If You Know What ‘Brainrot’ Means, You Might Already Have It

‘Yeah, TikTok is for three things: learning stuff and feeling good about yourself, stalking people, and brain rot.’

In this way, brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of con... See more

Like New York, the internet never arrests its massive sprawl. Instead, it exists as complex adaptive system that renders senses overworked and synapses under-rested.To open any app is to wade into frenzied maelstrom whipped by gale-force winds. Whether requests, reminders, or retweets, waves and winds alike pummel your attention as you try your bes... See more

"...goblin mode is normies processing burn out!"

It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all

... See more

Everyone is “dissociating.” Over the past few years, it’s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out.

Speaking of psychotics, the internet has made so many people go off the deep end. Or it’s also made so many become these disillusioned doomers, irony-poisoned and stuck with a nihilistic outlook. It’s important to acknowledge the realities of the horror show we call life, but also strive to move beyond that and not let the world beat you down or fo... See more

We have become conditioned to accept that viciously tearing down complete strangers online is normal and admirable, and that it is right and proper for a bad tweet from decades ago to ruin someone’s life. A new vocabulary – “doom-scrolling!” “hate-reading!” – is now necessary to capture how dysfunctional online activity has become.