Chopped Chin. You know him right? The dude with the nod that’s lowkey tuff? You know the video, he’s just mad chill in front of the huzz. Here, lemme pull up ig reels.
With the way that the internet has integrated into our social lives, this is probably a situation you’ve been in before. Someone mentions a new meme to you, something absurd that you can’t fathom being real. But it is. They whip out their TikTok For You Page and there it is, the “Eye of Rah” staring back at you through the screen. This is “Brain Rot.”
“Brain Rot,” a term used to describe the deterioration of intellect after the consumption of mind numbing content, was named Oxford’s word of the year for 2024. According to Oxford , “‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.”
There’s a stigma surrounding brain rot. A lot of people, even those who laugh at the memes, will agree that the very essence of it is that it’s pointless and devoid of intellectual expression. It’s in the name. Naturally, it seems like the inevitable degradation of internet culture and humor. The internet, a place originally built for sharing and bridging educational gaps across the globe, has now become reduced to the sharing of meaningless content.
But when did this begin? This decade? The last? Let’s not lie to ourselves and try to argue that online content has only started getting worse in recent years. Twelve years ago it was hard not to navigate YouTube without seeing a video titled something like “MLG epic gamer trick shot compilation,” with the illuminati and Mountain Dew plastered all over the thumbnail. For years the internet has pumped out this kind of absurdist content so are we really going to pretend that it’s worse now?
In order to fully understand brain rot and the implications it has on the future of the internet, we first need to examine why we find humor in such absurd places. I’d like to make the argument that some of these memes have more depth than one might reduce it to.
The term “Sigma,” for example, is a word describing someone that exerts extreme dominance, akin to what the word alpha means when referring to someone. It’s a pretty popular brain rot term but many people seem to not understand the importance in the origin of it. The word first started popping up in hypermasculine incel communities as a way for people to express their feeling of mental superiority over their peers. These online circles consist of people, typically males, who are frustrated by their lack of ability to socialize or find romance in the real world, often driving them to lash out online, cultivating and spreading misogynistic ideals within their select online communities. So when this word was observed by people outside of these circles, it began to become used ironically. It would be tossed around in a way in which we could criticize the destructive principles of these communities that cultivate backwards ideologies. People would refer to themselves or others as “sigma,” which, using humor, would point out the stupidity that such a word would have.
Another icon in the “brain rot-sphere” (a term that I just coined myself by the way), is Skibidi-Toilet. This seemingly mindless youtube animation series blew up with Gen-Alpha and the praise that it gets in meme culture from Gen-Z is not just stupid humor. The ugly animation of the series and immediate commercialization is a tell-tale sign of the power of capitalism and how they value quantity over quality, and I think we all know this. While it may seem like we’re big fans of the piece, throwing out the word “skibidi” left and right, this is Gen-Z’s way of critiquing the unwarranted commercialization of the series. It’s mindless, it’s lazy, it’s ugly, and we all know this. But this is out of our control. This garbage machine will keep pumping out content and we turn to the only thing that we can to critique: satire.
And this is what most of brain rot culture consists of. Satire and irony. And it’s not hard to see why the newer generations have grown fond of this type of humor. With all of the things going on in the world, all of the corruption, the laziness, the slop being fed to us masked as content, we have no other way to speak out against these things than making light of the situation with jokes. We mask intellectualism as stupidity and we try our best to play along with the narrative that we’re just regressing. Maybe we’re trying to find comfort in ignorance, but it’s hard to say. Maybe brain rot isn’t as rotted and meaningless as we’d all wish it was. Or maybe we’re just cooked chat.
