You Can't Stop The Brainrot

Accepting defeat in the war on meaningless stimulation with a tinge of optimism.

Internet culture is a subspace of society; like an unfinished basement. Nobody possesses an earthly comprehension of what lurks below until they venture down those musty-wooden-stairs. A quick trip to get laundry or check the boiler is fine, just don’t stay down there for too long.

As human engagement with the Internet rapidly transgressed from “hopping on the net” and “surfing the web” to “17 years of your adult life may be spent online,” the World Wide Web materialized what Neil Postman warned about television in the 1980s: a commercially-driven medium trivializing public discourse for the sake of “entertainment value” and passive consumption.

The days of, “I’m gonna hop on the computer for a little bit”, are gone forever, like those “school friends” that flooded your AIM Buddy List.

Thanks to smartphones, social media, and 92% of jobs requiring digital skills, the notion of truly logging off is pure fallacy.

Today’s real life, lives and breathes through the internet.

“This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We're the illusions! So turn off this goddam set! Turn it off right now! Turn it off and leave it off. Turn it off right now, right in the middle of this very sentence I'm speaking now.”

-Howard Beale (written by Paddy Chayefsky)

I wish Neil Postman were alive to witness how human beings, myself included, allowed digital tech to erode our connection to reality. Social media was marketed as a way to enhance interconnectedness. Instead, we are more connected to the very technology that replaces the need for genuine human interaction altogether; even if the digital substitute is sub-par, at best, compared to the real thing.

Have you ever finished a digital conversation feeling like you interacted with a sentient creature who is more than just an amalgamation of words, emoticons and half-assed attempts at wit?

I get it, conversation can be anxiety-inducing; but in a sense, it should be. Talking to another person requires you to acknowledge that it is in fact another person you are engaging with, and acknowledging the myriad of emotions and pressures inherent to being human. Yet, it is undeniable that even simple exchanges, like a head-nod to a driver whose car stereo sounds better than yours, evokes a greater sensation of fulfillment than any text you have ever sent.

I could rant endlessly about the many peculiar and questionable facets of the internet and digital life. Due to an attention-span wounded by the information overload that comes with being a digital native, I do not have the time.

Instead, I shall dedicate my cognitive faculties to a genre of content that embodies many of the detrimental aspects of social media so effectively, it is named after the damage it produces: brainrot.

Brainrot is a blanket term for hyper-stylized and purely superficial content that defies the three “Author’s Purposes” you learn in grade school; it is not designed to persuade, inform, or entertain. Brainrot exists to keep you engaged on a particular channel, or platform, to maximize audience metrics and data-monetization, of course. Forms of brainrot include: over-the-top clickbait, low-effort and highly replicable videos (such as TikTok challenges), and memes that are, I suppose, intended to be funny; but are downright incomprehensible.

In the late 90s, Fox News was dubbed: “the channel so busy it will make you dizzy”¹ on account of its graphic-heavy, and sensationalized presentation.

Brainrot social media posts can be described as creations so saturated your cognition feels violated.

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A compilation of some of the more benign brainrot found on social media. (All images are the property of their rightful owners. No copyright infringement is intended. Fair use critique…blah, blah, blah.)

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The beauty of brainrot lies in the fact that, thanks to omnipresent content algorithms, whether you are looking for it or not, the rot finds you. As someone who deliberately staved off social media until very recently, I was acutely aware of my graceful dissent into the realm of the rotted. When the traditional memes littering my “Explore” page failed to nab my attention, the algorithm smartened-up, and replaced run-of-the-mill fail videos and quirky (yet sexually suggestive) dance reels with increasingly lurid imagery.

Some posts were amusing — wouldn’t you take three seconds out of your day to appreciate an image of 50 Cent sleeping snuggly on a couch with the caption “Mfs (as in Motherfuckers) be like: I can’t find a job for shit”? However, most posts, like the ones selected in the above collage, seem to operate within a completely separate social code. It is almost as if the joke is not what is being presented, but rather how unhinged the drivel can be while still eliciting a reaction.

