOGE, I’m disappointed by how much it’s also suffocating the creative industries. This insurgency is the linguistic equivalent of forcing the creative into those awful fleece vests

Exhibit A. Awful fleece vest in Silicon Valley

(Incidentally, as I write this sitting in a Miami apartment, I can hear the droning, mechanical voice of a tech bro boasting about how his AI integration has ‘significantly reduced inefficiencies and created ‘synergies’ blah blah.)

Language births culture

Worse than merely dehumanizing us, tech jargon often wants to conceal meaning altogether. Did you really just inspire your team by calling it BX instead of brand strategy? And doesn’t putting your beautiful, inspirational insights into a data-stack simply cheapen it? Good language forges deeper connection and unifies communities around ideas, values - even ancestral beliefs. Bad language segregates, divides and diminishes. But all language has a remarkable knack of seeping into culture, so you’d better ensure it’s feeding and not poisoning it. Today’s ‘technocracy’ imposes a worldview suspicious of intuition and emotion, favoring clean, frictionless order. This binary worldview informs our metaphors and in turn how we think. If the metaphors of our time struggle with abstract thinking, chaos or drama then our ability to conceptualize and materialize the complex or philosophical will suffer too.

So language is not an inert byproduct of a culture, but an active, living participant in forging it. We creative media folks, of all people, must know this. Didn’t we used to influence culture with language and imagery? And wasn’t this very much embodied, emotional and even moral? We know how powerful language can either build or destroy physical entities - from ‘Yes we Can’ to ‘Sleepy Joe.’ And we know that those who own the nomenclature have the power to write history. So why have we allowed such perfunctory, clinical language to infect our quotidian? How did the brutalist hand of tech get to sully the beauty and the drama of media and design? It may not have been deliberate, but I believe the culprit is the same thing I see in Matt Schumer’s essay. We’re only looking at the rules through the lens of an engineer.

But we can assume tech’s advantages without wearing its clothes. Aspiring to the ends doesn’t mandate copying the means. Humans have better tools if only we can remember where we put them and then build the courage to deploy them. Before tech became the apex employer metiers had meaning beyond the efficient. While tech’s success is powered by logic, creativity demands boldly reanimating what nature gave us, and accessing this is a job for language that viscerally moves us. I am decidedly unmoved by creatively retentive names like Meta, X or Alphabet.

Bad language breeds ugly children

To an engineer a word is a rational identifier to demarcate one object from another to enable interplay between them. Objects abide by rules, so can be manipulated and ‘codified’ precisely. (‘Codifying’ is another linguistic fail of our age!). Culture, however, is alive. And language is fuel to sustain and grow culture. By coining a term you aren’t just tagging an object today, but potentially growing or thwarting a whole category. So if you want to grow something beautiful, plant it in a language that inspires and evokes. By supplanting evocative language with the perfunctory we amputated our capacity for germination and cultivation, polluting the inheritance of our descendants for generations.

I have a very personal story of ugly language. Shortly after I left my last ad agency I walked into a conference center of my new peers in the research technology space and was insulted by the ugliest of names I’d ever seen. Advertising by then had evolved from quaint old men’s names like Thompson and Ogilvy, to cheeky, evocative terms like Mother, Cake and Anomaly. But what I was met by was the linguistic founder effect in overdrive. Desperate to emulate the far cooler tech sector, names flailed from the sci-fi cliche: TeliusAI. Behavix. Quantum Research Grip, to the bad pharma-like names: Nexareg, Wortya, and Harmonya (even pharma wouldn’t have wished ‘harm-on-ya’), through to the absurd: Oomiji, Xelper, InfraNodus and Sogolytics, And these were before the AI entered the fray with Scalafai, Datelai and Panoplai!

There was a time when I would only encounter such farce from the deliberately ironic or movie tropes to denote a stark lack of humanity. But we became Hal, Spock and Johnnie 5 from Short Circuit and we’re dutifully crying for ‘More input!’

Ugly begets ugly, and these terms have reproduced like wet Gremlins. Suddenly we have a new sector orthodoxy, and each new company born into it sprouts similar nomenclature. The linguistic cancer metastasizes and strangles our processes too. We stop making speeches, hosting debates and engaging in discussions, replacing them with lightning demos, downloads and perfunctory inputs. The rampant ‘integration’ of ‘synergies’, ‘workflows’ and ‘alignments’ are materially annihilating value now. The wrong language is transforming us from evokers of ideas and crafters of art to mere movers of matter. Is it any wonder our clients are replacing us with AI?

