If You Know What ‘Brainrot’ Means, You Might Already Have It
We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own.
Amanda Montell • The Age of Magical Overthinking
The “offline world” and the “wilderness” function as vessels for our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do
The construction of screen time as the moral evil responsible for this fall figures screen time and offline time as two sharply distinct and yet internally homogeneous catego
... See moreLauren Collee • The Great Offline
The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot”— meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden , this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.
Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading
And the problem is that every time you go on Twitter/Instagram/etc., you lose hours. Not because you're browsing for hours but because those spaces agitate the mind, and it becomes nearly impossible to get back into contemplative mode. The spirit of Sublime is very much about rescuing that lost intentionality—and making space for thinking—without l... See more
Lauren Crichton • #82: Connecting dots, cultivating intention, and building a more human internet
The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
