It offers what cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito calls a ‘genre of participation’ .There’s a reward if you get the obscure reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same TikToks, following the same online conversations,... See more

Why is this happening? Firstly, we need to look at brain rot not merely as deterioration, but also as cultural alteration . A distinction Drew Austin also recently made, where he argues that digital slop - rather than decomposing like rotting fruit - acts more like a poison that stays in cultural circulation:

I prefer “brain poisoning,” [to describe

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