Somewhere between the two wars on terror and the two-thousandth "very demure" TikTok, we quietly agreed to let the alphabet go. I don't mean literacy rates, though those are cratering too. I mean the actual letters—specifically the first three—which have been stripped of all meaning and repurposed as a floating signifier for whatever a corporation needs to sell you that quarter.
It happened so slowly that most of us didn't notice. "ABC" used to mean something. It meant the American Broadcasting Company, which meant *Good Morning America* and *World News Tonight* and a shared cultural timeline where Walter Cronkite told your parents what was real. It meant the alphabet itself—the foundational sequence, the thing you learned before you learned anything else. It meant "easy," as in "as easy as ABC," a phrase that assumed a common floor of comprehension. It meant the liquor store on the corner, the one with the neon sign and the bulletproof glass, which is its own kind of American truth.
Now? Now "ABC" is a dating app acronym for "anything but Chardonnay." It's a brand of underwear. It's a Chinese electric vehicle. It's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which no one in Ohio has ever thought about. It's a news network that a third of the country believes is state propaganda and another third believes is insufficiently patriotic, which is a neat trick for the same three letters. It's a store-brand soda. It's a hashtag with 4.2 million posts, most of which are people filming themselves crying in a car.
The collapse of shared meaning is not a metaphor. It's a daily logistical problem. My daughter's third-grade teacher sent home a worksheet labeled "ABC Order." I stared at it for a full minute before I realized it meant alphabetical. For a second—a real, disorienting second—I thought it was a brand partnership. That's what happens when you let corporations colonize your linguistics. You start seeing ads in your own kitchen.
This is what societal collapse actually looks like. Not riots in the streets, not a mushroom cloud on the horizon. It looks like a country where a single three-letter string can mean "the news," "a liquor store," "easy," and "a type of vaginal hygiene product" all at once, and nobody blinks. We've traded a common language for a pile of trademarks. We've let the market decide what words mean, and the market decided that nothing should mean anything, because meaning is friction and friction is bad for quarterly earnings.
The American daily life impact is this: you cannot trust a single acronym. You cannot assume your neighbor hears what you hear. You cannot even assume your own brain won't flash a logo when you see a child's homework. We are drowning in signifiers with no signifieds, and we call it "branding."
I'm not saying we need to go back to the 1950s, when "ABC" meant three channels and a certain kind of white-picket lie. I'm saying we need to notice that we've lost the ability to say "easy as ABC" without someone asking which ABC. I'm saying that when everything is a brand, nothing is a country. And when nothing is a country, you get exactly what we have: a nation of people who can't agree on what the news is, what a store is, or what a letter means, but who can all agree that the soda tastes fine.
We didn't lose the alphabet to some shadowy cabal. We sold it, one licensing deal at a time, and we didn't even get a good price.