I have brain rot

send help, or don't - I'll make a meme about it anyway

It’s 7:46pm and I am scrolling through tiktok in my bed and thinking about a time when tiktok was genuinely fun and entertaining and that right now all I do is scroll and scroll and scroll and find myself watching clips of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares and wishing I could watch a whole episode of it because trying to find part 2 from part one is like trying to find the meaning of life in the bottom of my makeup bag.

It’s 8:43pm and I am watching a repost of a 2022 tiktok where a guy is wearing wigs (do you vear vigs) and the caption says “this is from the tiktok era with costumes and green screens and no one does that anymore”. I miss that era of theatre kid tiktok. Bring back the sketches. Where is the comedy? WHERE ARE THE JOKES?

It’s 9:17 and I am still scrolling on tiktok. I watch a video that asks me to describe the video I watched two videos ago and I cannot do it. I feel horrified and a bit sick. I remember that I still have twenty pages of the novel I want to read sitting unread on the bed next to me. I have puffed through all of my vape and the little flashing light at the end of it chastises me for wasting my life.

I have brain rot. Please send help.

I’ve been thinking about ‘brain rot’ recently, because I think it lives in the same part of the zeitgeist that AI Slop does. I think it’s become a catch-all term for the culture du jour, a get out of jail free card for big media to come for Gen Z in the same way that they came for us about buying too many netflix subscriptions, starbucks coffees, and avo toasts. Millennial culture had brain rot, too - it was a slow, steady diet of cultural junk food. It was Jersey Shore, and the Hills, and the Simple Life. It was Badger Bagder Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom, a buzzfeed listicle, and a late-night K-hole of absurdist cartoons where a pink cat says fuck a lot.

Gen X had it as slacker culture, as reality bites, as 24/7 music video hypnosis, as the same sitcom being made ad infinitum.

Even the boomers had it with the Beatles.

It seems every time culture shifts, and the young prise it from the death grip of middle aged culture purveyors (me. I’m middle aged now) there comes along a new term to deride it. The thing about this kind of brain rot, though, that manifests as fast-acting, algorithmically injected poison is that it’s not just coming for the young. In fact, it seems to me that the youth are the best at navigating it whilst the rest of us end up inured in an endlessly shifting downward scroll of information we never retain.

It’s 11:57pm and I got distracted again.

I was talking about brain rot. I am living the rot. I was reading a linkedin post by someone calling out career karens saying that Brain Rot is more at home in Gen X facebook feeds and and AI News cycles - but the things that Vogue is calling the brain rot aesthetic (Labubus, Erewhon drinks, MAtcha Lattes, whatever) aren’t brain rot aesthetic AT ALL.

The brain rot aesthetic is crucially aestheticless. It’s not even the conscious Gen Z no aesthetic aesthetic. It’s nothing. It’s vacant eyed, slack mouthed, nicotine huffing, thumb scrolling boredom. It’s not even being bored.

I’ve been thinking about Neil Postman (wait a minute mr postman) American author, media theorist, and cultural critic who died in 2003 and never got to see the social media swamp and all its tributary streams. He’s not a luddite tho, but he did write about an “unthinking submission” to technological progression - and its this unthinkingness that strikes me now - my vape on my chest, my eyes unfocused on the small rectangle of light hovering over my nose because I’m too lazy to find my lost glasses.

Postman’s the guy who wrote: Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. that everyone loves to roll out every time we enter into a “this is 1984” discourse run. His argument was that television had become - in 1985 - the dominant metaphor for all public life. News is entertainment, politics is about likeability, religion as showbiz, education as edutainment.

I think, now, that we’re moving away from his idea that we’re all amusing ourselves to death (the title of his book) - I think we’re being advertised to death. Even calling the emerging culture the culture of brain rot comes with things you can buy to be the most brainrotty girly at ur local coffee shop. Tiktok feels like QVC, your fave influencers are selling you skincare or scarves or whatever else pays their bills and we’re double tapping ourselves into oblivion and buying yet more bullshit for the privilege. More than that, our attention, our time, and our data is now the hottest comodity. Brands don’t necessarily want to see you convert to a customer via the highly relatable tiktok made by their underpaid and undervalued tiktok girly. They want you to remember their name when you’re in the supermarket. And to do that they buy up real estate in your brain via a slow drip feed of memes and a quiet unholy chorus of “I do that, too”.

The brain rot state, the vacant scroll, is no longer just a sad byproduct of a culture of amusement. It is the ideal, optimised state for the consumer. It's the goal. An attentive, critical mind is a barrier to profit. A slack-mouthed, unfocused one is a perfect, open vessel to remember that Cheerios makes you feel warm and happy when you’re standing in the cereal aisle. You’re not sure why, though. Those happy little Os.

And weirdly, the younger generations are more adept at navigating that. They recognise AI slop with more discernment than 50 year old finance managers. They identify fake news faster than your granny does on Facebook. That is to say… there is hope. But I suppose I mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the young have the ticket to escape. We thought we did in 2010. Gen X thought they did. Boomers actually DID have the ticket, but they pulled the ladder up after them.

I think it’s kind of weirdly more than that, though. I have written about the endless self-optimisation of the internet age. I’m not saying there’s a “system” that’s making us think a certain way - I don’t think things work like that - but I am saying that we’ve moved from a society of discipline and shame where our behaviour was dictated to by society at large and it really mattered what others thought of us - to a society of achievement, and where our largest enforcers are actually ourselves. By our own internal pressure to perform, to perform optimised lives or productivity and self improvement so you and your new husband can post a picture on insta holding the keys to your new flat. Look mum, I made it. Double tap. I want that. I do that too.

The endless scroll is not leisure. It is labour. It is self-exploitative WORK in which our behavioural data is the product we produce, and our reaction to the consumed content is our wage. to be chronically online is a currency. You are in the know. You have an opinion. You are engaged. In as much as you can be when all the information is less than three minutes long.

Byung-Chul Han talks about this as the burn-out society, and yet I don’t think that is any different to call it the brain-rot society. He’s leaving Foucault behind and underscoring culture with the ‘yes we can’ rhetoric - but I would argue that this is outdated. Yes we can is a nearly twenty year old political slogan.

I think the overriding statement now isn’t yes we can, it’s “what’s the point?”

The planet’s burning. We should probably do something about it. But what’s the point? There’s wars happening, and we should probably do something about them, but what’s the point? We’ve yes we canned ourselves into a catatonic state because… yeah we CAN do it. But like… can we be arsed?

Just like I can read my book - but I can’t really be arsed to hold it and turn the pages and focus my eyes on the words. Just like I should quit vaping but that feels like effort. Sometimes it feels like effort to sit here and think about why I do the things I do when I could just continue to do them, or not do them, and nothing in the world would probably ever change regardless.

right?

it’s 1am. I am tired and my eyes feel gritty. I should probably go to sleep, but going to sleep feels like effort. I’ll just stare at my phone for a bit until I feel ready to.