The return of the chaotic human

We have a choice with language, and we commit professional suicide by replacing the daring and evocative with the functional as we cosplay at engineer. We shat the bed when we allowed ‘filmmaker’ to be usurped by ‘content’ - stripping out associations of swashbuckling creative adventurers in favor of mere compilers of visual material. When the British comedian Stewart Lee was first asked to supply some of his ‘content’ to a TV show he complained how: “Content” is such an ugly word. It’s brutal and inhumane. It sounds like a machine grinding out culture in bite-sized lumps.” ‘Content’ gives us no joy, no heat and no inspiration.

So let’s reintegrate language that was designed for the full range of human expression. This may be tough at first as we have conditioned ourselves to subordinate our human skills to the big expensive machines. Operating these machines favored rational, safe thinkers, while the right-brain, lateral and messy ‘feelers’ were ‘streamlined’ out of the kitchen. But, AI’s rapid growth brings good news for the nutjobs and the fire starters: the new machines don’t need coherence or delicate handling anymore! We can go back to cultivating our chaotic, unhinged and emotional selves.

As the investor and business columnist Eric Markowitz - says:

“AI has arrived at precisely the moment when we have already hollowed out so much of what makes work meaningful. I believe that the companies that survive the next era won’t be the ones that move the fastest. They will be the ones that moved with purpose. The ones that kept their people. The ones that chose meaning over margin, long-term resilience over short-term extraction, humanity over efficiency.”

I want to leave you with three practical steps you can take to help clean up our polluted linguistic water system.

1. REINJECT THE LANGUAGE OF OUR RIGHT BRAINS.
For many years, we’ve curbed our language to fit neatly and methodically into the systems and tech of the big machine. Today’s machines are not only comfortable with messiness but work better when you challenge them to challenge you. We’ve coined a term for this: ‘Chaos Prompting’. You don’t politely stand back for AI to create, but instead assign AI the role of the firestarter at the brainstorm - maintaining your own role as ultimate arbiter of taste, creativity and beauty. This ensures that you retain your own agency and energizes yourself and the other humans around you.

2. DESIGN PROCESSES THAT WARM THE NEURONS
Human brains must be warmed up to connect to retrieve memories and make the kinds of creative leaps that only humans can. So your job is to design for this neuron warming by animating yourself and the humans you work with. Change your states, through play, trickery, humor, even vulnerability and emotional openness. It’s also about expanding your modes of expression. We communicate through tone, gesture, imagery, silence, metaphor, facial expressions, the looks we give across the table. If we limit ourselves to clean text, we limit our true human nature. When you widen the channel and the definitions of language you expand the neural pathways by which we arrive at new ideas.

3. NORMALIZE A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY IN EVERY DEPARTMENT.
Vibe coding is about to create a whole new generation of long tail, offbeat, zany makers - just as YouTube did with video in the mid 00s. The era of inaccessible creativity is behind us, yet we’ve been conditioned to see any form of creation as a pursuit for others - not us. BBH etched this idea onto its wall for two decades - ‘Ideas come from anywhere’. Our job now is to condition the human back into our employees, providing permission for them to tap into their intuition, their instinct for play and their imagination. I found John Hegarty’s latest version of this in his Rules for A Creative Life:

These are the remaining skills AI can’t replicate so it’s our duty to nurture, condition and retrain. So reclaim the making from the kids, the tinkerers and the experts. Language is the first step towards this. Liberating how you name the elements of your processes and culture will inductively communicate that you mean business. Choose inspiring, magical and emotionally stirring words and ditch the cold, mechanical and the faux-science nonsense. And now, with the help of vibe coding, you can physically manifest every dream, vision and idea that you can produce linguistically. Evocative language will be a huge differentiator in a world of prompting.

Not only will all this leave you feeling less apathetic and bored but you’ll waste less time fretting over efficiency and ‘the safe way.’ The nihilism and anxiety we feel today isn’t simply because we’re alienated from our outputs, but from any hint of understanding of the tool that makes the product. We became the tools. Regaining agency means getting ‘the prompted’ (AI) to prompt us right back to our fully animated selves.