Plug-and-Play Language

“Representation no longer exists; there’s only action.”
— Gilles Deleuze, from Intellectuals and Power,
a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze

There is a language that isn’t taught, isn’t corrected, and certainly doesn’t ask for permission. A language that flows elsewhere—parallel but not peripheral—emerging from chat streams, voice notes, Discord servers, streams, reels, and shaping an entire syntax. It’s a language that launches itself: its verbs aren’t names for things, but direct gestures, operative segments, shortcuts. This isn’t slang, a generational dialect, or a code for insiders—it’s something else. It’s a mutating source code, a linguistic interface that constantly recompiles itself. We’re not dealing with a derivative language, but a new form of language altogether: functional, rhizomatic, performative, born of use.

In this landscape, grammar is no longer a normative structure, but a dynamic topology. The lexicon is a repertoire on alert, always ready to evolve. Meaning is elastic, slippery, productive. In every new context, a verb can change form and function. Droppare (from the English “to drop”) has no single meaning—it can mean publishing, sharing, releasing a file, skipping an event, letting go of something, someone, some content, some responsibility. Its true meaning doesn’t exist in the abstract—it only exists in action, in the precise moment it is said or written.

In this sense, digital language is not a poor or messy form of speech—it is a language precise within its own environment, calibrated for speed, visibility, and propagation. It’s a language made to circulate, not to stand still.

Back in the 1980s, Vilém Flusser reflected on cultural transformation, noting how society was shifting from one based on linear, alphabetical, logic-grammatical language to a new dimension dominated by codes—more interactive, symbolic, and syncretic. In this context, language loses its purely descriptive function and becomes an operative tool; words become levers of action, commands, semantic shortcuts—codes capable of triggering immediate responses within complex communication systems.

Each new verb is a code fragment—not in the technical-informatics sense, but in the deeper sense of a language that executes effects in the world. Pushare (from “to push”) isn’t “to push” in the classic sense—it’s to advance something forward, in a game, a relationship, a group dynamic. Skillare (from “skill”) isn’t “to be skilled,” but to demonstrate effectiveness on a specific, experiential level. Blastare (from “to blast”) doesn’t mean to ridicule someone in a moral sense—it means to perform a public act of symbolic domination. These verbs function and act—that’s why they stick.

In this scenario, speaking is no longer expressive—it’s strategic. It’s a way of moving through a collective surface.

Language here behaves like a modular game, where each new expression is a temporary skin, an update, an extension. Language patches itself like a videogame, and every new word is an unannounced release.

It’s in the interactive space of online gaming that many of these words are coined and tested. Farmare, clutchare, pushare, grindare, buildare—these are verbs born in environments where language is immediate, adaptive, situated. In multiplayer games, language isn’t used to tell stories—it’s used to do things. The vocabulary is tactical, performative, stripped down to essentials, constantly updated based on experience and effectiveness. It’s a language for human interfaces that must act in sync—not an expressive code, but an operative one.

Alexander Galloway, in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, describes videogames not as representations, but as action. To play is to execute commands, to interact with a system that responds in real time. In this context, language also reconfigures itself: it becomes an extension of gameplay. Words are not signs to be interpreted, but events to be activated. Every term is an input. Every sentence is a strategy. From here comes the idea of language as a modular tool—a system of semantic shortcuts designed to alter the game state, and by extension, the shared reality.

“… where phrases split and scatter, or clash and coexist, and the letters, the typography begins to dance, as the crusade spirals out of control. These are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing: writing weds a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning strata, segmentarity, sedentarity, the State apparatus.”
— A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

Gilles Deleuze, with his mobile and anti-hierarchical thought, spoke of language as a field of forces—not a set of signs. In A Thousand Plateaus, he wrote that language is not a fixed structure but a rhizome: a decentralized, non-hierarchical network in which each element can connect to any other. Speaking, then, is not about articulating pre-given meanings, but opening paths, generating deviations. Every word can deterritorialize—lose its anchoring and take on new functions.

Young people who shottano, cringiano, flexano aren’t merely “butchering” Italian—they’re doing what Deleuze called lines of flight: linguistic movements that free meaning from rigidity, reinventing it through fluid, situated, real-time connection. Error, in fact, is integral to the process. Every new word begins as a glitch that doesn’t work according to the rules, sounds “wrong”—but it’s precisely this deviation that generates space for new meaning.

The anomalous verb is a bug that, if repeated, becomes a feature.

In this new rhizomatic grammar, meaning is no longer a property of the word, but an effect of the network. Each term means something in relation to others, to the context, the platform, the reference culture. All this entails a radical transformation in how we conceive of language. The verb is no longer a form to conjugate—it’s a function to activate. Every new word is tested, modified, reintegrated into the circuit. There’s no longer a correct use in the normative sense—only a series of locally effective uses. Efficacy replaces grammar. Impact replaces coherence. Intuition replaces definition.

And yet this is not chaos. There is a fluid, emergent order—like that of flocks, schools, or clouds. A situated, collective semantics. No longer a language to be preserved, but one constantly emerging—alive in feeds, servers, captions, calls, emotes. A language you catch on the fly, imitate, reinterpret, farm. A language that doesn’t accumulate to know more, but to act better—faster, more effectively.

In this landscape, the origin of a word doesn’t matter as much as what it does—or if it does anything. Genealogy gives way to performativity, where language becomes a field of operative possibilities, a form of social software, a strategy.

Will many of these words disappear? Of course—some are already obsolete the moment they’re written down, right now. But permanence isn’t the point. The point is that contemporary language behaves like an ecosystem in permanent beta. It updates itself, self-corrects on the fly, reinvents itself every day. There is no final version. There is only the current one: unstable, rhizomatic, alive.

In this sense, to speak today is to navigate a liquid language, constantly reassembled. There are no reliable maps—only temporary routes. And perhaps this is where a new kind of authenticity emerges—not in obeying the rules, but in the ability to invent them in real time.

To drop language, then, is a symbolic gesture—it’s letting go of a certain idea of language as closed, linear, transparent, and opening up to another: hybrid, dynamic, nasty, and powerfully unstable.

“We say ‘rawdoggare’ and you’re like ‘what the fuck are they even saying?’…”
“Yeah but that’s too much, bruh…”
“Too much for who? Who’s the ‘too much’ police?”

— from an episode of Epico! podcast, live-streamed on Twitch via Dario Moccia’s channel

Martina Maccianti

Born in 1992, he writes to decipher contemporaneity and the future. Between language, desire and utopias, he explores new visions of the world, searching for alternative and possible spaces of existence. In 2022, he founded a thought and dissemination project called Fucina.