Not everything online aiming to be funny is universally appealing, and off-beat humor has been woven into the fabric of “The Net” since the days of dial-up. “All your base are belong to us” makes as little sense to me now as it did on Newgrounds; but nothing made sense on Newgrounds. That dancing banana in the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” Flash animation (yes, the one referenced by Family Guy) had a charming silliness; but I’m sure culture snobs griped about its popularity on 2000s message boards just as I am grumbling now.

And don’t let me delve into the “YouTube Poop” era. “YTPs” inspired many future video editors with surrealist narrative construction involving word-by-word sentence mixing², distorted sound effects, and NSFW re-imaginations of children’s programs that made for some rather interesting conversations with your parents. At least the insane subversion of original context around shows like Spongebob Squarepants rendered videos like “The Sky Had A Weegee!” memorable 15 years later (even if I still don’t know what a “weegee” is.)

Like YouTube Poops, contemporary brainrot operates with its own colloquialisms; further complicating the understanding of brainrot by those not submerged in its depths. I’m no psychologist, despite my role as a “Therapist Friend,” in my expert opinion, if you understand the following jargon, you may have brainrot:

• Baby Gronk

• Based

• Blud

• Boa

• Edging

• Fanum Tax

• Fent Cart

• Freaky _______

• Gooning

• Gyatt

• Jelqing

• Jorking

• Josh

• Looksmaxxing

• Mewing

• Mogging

• Ohio

• Pack Watch

• Papyrus Font

• Rizz

• Sigma

• Skibidi Toilet

• The Plug

• Turkish Quandale Dingle

• Vro

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When you realize the world’s mental state is not as decrepit as yours. (Credit goes to some meme page; I can’t keep track at this point, apologies.)

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As one of my friends, whom we’ll call: Anonymous Brainrot Victim #1, told me, “I think all this Skibidi shit really lowers one’s perspective on life as a whole.”

Clinically speaking, the habitual consumption of low-quality “brainrot content” mirrors the consumption of any hyper-processed stimuli: our minds undergo a narcotic-esque dopamine cycle. Scrolling through “Reels” or “TikToks” of flashy, low-substance content, provides bursts of stimulation that alleviate boredom, situational anxiety, and distract you from the lingering terrors of your daily life. Just like a “bump”, or compulsively eating, the quick coping high is followed by a spectacular crash; leaving your mind desperate for more filler to get you through today, so you could scroll endlessly tomorrow, and the day after, ad infinitum.

Social media addiction is well-documented, and easy to consume brainrot is the perfect content for perpetual doomscrolling — a term first coined for the immense passage of time while consuming streams of negatively-coded news articles. The irony is, according to real psychologists, numbing your real life with social media actually makes you feel worse (who would’a thought?), and can trigger mental follies in other areas of life.

Recent research has also indicated that excessive use of social media could potentially instigate cognitive failure…minor lapses in thought and action, such as forgetting appointments, overlooking information, or accidentally knocking things over. The susceptibility to cognitive failure derives from a blend of both stable personality factors and situational elements. The latter may encompass conditions such as sleep deprivation, stress, boredom, and information overload.

- Christian Montag & Sebastian Markett, “Social Media Use and Everyday Cognitive Failure: Investigating the Fear of Missing Out and Social Networks Use Disorder Relationship.” BMC Psychiatry Read More.

At the risk of posing a “straw-man argument,” it seems active social media users are compelled to fixate their minds on digital content every idle moment they get. Ask yourself: is the first-thing I check when I wake up: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or worse? Before bed, is the last image you see some distorted “Rizzler Meme”? Does your attachment to social media sound eerily similar to that Uncle Kracker song penned from the perspective of heroin?³

It seems we no longer revel in the mundane. Whatever happened to daydreaming “in monk-like silence,” as one of my former professors routinely quipped? Bored at work? Do what humans did for centuries and just nod off (remember, sleep is actually good for you). As someone who gets motion-sickness within 60 seconds of staring down at my phone, I am relegated to appreciating the world around me as I commute; which is a blessing because everyone should be fully alert in public.

