Ever since Elon Musk bought X, the platform’s production of novel slang, metonyms, catchphrases, and other neologisms has fallen precipitously. The site that gave us milkshake duck (shorthand for discovering an overnight celebrity’s racist, sexist, or otherwise objectionable posts) has, post-2022, contributed noticeably less in the way of argot. This problem seems partly because of declining engagement—as much as 30 percent in the past two years—and partly attributable to X Premium, which allows subscribers to pay a monthly fee to make their replies more visible, among other features. This pay-to-win offer has interfered with the process of natural selection—in which popular posts would multiply through reposts, mutate in iterative references, and rise above the overwhelming majority of posts that got no interest at all—that used to be the platform’s defining quality.
But if the evolution of weird language on X has slowed, new species of expression are still surfacing from the muck. One of the most colorful in recent months is oneshotted, a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience. The word was all over X last month, suggesting that it had expanded beyond the relatively narrow sense in which it had been used for years.
Prior to its recent popularity, oneshotted was gamer slang: When an opponent kills you in a single blow, you have been oneshotted. Oneshotting tends to happen when you venture outside the places that the designers of the game intended for a character of your current abilities—in other words, when you go somewhere you’re not supposed to be. In its second act on X and other non-gamer-specific social media, however, oneshotted is less physical than existential: a crisis not in the health of your character but in the continuity of yourself.
The current popularity of oneshotted seems traceable to a 2023 post from the X user @LandsharkRides, who wrote: “‘Ayahuasca’ is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous drugs with the potential to gigafry your brain but is exclusively taken by literal turbonormies who unironically want to like ‘heal internalized racism trauma’ and basically get oneshotted by it.”
What we have here is a rich text. Its premise is the fad for ayahuasca among tech entrepreneurs and other corporate types, which goes back at least as far as 2016, when Business Insider reported on a Peruvian ayahuasca retreat marketed toward start-up founders, called Entrepreneurs Awakening. Last fall, Sam Altman of OpenAI told a podcast host that taking ayahuasca while on a retreat in Mexico transformed him from a “very anxious, unhappy person” to “calm,” presumably allowing him to more efficiently build job-eating robots. Such people seem to be who @LandsharkRides meant by turbonormies: go-getters who see ayahuasca as a way to innovate solutions and maximize shareholder value, possibly in conjunction with mindfulness.
This use is decidedly off-label. An extremely potent hallucinogen, ayahuasca was originally consumed by Indigenous South Americans for ritual purposes. Users would take the drug and enter a trancelike state, after which many reported encounters with the spirits of dead ancestors or personifications of abstract forces such as time and death. This is the opponent—the “Mesoamerican 6D demon” that makes them quit work and become a “traveling circus stripper,” as @Landsharkrides put it in a subsequent post—that oneshots the turbonormies, who never would have gotten near it in the universe as correctly designed. That type-A entrepreneurs have come to regard ayahuasca as a performance-enhancing drug is grimly ironic, given its potential to render them incapable of or uninterested in basic functioning.
The viral spread of the original @Landsharkrides post was Phase 1 in the outbreak of oneshotted. Phase 2 began when the word started appearing in new X posts that alluded to the original. These allusions signaled the familiarity with significant posts that passes for status on text-based social media, creating incentives for more people to learn the term and demonstrate that they, too, can use it correctly. (This phenomenon sounds esoteric and modern in this context, but it should be familiar to anyone who remembers that year of elementary school when everyone starts swearing like longshoremen.) The consequent ubiquity of the word has brought us to Phase 3, in which people now say oneshotted without quotation marks—not in reference to the original post but rather as a vehicle for conveying its own meaning. In this interview, for example, two podcasters theorized that the accused killer Luigi Mangione got oneshotted, as in he lost his faculties of judgment as a result of psychedelic-drug use. To hear them tell it, the term carries a whiff of grudging admiration for how the oneshotted has achieved a desirable transcendence.
Phase 4 swiftly approaches, at which point the whole thing will be over, so say it while you can. It’s ironic that this term has entered our vocabulary through a process of gradual accretion, in post after post that calls on us to read and interpret the word until we find ourselves using it without being able to say exactly when we started, because that is pretty much the opposite process of what oneshotted describes. But what drives this exposure to thousands of repetitive posts if not our desire to be oneshotted?
Let us agree, for the purposes of this argument, that social media totally rots. It contains some good stuff, but overall, it is like a cookie the size of a football field with three chocolate chips in it, plus an equivalent number of staples. We keep opening our phones and sifting through the dross, though, because we want to find that single, elusive thing that will blow our mind. These things are, for the most part, not available online. Maybe you will get oneshotted by a romantic relationship, or your first surfing lesson, or the touring production of Hamilton; whatever it is, you will probably not be holding your phone when it happens. In fact, the less one uses the internet—due to incarceration or hiking or whatever—the more one realizes that being online actually prevents a variety of oneshot-type experiences. But screen addicts (myself included) keep going back, hoping to get oneshotted by an internet that, characterized by ephemerality and continuous renewal though it may be, is also marked by a crushing sameness.
The ubiquity of oneshotted on social media is paradoxical, because the impression you get from long-term scrolling is that nothing will change. Screen time is not linear; it is episodic, even cyclical. Of course the torrent of news is massive, and lately, any given article is likely to feel shocking, but little to none of it has the power to oneshot you. That’s a shame, because the thing about getting oneshotted is that it’s supposed to be bad, but it’s secretly appealing.
No one wants to gigafry their brain, and the turbonormie who gets oneshotted by ayahuasca has undoubtedly lost something of irreplaceable complexity. Yet one suspects that he is happier. His remaking frees him from the responsibilities and even the values that kept him from living a more interesting life, and that freedom is something many of us long for, even if the circumstances of his new life aren’t. Although the correct use of oneshotted is denotatively negative, it is not entirely derisive, because to be oneshotted is to be released—released by an event that is destructive, yes, but also swift enough that it is over before the old self can be much immiserated by it, and a new self emerges in the aftermath, likely to be objectively gigafried but subjectively happier.
The subtle implication of oneshotted, and what I think accounts for the term’s popularity, is that it is enviable. Getting oneshotted is frustrating when it happens in a game, but when it happens in real life, it’s sublime—when it happens figuratively, anyway. I do wish to be metaphorically oneshotted as soon as possible. You might too. The most reliable way to keep it from happening is to pick up the phone.
