On Wordcels

the key is the entitlement

Because Twitter is Twitter, a new meme is sweeping across cyberspace. It isn’t a word game or a ten-year glow-up but, instead a pair of words that claims to explain the past five years of Twitter drama: wordcels and shape rotators. The kinds of people that the terms describe are over-indexed on Twitter and are therefore in the media more than they otherwise would be. Wordcel has been twisted in the conversation so far and is being used in ways that ignore the full meaning.

Background

The terms were coined by Roon, a pseudonymous Twitter user who mostly tweets about tech. Roon has a post on his substack about what they mean to him, and I encourage you to read it.

A Song of Shapes and Words

An explainer about the meme is going to drop in a prestige outlet — such as the New York Times, Vox, The Atlantic, etc. — in the next few days which will probably retcon the whole thing into a story about one of the two boogie men of online culture reporting: incels or white nationalism. Those storylines make readers of legacy news outlets happy and there is a tenuous connection that can be mined for clicks:

• The terms first emerged in 2019 on 4chan

• Steve Sailer wrote about the terms the other day¹

• The suffix -cels is stolen from incel lingo

I don’t think Roon’s usage in late 2021 and onwards is connected to any of these, but such is life on the meme farm.

Wordcels

Something that has been downplayed in the conversation is who exactly wordcels are. Silicon Valley influencers, like Balaji, have attached themselves to one part of the definition that confirms their priors. Balaji, for instance, has a long-term anti-humanities and anti-journalism project that he uses the meme to further.

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

To spoil the joke here you go rotator = high math, can do mental shape rotation wordcel = high verbal deep learning is held by @tszzl to be attractive to the practical, while crypto ostensibly appeals to the theoretical but this is a lossy approximation to a 4 cluster space

What his tweet misses is that wordcels are not people with high verbal intelligence, but a much smaller group. You can see this by breaking the word down into its parts:

• word: People with a humanities/non-quantitative social science background and writes professionally

• -cels: Derived from incel culture, but is used mockingly to describe a person with a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement.

So I wordcel is someone with high verbal intelligence who believes it entitles them to money and fame. This is very different from Balaji’s “humanities grads are a drag on society” schtick. Tech, the home of Roon’s shape rotators, is filled with people with BAs in the humanities and social science. Also, there are plenty of people who “sold out” and work in industry. None of those people would be wordcels.

The prototypical wordcel is the gunner journalist with a degree from a highly-selective college or university. Despite their degree in politics from Princeton, a gig as a staff writer at New York Mag, and 40,000 followers on Twitter, they only make only $55,000 per year.² When they go to alumni events or to the bar with friends they rub shoulders with their peers who work in finance/tech/business/law and make double what they do. This triggers envy and feeds into feelings of entitlement.

Journalism is not the only field where wordcels are found. Twitter shows that academia (particularly Ph.D. students, post-docs, and non-tenure-line faculty), as well as non-profits, are fertile ground for wordcels. Look for anywhere that tries to pay their workers in “mission” or “prestige” instead of cash.

The prototypical wordcel listened to their high school guidance counselor’s and college academic advisior’s advice: you can major in anything you want and there are jobs there. I have a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy and I have been employed in things related to my Anthropology major. It is possible. But, a degree from a selective college no longer is a no-questions-asked ticket to making as much money as you want in the field you want.

We as a society need to be much more transparent with young people about their real chances of making it in their dream field. Higher education needs to stop offering scam programs that place alumni in a lifetime of debt due to scant employment prospects in the field. Employers and industries that only persist because they pay their employees lower than market wages while requiring expensive higher education should not survive.

1. I would link to the piece but it is dull and I don’t want to give him more traffic

2. The median individual income in New York City is $32,320 per year and $31,133 per year for the United States as a whole. $55,000 is well above what most people around them make, but that is low compared to other people in their college-educated bubble. The median Princeton grad makes $90,700 per year at 34.