The formation of a mass, understood as a numerically significant human aggregation, inevitably poses the problem of its internal cohesion. Tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals, each carrying their own universe of ideas, convictions, and cognitive nuances, must find common ground to act or exist as a collective entity. This process of unification does not occur through complexity or depth of thought, but through its radical simplification. To find points of contact capable of satisfying everyone, thought must be skimmed, reduced to the bone, stripped of every specificity that could become a reason for division. The result of this process is the slogan-concept: a brief, generalist proclamation so emptied of specific content that it is, in substance, empty. Its strength lies not in semantic richness, which is almost non-existent, but in its ability to be the lowest common denominator acceptable to a multitude.

The true nature of this form of expression is revealed by its etymology. The term “slogan” derives from the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm. Sluagh referred to the “army of the dead,” a host of spirits, while ghairm meant “shout” or “cry.” The sluagh-ghairm was thus the battle cry of an army of non-living entities, beings that had lost their individuality. The modern word “slogan” perfectly inherits this conception: it is the war cry of modern masses, comparable, in this powerful metaphor, to an army of the dead. To act in a compact way, the mass must renounce the complex articulation of individual thought. Its expression necessarily becomes a dry, sharp, and repetitive shout, which gains power and meaning not from the intrinsic value of its content, but exclusively from the numerical weight of those who repeat it. Substance is replaced by volume, reflection by repetition.

This mechanism is not confined to political or public rallies; it is a pervasive phenomenon that structures communication in any context where a large number of people seek a common identity or purpose. Even environments ideally based on rationality or technique are not immune. Take the example of the Nostr protocol and its community. Born as a simple and decentralized protocol for transmitting notes, its ecosystem quickly developed its own slogans. Phrases like “Client freedom” or “Censorship-resistant” function exactly like the described sluagh-ghairm. They are key concepts that aggregate the community, becoming identity flags. However, in being proclaimed as absolute and self-evident truths by a mass of users, they risk being emptied of their original technical meaning. In-depth discussion on implementations, technical compromises, and the practical challenges of decentralization is often supplanted by the ritual repetition of these slogans. The compactness of the digital “crowd” is thus preserved, but at the cost of flattening the debate and transforming potentially rich concepts into simple battle cries. This demonstrates that the phenomenon is transversal: wherever a mass forms, language necessarily contracts into the slogan, into the empty yet powerful cry of the collectivity.