I remember when I failed my most ambitious optional subject in college: Sociolinguistics. It covered questions of culture, ethnicity, speech patterns, and the intersection between traditional elements of grammar like morphology and syntax, updating the decades old notion that the language we spoke should be labelled as either good or bad (a societal, moralistic imput) and instead, more in terms of how many elements we could label and classify, identify and try to describe, taking aim at discourse analysis and Semiotics as well as real world data. Conversation was the main theme. That contradicted classic Linguistic theory thinker Ferdinand de Saussure, who thought that the object of study should be form, and meaning should be something else (given that it’s too broad, too variable and often contradicting or ambiguous). Form had a simpler structural pattern. Therefore, every linguist should look at how words are written (the Humanities student might have heard “how the sign is signified”, although these are each separate categories — one for the form, the other for the content). Notice that the content is where meaning is — and that is deliberately ignored. Many theories came after that, but as computer science advanced, the same kind of obsession with form (and function, because these were people with orders for the machine to do as told) made every programming language empty in social purpose, by design and theory. Fast forward to 2026, and nobody even studies Humanities anymore, because reading is apparently overrated and a thing that grandparents do (because, again, it’s 2026, and kids born in 2008 can do sex work — legally).

What the exact sciences failed to grasp was not just that humans never wanted to confuse reality with the virtual — at all. We see it everywhere: the bank card doesn’t require a password anymore, just approximation, and now, on your phone, with a technology called NFC. No need to worry about your phone’s security. Who does? They already have everything on Drive (One Drive, Google Drive, whatever service you pay for), but maybe nobody predicted that SanDisk would be making a lot of money in a world where cloud dominates so much of what we’ve come to know about personal organization, and mind you, “memory” (not the computer’s, but human beings’ ability to register personal moments, not to mention every project that they make and everything that they collect on the open web, as we insist to call it, despite abundant evidence of censorship). And we have the habit of deleting our conversations as an act of privacy — not collecting years of exchange between the people we care about. Snapchat is over, but Signal isn’t even safe anymore. If I show my face (or my body) in front of a camera, the device sends information to biometrics banks and any unwittingly installed software (you can think Pegasus, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, the United States of America has sponsored a war in Palestine and this is an Israeli product), making anyone at risk for the simple fact that they’re showing who they are.

Too late now. The economy moves on data. The conversations will not just be monitored, but used to train AI (not for your dumbass searches and image crafting that nobody fucking likes, but for advertising products, which ultimately will be timed at your highest inconvenience and their best profit margin). Nobody cares about the nature of conversations; what matters is more people add more contacts (which, stats will show, are different than people, given the percentage of the web composed of robots). No doubt that the current norm of the web is to make professional storytellers want to throw their phones onto the wall as hard as possible, with an overflowing algorithmic feed of trash comedy and people asssuming different characters, simulating situations and very often using another person’s voice to mimic how they’d react if such a thing would happen to them (whatever is going on in the audio). Not to mention the music industry — I definitely decline to comment. When the people running AI realize that nothing replaces human conversation; that it is essential for people to grow and learn how to collaborate, negotiate and develop affection; that we need to allow people to express themselves as they wish, and not standardly offer a one click mechanism that banishes human beings from a given user’s life forever; that certain topics of conversation are naturally going to be brought up, and that the data will inevitably, no matter what, show that; and that linguistic awareness and tolerance should be the reason why we have developed systems of global communication in the first place, maybe then they’ll be interested in what’s been written in the real Linguistics field: not the stuff that deals with code language, made for machines, but human language, made by humans, for humans. And maybe one day they’ll realize that we learned that from animals, and we won’t have to hear bullshit like “eat real food” from the Department of Health, while slaughterhouses in Brazil pile up dead carcasses for the American populace to eat. Swallow your meat, USA! Just don’t mind us if we raise taxes. I’m sure you wouldn’t invade our country and steal the cows.