The Physiology of Brain Rot

Despite being the birthplace of my feelings of social isolation and sadness over the content-mediated half-life I am living, the internet, at the very least, comforts me by showing me that I am not alone in my misery. Every other essay I scroll past on substack (where humanities degrees go to die) nods to Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”, every other clear-pilled shitpost I share is embedded in ironic commentary on hyperreal online worlds, the girls are lobotomized, the kids, for the love of god, won’t touch grass and the internet is suffering brain rot. In its recent ubiquity, the term brain rot usually refers to the way we use language online, and the disconnect it creates from the real. Sometimes it betrays the doomsday anxiety, that Gen Alpha’s first attempts at creating their own vernacular of memes and pop culture references à la skibidi toilet was indicative of a general mental decline amongst the youth, other times it professes horror over a certain kind of chronically online speak, which prefers to stack together a bunch of popular tiktok phrases in lieu of expressing an original thought. In that sense, to speak of brain rot is in itself brain rot. More schtick than vocabulary it is born out of the internet hive mind, like all online terminology it communicates only what is already known and as such, it is a signifier for a collective experience, a loss of reality, a grand unravelling. 

For a larger chunk of the day, than I’d like to admit, I let the sonic backdrop of songs at double speed, hot takes and viral sound bites wash over me. Of all the ways in which I consume social life as a synthetic commodity, this is the most addictive one. On tiktok, people are allegedly less fake than on instagram, less angry than on twitter. Everyone on my fyp has roughly the same personality as if we had all pureed our essences together into a lukewarm soup. Here the social can be experienced without its usual frictions. Whereas IRL we are expected to make an effort for one another, endure tensions and even embarrassments in our relationships, this app is ruled by a simple social contract: I look at you, you look at me, we both get to feel seen for a moment and then move on with our days. It’s an abstraction of social life that can be neatly fitted at the end of a work day and practised while rotting away in bed. 

To cut to the chase, I believe that there is something truly sinister about the fact that our lives are becoming increasingly atomised due to the individualistic culture perpetuated by capitalism, while the cure we are offered to mitigate this condition emerges from the same system. I don’t want to sound like a tech-averse boomer, some zany hippie or your mom, but social media platforms are consumer products that pretend to further human connectivity, while literally being the escapist drug from Brave New World. Zuckerberg and his entourage reap the riches of getting the world plugged into their VR profit-maximizing machines, becoming experts in dodging the lawsuits they face for turning children into screen zombies, and me, well I feel so lonely that I continue to simulate the experience of being in the company of people through their stupid apps. 

But even though techno-capitalists moved into a market niche left by the disappearance of community and third places, to assume that these corporations merely exploit a preexisting lack vastly undersells their business model. Philosopher Byung Chul Han observes that neoliberalism in the digital realm unleashes the same level of control and surveillance typically harnessed by autocracies, but where despots cultivate scarcity amongst a population to assert power, our modern cyber utopia does the opposite, by offering abundance. Content, products, distractions, you can never have enough. As Han explains, needs, in this mode of digital neoliberalism, are not “repressed, but stimulated”. And that’s how my needs feel these days: stimulated, amplified, tickled, ruffled, roused, rubbed the wrong way like a clit, animated, teased, made up all together.

I’m a growing pile of natural human needs. For connectivity, for friendship, for story likes, engagement, micro-internet-fame and catharsis. I ask myself why I have these needs and I guess it's because my method of releasing internal tension, which is to shoot content into the void or greedily consume it, does much more to produce social needs than manage them. Desire, as Deleuze and Guattari famously argued, is not a compulsion of the unconscious mind caused by lack, but a productive force that gets appropriated by capitalism. So now we have Tech-CEOs who speak of “social innovation” as if they had discovered the next big revolution since empathy when all they found was a way to tap into our most desolate inclinations, to reconfigure desires in short-term attention loops and to make demand endlessly give birth to itself. And I’m the rat in the behavioural experiment, forever pressing the pleasure button. 

But the problem is also the substance of my online existence. On the internet, actual communication gives way to the algorithm-friendly regurgitation of everyone’s latest interests, complete with uniform tastes and brand-sponsored opinions. Thoughts tumble around the digital sphere like rocks in a polishing drum, the zeitgeist meanders lazily around microprocessed vapidity, and the feedback loop swallows and purges ideas, until everything feels pointless, ruminated and strangely Baudrillardian. Funnily enough, Baudrillard’s theory on simulacra inspired a genre of memes that explores civilisation’s departure from reality, which is beautiful and ironic (so to say, rotting brains becoming aware of themselves).

