the case for lowercase

the worst personyou know probably writes in all lowercase.

they’ll tell you it’s an aesthetic choice, a testament to informality. they’re likely a twentysomething brooklyn resident like myself, bullish on being notthevoice of their generation butavoice ofageneration, and definitely guilty of posting performative notes-app screenshots and pseudointellectual, stream-of-consciousness “musings” that compare charli xcx to the pope.

what are they really up to, and do they know they’re participating in a long, exclusive, exclusionary tradition? the stylistic choice to write in lowercase is a dead horse that’s been beaten, flogged, and beaten again—what my generation callsran through. and yet, it’s having a moment. i had to investigate.

for one sideof the internet, lowercase writing is feminine.

it’s a “formal feature of how girls engage online,” says rayne fisher-quann, who’s 25 and lives (where else?) in brooklyn. known to the web for the all-lowercase personal essays she writes for her bloginternet princess, fisher-quann insists that the offhandedness of lowercase “neutralizes” the self-importance of writing about oneself. it’s a way, fisher-quann says, “to avoid criticism.”

her feelings trace back to the digital spaces she occupied in her adolescence. “i got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from early 2010s feminist tumblr,” fisher-quann tells me. a decade-plus ago, incisive microblogs were on the rise on the platform, alongside the now-canonical pagejustgirlythings. justgirlythings pioneered the art of superimposing an all-lowercase serif-font sentence on a desaturated image (usually of a young woman wearing an oversized jumper and a messy bun sitting by a fireplace). it mostly covered cozy clichés such as “rainy days” and “lazy sundays.” becky campos, the blog’s author, says she wrote justgirlythings “because it almost felt like you were reading more of my diary instead of some polished copy. it showed that i’m more of a real person than some corporation making the posts.”

then there was rupi kaur, theinstapoetof my generation. kaur’s work investigated the less manicured parts of the female experience, also through a lack of capitalization, except her words weren’t accompanied by stock imagery—theywerethe image. this performance of accessible vulnerability, akin to a live-laugh-love pillow, was kryptonite for millennial women: in 2016, kaur’s debut collection,milk and honey, sold more copies than the next-best-selling work of poetry,the odyssey, by a factor of 10. in homer’s defense, he didn’t have instagram.

while kaur describes her fixation on lowercase as an “ode to my identity as a diasporic punjabi sikh woman” (gurmukhi script only has one case) and a way to channel “equalness,” the virality of her work cemented the supple curves of the lowercase alphabet as an expression of femininity during the early days of social media. and the story might end there, if the internet were only populated by women.

but, to burst my own algorithmic bubble: behind every justgirlythings fan is a 4chan power user.

“i’m willing tobelieve that [using lowercase] is more deliberately aestheticized among young women on tumblr,” says adam aleksic, an internet linguist who goes by etymologynerd, “butnoneof the mega online communities use regular punctuation.” he and i are talking at a swanky coffee shop in soho, where he’s finishing up research on why the r-word ismaking a comeback.

to make his point, etymologynerd pulls up 4chan on his phone and starts scrolling. among the rancid all-lowercase musings, i notice a plethora of greater-than signs, angle brackets, and asterisks. because 4chan doesn’t support—has never supported—rich text (italicization, bolding, etc.), users also employ text-markup conventions: *yes* foryes, /i/hell no/i/ ashell no, etc.

while many may contend that writing in lowercase is a callback to one’s youth, sites like 4chan remind us that, at least within the digital sphere, the callback goes back much further and is part of a larger tradition. “lower case? it started with single-case tty model 33. now, it is habit,” ken thompson writes, in lowercase, in an email where he politely declines my request for an interview. (notice how thompson spellslower caseas two words instead of one. before lowercase was a cornerstone of identity politics, it was just a lower case of the alphabet.)

ken thompson is 83 years old and, of course, one of the computer scientists to whom we owe the existence of the internet. he’s referring, in his email, to the teletype model 33, a popular terminal used for telecommunications that debuted in 1963. back in the ’50s, computers functioned on terminals that could support only 64 unique characters that—counting numbers, punctuation, and special characters—left no room for lowercase letters. this meant that most earlyprogramming languages(fortran, pascal, lisp) were written exclusively in uppercase. it was only between the ’60s and ’70s, when hardware manufacturing started to mature and memory costs started to plummet, that more characters became possible.

