Word of the week: Zynternet
Is it this year's "enshittification"?
In early January 2024 the language mavens at the American Dialect Society selected enshittification as the word of the year for 2023. (By that time, I’d been tracking the word for almost a year; see my February 1, 2023, post for the Strong Language blog.) Uncharacteristically for a newly created word, enshittification could be traced to a single person: journalist and author Cory Doctorow. Doctorow isn’t your average scribe: He has clout, and his coinage quickly spread. “Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded,” said Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee. “From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts.”
This year we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Zynternet, which cropped up just last month, is less sweary and more brand-y than enshittification, but it’s nearly as viral. And as with enshittification we know who’s responsible for it: In this case, Substacker and journalist
.You can infer from the -ternet suffix that Zynternet has something to do with online life. But what about that Zyn prefix?
I’ll turn the mic over to Max Read himself. Here’s an excerpt from his June 28, 2024, newsletter, headlined “Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet”1:
Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings — mostly but by no means entirely male — has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents — college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches — and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.
Emphasis added.
What is Zyn (or ZYN, as it’s sometimes styled)? It’s a tobacco-free nicotine-delivery brand sold2 by Stockholm-based Swedish Match, since 2022 a division of Philip Morris, which also makes the snuff brand Snus. The product consists of biodegradable paper pouches containing “nicotine, flavorings, sweeteners and plant-based fibers,” according to the University of Nebraska Health Center; a user places a pouch under his top lip (“pops an upper decky,” in Zyn argot) or his bottom lip (a lower decky), where it releases (addictive) nicotine into the user’s bloodstream.
What does the Zyn name mean? I don’t know, and I’m as disappointed as you are. It does not appear to have any significance in Swedish. Could it be a reference to sin? Maybe! If nothing else, the similarity between the words has engendered some punning. On May 18, the satirical newspaper The Roman Fly published a fictional story in which the Vatican declared that “Zyn is not a sin.” In fact, there has been no papal commentary on the subject at all, and you are free to make your own judgments about the seven deadliest Zyns.
If you’re not a Zyn user, you may have heard about the Zyn culture-war controversy, which began in January when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned that the product was a danger to children and urged federal agencies to investigate it.
“This calls for a Zynsurrection!” bleated tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene (R-GA) in response. The most vocal Zyn-thusiasts tend to skew libertarian or reactionary: Among Zyn’s other defenders is former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who has said that he uses Zyn “every second I’m awake,” and who told a podcast host that “[Nicotine] increases mental acuity, raises your testosterone level, [and] it may be a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”3
Call it “bro-y fandom” (Guardian, February 12, 2024) or “mascuzynity” (Vox, February 23, 2024): Zyn has produced not just “Zynfluencers” — all enthusiastic volunteers, according to a Philip Morris International spokesperson — but an entire online culture, which Max Read claims is “a genuinely new phenomenon”:
There have always been college-sports fans on the internet, consigned to some of the worst message boards you can possibly imagine, but it’s only in the past decade that the internet has become so ubiquitous and culturally hegemonic that it’s been able to sustain a large population of current and former fraternity members, degenerate gamblers, and Southern party girls, and in turn to convince those people to participate actively in the culture of social media.
But these groups may never have really been organized into a subculture absent two other important developments: The first is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which has been extremely beneficial to all kinds of demonstratively macho subcultures for reasons that have been discussed ad nauseaum [sic]. The second is the legalization of sports gambling in many states, which has flooded media properties that cater to Zynternet demographics with cash, either as advertisers or often as owners.
I suspected that “Zynternet” might have legs when I spotted it on Know Your Meme, which defined it as “a zone of largely American internet culture invested in sports betting, traditional gender roles, Zyn nicotine products, a largely apolitical worldview and media brands like Barstool Sports.” There’s even a short video. But I really paid attention when the British journalist
, a contributor to The Atlantic and author of the Bluestocking Substack, put “Zynternet” in a post headline and devoted a Quick Link to Read’s Zynternet post in her July 5 newsletter. She labeled it NSFW, which I have no doubt will only amplify its reach.Related (linguistically): Splinternet
“Hawk Tuah” is a meme based on the response of a young woman named Hailey Welch to an interviewer in Nashville who asked, “What move in bed makes a man go crazy every time?” Watch the video, if you must.
Until recently, anyway. On June 17 Philip Morris announced that it would suspend online sales of Zyn “as local officials in Washington, D.C., investigate the company’s compliance with the district’s ban on the sale of flavored products.” (Wall Street Journal) Meanwhile, Zyn products have been in short supply in brick-and-mortar smoke-and-vape shops as well. The cause is unclear: A warehouse fire? Skyrocketing demand? Supply-chain problems? Bereft users are calling it, naturally, a “Zyndemic.”
Alternatively, Carlson may have his nicotine-besotted head up his ass. I report, you decide!
Who will be the first person to claim that their survey of the too-online quasi-libertarian quadrant of American culture is "from Ayn to Zyn" ?
Wow, I had never even heard of Zyn (eww). And boy, that Tucker Carlson quote sure explains a lot about HIM. (Again, eww...)