But although I’ve identified social media as the cause for my personal anguish, I imagine that this predicament isn’t unique to me or this time. Underlying there seems to be something much more universal: the yearning for something actual and real. It’s Sturm und Drang, rebellion against the Industrial Revolution and Sadie Plant’s nostalgic musings of primordial soup in the foreword of “zeros + ones”. It bubbled up whenever we felt like the umbilical cord connecting us to nature was severed, when farmers moved to the cities, when Sony released their first Walkman and when Guy Debord wrote “The Society of the Spectacle” in 1967. In this work of Marxist theory, Debord explores the end of meaningful social life in Western consumerist society, tracing how people collectively assign meanings to consumer goods, then accumulate such goods because of those mutually agreed upon significations, until their entire lives are dedicated to the consumption of products and fantasies. Images that are born out of this culture of commodity fetishism, become the language of human interaction, leading to the atrophy of social life and reality itself. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”, he observed, if you believe it or not, at a time when tiktok micro-aesthetics were still a pre-embryonic clump germinating in the womb of existence. What foresight!

Like the Spectacle, social media doesn’t simply replace life but attempts to convincingly mimic it, which is why there is an app for every kind of socialization from dating, and motivational coaching, to therapy. But an uncanny feeling remains because it isn’t the real thing. Debord describes the Spectacle as “a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving”. I found myself drawn to this particular phrasing, the “inversion of life” and “the non-living” as poetic evocations of death. Because what else is my daily screen time report if not evidence of a small death I die every day? When I scroll, passively and lethargically I might as well be asleep. Just like I won’t remember my dreams, I won’t remember the reels I watched, won’t remember the posts that made me laugh or cry even, because my scrolling exists outside of memory, and like death, outside of experience. This theme of death is mirrored in the texts of other anticapitalists, the Manifesto Against Labour opens with the declaration that “a corpse rules society – the corpse of labour” and Raoul Vaneigem passionately proclaimed that those who spoke of class revolution but not of love had “a corpse in their mouth”. Here the imagery is expanded. Beyond the emptiness of oblivion, these authors are interested in the physical form that is left behind to rot. That which is tangible, which exists in the material world, which will putrefy, once the spirit dies. Long before the internet joked about brain rot, these authors compared the effect of capital on our lives to the decay of the human form. Then and now we feel that this mode of production and consumption is antithetical to real emotions, to organisms, and to life itself. 

The process of rotting, as it befalls the body’s central processing unit, is set off by the absence of oxygen and an oracular flash. Everything is lit up, synapses, like hot metallic filaments, go into overdrive, waves of neuron activity break against the coast of ether and a final thought is conceived. Then lysosomes open up their flood gates and the dying brain gets haunted by digestive enzymes, like living ones do by bad memories. Connective networks deteriorate, soft grey tissue unweaves and bacteria break down cell structures, confusing and abstracting them. Now there is decomposition and everything disintegrates into polymers and contradictions, there are shards without sharp edges, self-destruction without pain and rapture without a great beyond. And so the brain rots, as does all organic material. And we should be happy that it does, because there was once a stretch of epochs, long before reality needed to construct itself through people and before time collapsed in on itself through excessive screen time when such wasn’t the fate of all living things. In the original landscapes of the Carboniferous, trees had evolved, tall and alien, but not yet the microbes to break down their fibres. Dead trees would cascade to the ground and simply stay there, unliving and unchanging. In time they would be crushed by more trees, their carbon components trapped in their forest graves instead of dissipating back into the cycle of being. One day they would generate a lot of money and power the machines that heralded our fall from grace. So it's good that we rot, that our matter isn’t preserved to be capitalized upon in another eon. But like those trees, my nervous system doesn’t dissipate in nature’s microorganismic give-and-take. Instead, it rots away in a jumble of information and encrypted death, pixels in a void and tiktok. So you must see why I’m upset. 

But hey. Maybe I’m just winter depressed, maybe I will pick up hiking this summer and all will be well. And if I find the willpower I’ll actually log off for a while