‘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... See more

As adults, we can have an unfortunate habit of forgetting our youth as soon as we’ve left it and policing the next generation according to our own expectations.