Cool kids are writing in lowercase now. Does this make you angry?
A certain type of person is now writing in lowercase. Why?
The worst person you know probably writes in lowercase letters.
They'll tell you it's an aesthetic choice, a testament to informality. They're probably 20-something Brooklynites like me, who want to be the voice not of their generation, but of a generation, and are definitely guilty of posting screenshots of Executive Notes and pseudo-intellectual, stream-of-consciousness "studies" comparing charli xcx to pop.
What are they really doing, and do they know that they are participating in a long, exclusive, exclusive tradition? Choosing a lowercase style is a dead horse that has been beaten, whipped, and beaten again – what my generation calls it. And yet, a moment passes. I had to research
For one side of the internet, lowercase writing is feminine.
"It's an official feature of how girls interact online," says Rain Fisher-Kwan, 25, who lives in (where else?) Brooklyn. Fisher-Kwan, known on the web for the perfectly small personal essays she writes for her blog Princess of the Internet, insists that the rudeness of lowercase "neuters" the importance of writing about yourself. Fisher-Kwan says it's a way to avoid criticism.
His feelings go back to the digital spaces he occupied in his teenage years. “I got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from the feminist blog of the early 2010s,” Fisher-Kwan tells me. More than a decade ago, penetrating microblogs were on the rise on the platform alongside today's mainstream blogs. Page justgirlythings. justgirlythings pioneered the art of superimposing an all-caps sentence over a desaturated image (usually a young woman wearing an oversized jumper and a messy bun sitting by a fireplace). It covered mostly cozy clichés like "rainy days" and "lazy Sundays." "Because it almost felt like you were reading more of my diary than some polished copy," says the blog's author, Becky Campos. It showed that I'm a real person rather than a company writing these posts."
Then Rupi Kaur, the insta poet, was the poet of my generation. Kaur's work also explored the less manicured parts of the female experience by not using capital letters, except that her words weren't accompanied by existing images—they were images. This accessible, laugh-pillow-like performance of live love was kryptonite for millennial women: In 2016, Kaur's debut collection, Milk and Honey, outsold the next best-selling poetry work, the Odyssey, by 10 percent in Defense of Homer.
While Kaur describes her fixation on lowercase as "an ode to my identity as a migrant Punjabi Sikh woman" (the Gurmukhi line has only one) and a way to channel "equality," the virality of her work reinforced the flexible curves of lowercase as an expression of femininity in the early days of social media. And the story might end there, if the Internet was populated only by women.
But, to burst my algorithmic bubble: behind every justgirlythings fan is a 4chan power user.
"I'd like to believe [the use of lowercase letters] is a deliberate aesthetic among young women on Tumblr, but none of the big online communities use regular punctuation," says Adam Alexik, an internet linguist who works on etymology. He and I talk in a chic coffee shop in Soho, where he's completing research into why the r-word is making a comeback.
To make his point, etymologynerd pulls up 4chan on his phone and starts scrolling. Amidst all the little corrupt reflections, I notice a multitude of larger signs, angle brackets, and asterisks. Since 4chan does not support – never has supported – rich text (italics, bold, etc.), users also use text markup conventions: *yes* for yes, /i/hell no/i/ for no, etc.
While many may claim that lowercase writing is a response to one's youth, sites like 4chan remind us that, at least in the digital realm, callback goes back much further and is part of a larger tradition. "Lowercase? Started with the single-case 33 tty. Now it's a habit," writes Ken Thompson in lowercase in an email politely declining my request for an interview. (Notice how Thompson spells lowercase as two words instead of one. Before lowercase became a cornerstone of identity politics, it was just one lowercase letter of the alphabet.)
Ken Thompson is 83 years old and of course one of the computer scientists, we owe the existence of the Internet to them. In his email, he refers to the Model 33 Teletype, a popular terminal used for long-distance communication that began in 1963. In the 50s, computers ran on terminals that could only support 64 unique characters, which - counting numbers, punctuation and special characters - left no room for lowercase letters. This means that most early programming languages (Fortran, Pascal, Lisp) were written exclusively in uppercase letters. Only between the 60s and 70s, when hardware production began to grow and memory costs fell, did more characters become possible.
