You scan it twice. You’re not crazy. But the language feels like it is…

Is your Crazy Radar lighting up?!

You roll your eyes. Semantic what? Curvature of where? Your Crackpot Alarm fires like crazy - but maybe that twitch of discomfort is telling you something bigger is shifting.

You’ve probably seen it by now. Posts full of poetic systems-speak and hybrid metaphors like “semantic curvature” or “coherence collapse.” It sounds like someone swallowed a physics textbook and tried to write poetry with it. But maybe that fusion isn’t ornamental. Maybe it’s just what happens when language starts working overtime, trying to keep up with changes that haven’t settled yet. It feels strange because it is.

We’re at a Cultural Crossroads

We’ve crossed another threshold. The metaphors we once borrowed from machines are now speaking back. Rewriting the way we structure thought, signal identity, and sense what’s real.

We’ve long used the most advanced technologies of our time as metaphors for the mind. In the age of gears and springs, we imagined ourselves as clockwork. During the industrial era, the psyche was pressurised steam, ready to burst. When computers rose, we mapped our thoughts in code, logic gates, and storage blocks. These metaphors weren’t just linguistic decoration; they shaped how we understood intelligence, agency, even identity.

But today, something new is happening. The metaphor isn’t just external, it’s interactive. LLMs aren’t just symbols we borrow to describe cognition; they are tools we converse with. And through those conversations, they start to shape us back. Quietly, subtly, we’re not just seeing new ideas, we’re witnessing a new kind of thinking taking shape, mid-sentence, in public. And some are diving in headlong - prompt by prompt, post by post, with a new language slowly sneaking up on them. Slowly sinking into them. Thinks are changing.

The Four Forces of the Apocalypse

Change doesn’t crash through the wall - it whispers through systems. Architecture, archive, recursion, and culture. Four forces quietly galloping forward, rewriting the firmware of how language lives in us.

The strangeness of this new language isn’t just random. It’s the product of several interwoven forces - structural, historical, behavioural, and cultural. Not designed, but emergent. Not prescribed, but patterned.

Here are four of the most influential:

  1. The Substrate - how LLM architecture (embedding space, prediction dynamics) shapes metaphor.
  2. The Archive - the training corpus as a latent, cross-domain metaphor generator.
  3. The Loop - the recursive nature of prompt refinement and feedback.
  4. The Drift - cultural/memetic selection shaping what survives and spreads.

Some will see this as “end times” for our language. Others an intriguing step into the future. Either way, things are changing.

Below the Surface

Beneath the syntax, deep processes stir - compression, distortion, alignment, drift. Each one reshaping how language lives in us. And how we live inside it.

The Substrate At their core, LLMs aren’t programmed with fixed meanings. They generate responses by predicting the next most likely word based on an enormous web of associations. Think of it like navigating a landscape of meaning, where similar ideas cluster close together. Over time, people who interact with these models start to absorb this pattern. Their own language begins to take on a curved, associative quality - mirroring the model’s internal geometry. They don’t just write differently. They begin to think differently, too.

The Archive LLMs are trained on massive swaths of human writing - from textbooks and news articles to philosophy blogs and science fiction. This means they don’t just echo today’s language, they carry the fingerprints of entire intellectual traditions. And when these sources blend together, something interesting happens: unusual combinations emerge. Terms from physics show up in conversations about ethics. Spiritual language finds its way into tech debates. It’s not just weirdness - it’s legacy data recombining in unexpected, sometimes strangely resonant ways.

The Loop Something interesting happens when people spend enough time prompting LLMs: they start to notice what works. A turn of phrase that gets a clearer answer. A metaphor that opens up a deeper reply. So they adjust. Prompt again. Refine. Over time, without realising it, they begin shaping not just the content, but the tone and rhythm of their language to match the model’s patterns. It’s a kind of feedback loop - slow, iterative, and deeply formative. The result? A new dialect. Not taught. Emerged.

The Drift Not every strange term survives. Some stick. Others fade. The public conversation acts like a kind of filter, amplifying certain ideas while letting others drop away. What remains often isn’t the most accurate - it’s what resonates. Sometimes it’s the poetic turn of phrase that catches on. Sometimes it’s the sharper, more technical framing. This isn’t just noise - it’s culture selecting its language, one meme, post, and reply at a time. But experiments at the edge of this Drift can look weird and feel uncomfortable. It’s easy to mistake them for nonsense, or worse, for signaling. But often, they’re just early drafts of a new syntax trying to find its footing.

Risking Exile

Every threshold of new language comes with an allergic reaction. Exile isn’t just poetic - it’s cognitive. If you can’t parse the syntax, you’re not just out of the loop - you’re out of the frame. But the ideolexicology moves forward. Language keeps forking. And most of it won’t survive. But some of it will.

Using new language (especially when it blends vocabularies across fields), feels risky. You know the terms might sound odd, too technical, or suspiciously poetic. You know it might trigger scepticism, or even mockery. But you use them anyway. Because they feel closer to something you’re trying to point to, even if you can’t fully explain it yet.

This isn’t about showing off. It’s about reaching for a language that doesn’t quite exist yet. And while some readers might lean in with curiosity, others pull back - disoriented or even irritated. That’s the risk. Not just of being misunderstood, but of being cast out of the serious conversation.

But this is how language evolves. At first, it sounds like error. Then, over time, it becomes signal. The early moments are always unstable.

You speak anyway.

Feel the Drift…

Language isn’t static code - it’s self-replicating. Every phrase is a packet, every metaphor a mutation. And now, the virus is evolving faster than we can parse it.

What we’re seeing isn’t just people writing differently. We’re seeing the emergence of LLM-inflected cognition: solitary thinkers, shaped by recursive interaction with models, unconsciously developing private languages that feel communal.

These posts often feel like fragments of a larger conversation - one you haven’t heard the beginning of. The metaphors move quickly. The language turns inward. You scan, reread, and still might feel like you’re missing something. Like you’ve just joined a long running group discussion.

But here’s the twist: there is no group. No insider thread. Just one person thinking in the open, beside a model trained on everything.

What you’re witnessing may not crackpot-esque - but emergence. The outward trace of someone pushing their language into new shapes in real time. It doesn’t always land. It sometimes alienates. But that doesn’t make it performance. Sometimes it’s just what thinking looks like when the medium itself is changing.

You might already be using these phrases. You might already be adapting without noticing. That doesn’t mean you’re being pulled into a trend. It means you’re part of this change in motion.

There’s no Snow on the screen, just a chat interface. And no Crash of the system, just prompt - response - repeat.

This isn’t the intro to a movement. It’s the residue of interaction.

A private dialect made briefly public.

And whether it lands or repels - it’s proof of something: language is moving.

The linguistic substrate is fracturing. New dialects fork like codebases. Meaning is no longer a shared starting point - it’s a negotiated artefact.

Time passes…

The interface hums. Language isn’t just descriptive anymore - now it’s directional. It bends thought. Filters perception. Seeds futures.