Among the myriad of brainrot memes, you’ll sometimes encounter posts with captions along the lines of: “Life before social media,” or “Things we no longer have because of social media,” and it shows a montage of sunlight, freshly cut grass, and swingsets. I’m sorry, but unless the window (actual window, not a browser window) in front of me is AI-generated, all of those things still exist. The sun still shines, and the moon looks nice sometimes, and for as long as we are on pre-apocalyptic Earth, the beauty of real life will be here; as will brainrot.

No disrespect @yourpastreality, but I’ve seen some pretty damn good sunsets in the 2020s. I’m a sucker for nostalgia bait; but mourning something that still occurs everyday is ridiculous.

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On April 24, 2024, President Biden signed into law the: “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”, known colloquially as “The TikTok Ban.” The law focuses on data privacy, security breaches, espionage, and other malicious activities that are allegedly conducted by foreign entities through applications like the ByteDance-owned TikTok. While ByteDance denies any involvement of the Chinese government within its platforms, the company is still subject to strict PRC laws and regulations regarding data collection, user monitoring, and censorship. To avoid TikTok receiving a U.S. government-issued death penalty in one year’s time, ByteDance must sell the platform to an American company; ensuring all data, monetization, and surveillance remain in the hands of homegrown, All-American corporations (and our intelligence community).

One of the many running jokes about the entertainment industry is that individuals "sell their souls to the devil" to be successful. But engaging with social media to the point where you succumb brainrot is selling your ability to formulate a free thought to multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates who want you intravenously tethered to the endless stream of content on their platform.

As much as bitter ole me wishes a TikTok ban would magically remedy the societal damage done by social media overload; I’m not that naive.

Shitty, low-quality content will thrive and mutate somewhere on the Internet forever (for better or worse). Yesterday it was chatrooms, today it is pervasive social media apps, tomorrow: some horrid creation on our augmented reality headsets.

Am I too harsh on these forms of entertainment? Yes.

There are a lot of worse things on the Internet; crimes are being committed online as it is in reality. When compared to the illegal, immoral, and downright vile material that fills crevasses of the web that should be exterminated by all of the worlds governments; “brainrot content” is like a walk along a beach in the 2000s. As a writer, I feel this nonsensical duty to protect my mind at all costs. The brainrot popping up on my feed felt like a threat aimed to derail my sanity in ways I never could. But those thoughts were pure hysterics.

Although I can’t recall the source, some sage advice I read online in regards to staying focused while writing can apply to anyone trying to recenter themselves in the real world instead of the digital realm: “Keep your phone far, far, away.” Turn it off, hide it in another room, and ensure it is inaccessible while completing any task that matters; including taking a moment for yourself.

If you too are part of the rotted, don’t feel ashamed; be happy you are finally part of a majority.

All jokes aside, it is said that true character is revealed by what we do when no one is paying attention. It is also true that we are not the sum of the content we consume (especially when no one is paying attention).

But what are we, in relation to the content that consumes us?

“You don't know how you met me, you don't know why
You can't turn around and say goodbye.
All you know is when I'm with you, I make you free,
And swim through your veins like a fish in the sea”

-Uncle Kracker (written by Uncle Kracker and Michael Bradford)

1. As quoted by the incomparable Reece Peck in Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (2018).

2. The creators of YouTube Poops should be commended for their ability to create absurd dialogue that sounds somewhat natural over a decade before speech-generating AI became the normative way to make politicians and celebrities say things they never said. Enjoy this Obama YTP by @DaThings1 as proof: youtube.com/watch?v=GG6q5RrKUyU.

3. I for one think the song is polysemic: it can be interpreted as the POV of a homewrecker, or the verbal manifestation of any intravenous narcotic. You can also neatly substitute in any addictive substance (in this case social media) and the meaning of the lyrics still lands. Remember kids, you can only pick one: abstinence, moderation, or destruction.