in early 1969, thompson got pulled from a project at bell labs, leaving him with nothing but time. so he decided to try to port 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 ended up reconfiguring the pdp-7’s operating system entirely and, alongside his colleagues dennis ritchie, douglas mcilroy, and bob morris, kickstarted the development of 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 every new computer model; and, perhaps most notably, it supported two cases.

soon, all the leading research institutions and corporations running on unix had to standardize how they capitalized in code: upper and lower case helped distinguish variables from constants (e.g., snake_case for variables, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE for constants). these naming conventions, coupled with the increasingly collaborative culture of coding that unix established, evolved into a form of etiquette. capitalizing your code correctly was critical to how legible it was to other programmers, and excess capitalization was considered a faux pax. by the time this etiquette trickled down to the threaded text posts on usenet—the global network system created in 1979—the jargon file (better known asthe hacker’s dictionary) had consecrated uppercase as SHOUTING.

point is, the internet used to be nerd country, reserved for those with technical expertise and written mostly in their idiom of programmatic lowercase shorthands. but everything changed in september 1993, when aol made usenet access a sign-on service, opening the floodgates to what the original usenet (then later irc and world wide web) users would call noobs. all of a sudden, an influx of digital non-natives started usingpropergrammar andcorrectcapitalization, blissfully unaware of the rules that maintained the ecosystem they had just besieged. eventually, because there were just so many of them, the lowercase hacker vernacular became a marginalized quirk, and proper capitalization took over as the new norm.

i’m not saying the tumblr girlies stole from early-internet nerds destined for 4chan. but i am saying lowercase wasn’t invented by them, and perhaps has always been the hallmark of the outsider.

of course, maybenone of this matters. according togretchen mcculloch, author ofbecause internet: understanding the new rules of language, lowercase is a classic case of “resemanticization.” just look at something like “lol.” mcculloch’s theory is simple: first, a phrase is coined for a specific function (L.O.L. as laugh out loud). then, as more people use the phrase in different contexts (lol as an expression of nonchalance), its secondary meaning takes over. in just this way, the meaning of lowercase now bears no connection to its hacker associations, or even to its feminist co-optation.

today, lowercase can be clickbait—gong.io, an ai company that sells marketing data, analyzed over 85 million cold emails and concluded that those with lowercase subject lines get twice as many opens as properly capitalized ones do. i’ve heard of people my age who “become lowercase” because capital letters in texts and dating apps read as “too intense.” lowercase can also be a status symbol—when jack dorsey laid off 40 percent of his staff in february, he did so in anall-lowercase tweet. “the more senior you get, the less formal your emails are,” michelle liang, a tech growth investor, tells me. rarely were any of jeffrey epstein’s emails properly capitalized.

and yet, pockets of the internet still maintain that typing in lowercase is somehow antiestablishment, evident in the twitter trend of posting the phrase “i type in lowercase because i’m anticapitalist.” this could, perhaps, be a nod to the way writers like bell hooks used lowercase writing to “decenter” themselves from their writing; or to every college student’s favorite poet, e e cummings; or to the german bauhaus artists who deemed two cases aesthetically “inharmonic.”

aleksic, the etymologynerd, offers an alternative, more modern explanation: “people might be doing lowercase to signal thatthey’re not ai,” he says. obviously aicanwrite in lowercase, but you at least have to prompt it to do so, so there’s some inherent “friction,” etymologynerd says. after all, it’s not exactly easy to read an essay written entirely in lowercase.

the writer and self-diagnosed contrarian sam kriss sees beauty in how this tired, self-contradicting trope splits hairs: “writing enormous block paragraphs entirely in lowercase is the highest form of ‘respect’ i can render you,” he wrote recentlyon his substack. “reading my posts should be like scrubbing your eyeballs with sandpaper. i will keep attacking you until you are free.” etymologynerd goes so far as to insist that lowercase is the new normal.

or not. when i check back in oninternet princess, fisher-quann’s substack, i notice she’s made a big change: she now writes with proper capitalization.

let us know what you think about this article. submit a letter to the editor at[email protected].

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is a tech and culture writer based in Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in publications including Vox, MIT Tech Review, Vice, Insider, and Vogue. She writes the neo-luddite newsletter

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