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In February, Block CEO Jack Dorsey wrote a letter in such a gentle whisper that he almost made you forget he was announcing some of the biggest layoffs in recent history. "i'll be straight about what's happening," he wrote to the 4,000 people, or 40% of his fintech company, he had just axed. "i'm grateful to you, and i'm sorry to put you through this." He wrote the entire 600-word missive in the new language of power, lowercase.
As tech executives amass more influence on humanity, "type softly and carry a big stick" has become the unspoken communications mantra among many of them. Dorsey has been up on lowercase since his first post on Twitter, now X, in 2006: "just setting up my twittr." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman abandons capital letters with abandon. After he was fired and before he was rehired in 2023, for example, Altman texted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a draft of a statement they could jointly release: "how about: satya and my top priority remains to save openai." Other practitioners of lowercase include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and LinkedInfluencers everywhere.
It's informal, conversational, playful, and approachable, but is lowercase effective or just an affect? By flattening letters, are executives flattening hierarchies? Does lowercasing shrink that spiky chasm between thoughts and words? Or are these just billionaire Gen Xers and elder millennials cosplaying as Zoomers? Are teeny tiny letters the new midlife-crisis Porsche? Perhaps lowercase and shorthand is the unserious dialect for our unserious, postliterate time.
to find out, i spent a week typing only in lc: every slack msg to my direct reports & my boss, every email, every parent grp chat txt, every outreach to sources for this story — biz etiquette experts, comms gurus, & sam altman. no cap, i liked it more than i thot i would; but i fear its unchecked power.
it feels weird to talk about how superintelligence is going to reshape society and still not use capitals and punctuationSam Altman
I quickly noticed that I was thinking less about what I wanted to say. Without the rules of grammar or the need to find the mot juste, I responded to people almost instantaneously throughout the day and left no room for doubt about how my messages would be received when firing off emails. Lowercase is a linguistic liquid courage; the words spill out more easily, but they're often slurred. I trade clarity and thoughtfulness for volume and responsiveness.
But for some recipients, I found, lowercase is a capital offense. A male coworker told me that a woman to whom he sent flirty lowercase Tinder messages texted back, "I feel like I'm talking to a 12-year-old." He's been a model grammarian since. Two female Gen Z coworkers called lowercase an epidemic among Brooklyn men — lowercasing, they say, is an instant red flag.
I reached out to the lowercase luminaries to get their thoughts on foregoing capital letters. Garry Tan wrote back, "sorry i have to code!" Dorsey and Block did not respond to my request for comment. Sam Altman texted me back within 15 seconds.
"i am trying to change to upper case! but its hard," he wrote. "i do think it feel unserious, so i am making a half-hearted effort to change."
What prompted the change? I asked.
"it feels weird to talk about how superintelligence is going to reshape society and still not use capitals and punctuation," he said. "i had a moment where i was writing about how much the world was going to change and felt like it deserved capital letters. but i dont know if it will stick."
Thomas Farley, aka Mister Manners, an etiquette consultant whose clients include JPMorgan, Estée Lauder, and the US Army, calls lowercasing "careless" and "affected." Executives who type in lowercase convey to their readers, "You're not important enough for me to put in the effort," he says. "There's a kind of a built-in supposition on the part of the writer that 'I'm above punctuation and convention and therefore you, my recipient, need to deal with this, interpret where my thoughts begin and end, decipher my abbreviations, and that's your problem.'"
"It really has a negative impact on the way you're going to be perceived," Farley tells me.
"It seems misguided," says Mary Norris, a writer, copy editor, and The New Yorker's longtime "Comma Queen." Not only does it often take longer to write out in lowercase and shorthand, she says, it's also "hard to read. To me, it looks like alphabet soup."
Other communications gurus say its shorthandedness can convey authenticity, provided you are being authentic.
"There's no good or bad personal syntax, just avoid being performative," Lulu Cheng Meservey, who founded a communications firm, Rostra, and has worked with firebrands like Altman, Palmer Luckey, and Bari Weiss, tells me over text. "people like sam or jack have been no caps since forever, but more recently it's become a fad where people actually go through extra effort to turn off auto caps."
Most people in my life didn't even notice I was typing in lowercase, especially at work. Lowercase is the slippery patois of Slack. Bosses, middle managers, and entry-level employees message each other all day sans caps — likely a function of volume. The average Slack user sends nearly 100 messages a day; so many words, so little time to hit the shift button. It may also have a tonal benefit for the sender. Slack smudged away the boundaries of when the workday begins and ends. If I sent a message at 9 pm that said, "Where are we on the RFK Jr. story?" my direct report immediately wants to decapitate me. When I instead sent, "hey how r u feeling abt rfk?" the laid back attitude seemed to prompt him to respond before he thought about decapitating me.
On Friday, hours after a man threw a molotov cocktail at his house in San Francisco, Altman posted a thousand-word blog in which he addressed the attack, as well as a damning profile of him published in The New Yorker earlier in the week, which he called "incendiary." "I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives," Altman wrote. He called on humanity to "de-escalate the rhetoric" as we debate who controls the future of AI. This time, all 26 of the CEO's "I" statements were capitalized.
Zak Jason is the executive editor of Business Insider's Discourse team.