On Brainrot

 “‘Brain rot’ is defined as ‘the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.’”


-Oxford University Press


Many people in our meta-modern world are growing increasingly concerned about brain rot. After all, the name itself implies something that is harming the brain and tends to be referring to a loss of intelligence, becoming idiotic, etc. Under this definition, how could a good philosophy of brain rot ever emerge? For to become a philosopher of brain rot, one would have to have engaged with the brain rotting media and undergone a deterioration of their intellectual state. Shouldn’t all philosophy of brain rot be bad philosophy? This is what I set out to do here today. To produce a good philosophy of brain rot, and to do that we must first over come this common idea of brain rot.


This leads me to the first claim I’d like to make about brain rot: Brain rot is not a particular type, style, or genre of media, it is merely the concept that exposure (and most specifically overexposure) to certain content can make you an idiot. For some people, this content is the stereotypical brain rot such as skibidi toilet, but the online leftist community has also often referred to “tankies” and their media as brain rot, which is often the polar opposite of simple low-thought memes and comes in the form of convoluted history and political philosophy. In a sense, any form of media can be brain rot so long as it is the type of media that overexposure to it will make you an idiot. In another sense, brain rot is just spending too much time on any media.


This leads directly into my second claim: There is no evidence that brain rot is making you an idiot.


“Dr Poppy Watson, adjunct lecturer with UNSW’s School of Psychology, says while the idea warrants exploration, there is a lack of evidence showing excessive doomscrolling of social media is responsible for the mental fatigue, lack of focus, and reduced cognitive function often attributed to ‘brain rot’.”


-Lachlan Gilbert, “‘Brain rot’ and digital overload: more myth than menace”


This leaves us with a peculiar situation. In order to discuss brain rot, we can’t truly discuss what brain rot is, only the sorts of media commonly associated with the term brain rot. And we must find a new narrative in which to discuss this sort of brain rot genre of media because the old narrative that it is making us stupid is false. If it is not making us stupid, then what is it doing? 


This leads to my third, final, and biggest claim about brain rot: It is not about becoming stupider, but reflecting and protesting. 


“…by creating an absurd, bizarre grid, brainrot and absurd memes point to the ways that our own grids (whether literal or conceptual) are questionable and don’t have to weigh on us as heavily as they do.”


-Aidan Walker, “brainrot and the order of things”


Michel Foucault‘s grid is just a system of elements. When we group objects together or distinguish them from one another on the basis of shared or different properties, it is this system of properties that composes the grid in question. There is no intelligibility of reality without this grid. 


The “absurd, bizarre grid” of brain rot is often the combination of the natural and the unnatural, the possible and the impossible, the real and the unreal. Take, again, skibidi toilet. It is a human head emerging from a toilet. The natural human head, the unnatural toilet. The possibility of the head having a body, the impossibility of that body being a toilet. The reality of there being human heads and toilets, the unreality of them being combined into one organism. This absurdity causes us to reflect on what we consider possible and impossible, real and unreal, natural and unnatural, within our own grid of intelligibility. 


Brain rot isn’t just absurd thought- it’s a force of abstraction. It causes us to consider something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments. And what does abstraction do? It makes us actually, really engage. We actually see our seeing, read or reading, and hear our hearing when we receive it back to us abstracted. It also reminds us that we can always see, read, or hear in other ways, we are not actually bound by the discourses other people have made to enclose and envelope us within for their desire to order us in a disciplined way. 


What does brain rot do as a force of absurdity and abstraction? It exposes that the actual brain rot is the manner of living in which we call normal. The normal, every day ways that we have become accustomed to are what is actually making us idiots. The normal, every day life we have become accustomed to is truly what is responsible for the deterioration in mental and intellectual states. 


“What we must realize is that Brainrot is a reflection of a rotting world, it is a self-deprecating protest against the absurdity of the times we live in, and most of all an intoxicating escape from the depressing industrial wasteland out there.”


-Gautam Deka, “The Metaphysics of Brainrot”

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