In early 1969, Thompson was dropped from a project at Bell Labs, leaving him with nothing but time. So he decided to try porting a video game he had developed on company-owned equipment, Space Travel, to a more accessible pdp-7 computer he found unused in a neighboring department. He eventually fully configured the pdp-7 operating system and, along with colleagues Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Bob Morris, began developing Unix. Unix made programming more ergonomic. With it, programmers no longer had to work with obscure machine code. There was no need to rewrite programs from scratch for each new computer model. And perhaps most importantly, it supported two things.
Soon, all leading research institutes and companies working on Unix were forced to standardize how to use uppercase letters in code: uppercase and lowercase letters help. Distinguish variables from constants (eg, snake_case for variables, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE for constants). These naming conventions, along with the increasingly collaborative culture of coding that Unix created, evolved into a form of etiquette. Capitalizing your code correctly was very important to other programmers, and excessive capitalization was considered a package cheat. By the time these customs reached text posts on Usenet (the World Wide Web system created in 1979), the dictionary file (better known as the Hacker's Dictionary) offered capitalization as a shout.
The thing is, the Internet used to be a vulgar country, reserved for those with technical expertise, and mostly written in programming shorthand. But that all changed in September 1993, when aol turned usenet access into a login service, opening the floodgates to what the core users of Usenet (and later irc and the World Wide Web) called noobs. Suddenly, an influx of digital non-natives began using proper grammar and capitalization, blissfully ignorant of the rules of the ecosystem they had just besieged. Eventually, because there were so many of them, the lowercase hacker vernacular became a marginal fad, and capitalization became the new norm.
I'm not saying that Tumblr girls stole from the Internet innovators destined for 4chan. But I say that the small letters were not invented by them, and may have always been a foreign character.
Of course, none of this may matter. According to Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because the Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, lowercase letters are a classic case of "remeaning." Just look at something like "lol". McCulloch's theory is simple: First, an expression is constructed for a specific function (L.O.L. as in laugh out loud). Then, as more people use the phrase in different contexts (lol as an expression of disdain), its secondary meaning increases. As such, the lowercase meaning now has nothing to do with its hacker communities, or even its feminist subscription.
Today, lowercase letters can be clickbait—gong.io, an AI company that sells marketing data, analyzed more than 85 million cold emails and found that those with lowercase subject lines were twice as likely to be opened as those written in uppercase letters. I've heard of people my age getting "lowercase" because uppercase is read as "too intense" in texts and dating apps. Small letters can also be a status symbol — when Jack Dorsey laid off 40 percent of his staff in February, he did so in a perfectly small tweet. “The older you get, the less formal your emails are,” technology growth investor Michelle Liang tells me. Hardly any of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were properly capitalized.
And yet, pockets of the internet still believe that typing in lowercase is somehow anti-establishment, as evidenced by the trend on Twitter to post the phrase "I type in lowercase because I am. Anti-capitalist." Perhaps this could be a reference to the way writers like bell hooks use lowercase letters to "center" their writing. Or to every student's favorite poet, E. Cummings. Or to the German Bauhaus artists, who considered the two aesthetically "incongruent".
aleksic, an etymologist, offers an alternative, more modern explanation: "people may indicate that they are not ai by lowercase letters," he says. Obviously, ai can write in lowercase, but you have to at least encourage it to do so, so there's some inherent "friction," says etymologynerd. After all, it's not entirely easy to read an all-lowercase article.
Self-diagnosed author and Sam Chris sees the beauty in the way this tired, contradictory song splits hairs: "Writing long paragraphs entirely in lowercase is the highest 'respect' I can show you," he recently wrote in his substack. "Reading my posts should be like sandpapering your eyeballs. I will attack you until you break free." etymologynerd goes so far as to insist that lowercase is the new normal.
Or not When I revisit Internet Princess, Fisher-Kwan's substack, I notice that she's made a big change: she now writes in all caps.
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