Is brain rot the end of the world as we know it? An investigation

Taken from the winter 2024 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here.

You wake up, you throw some water on your face, you open your phone. Waiting for you is a video of a posh woman swallowing an ungodly amount of oysters, and another of ‘The Rizzler’, playing basketball while dressed like Steve Jobs. You double tap them both, acknowledging receipt with the Instagram heart reaction. Some mornings might elicit a giant tears-streaming emoji, an ‘ffs’ or even a ‘looool’ – but not today. Instead, you browse your feed for something to respond with. That viral advert for a Turkish gastric band clinic? Hmm, not quite right. The mashup where the ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl interviews Cole Palmer? No, you already sent that last night. Ah yes, that post where the cutesy e-girl writes, “If the world was ending i wanna be skibidi toilet by a sigma alpha woman.” Yeah that was good, that’ll do.

If you’re anything like me, this is your life now, your primary form of entertainment, the front page of your internet and a stunted, ersatz form of communication. The content you see will depend upon your tastes, yet it all looks remarkably similar: fun, catty, surreal, postmodern and consciously banal. Maybe you’re OK with this situation, gleefully treading water in the digital septic tank. Or maybe you take steps to avoid it all, setting screen-time limits and curating your feed with only chic or informational content. But most likely, you’re in a toxic bind with this crap – a tragic, codependent relationship which makes you laugh from time to time but ravages your mind and soul, forcing you to wonder about all those books you failed to open, all that music you used to listen to.

This form of media now has a name: ‘brain rot’. It’s a phrase that’s popped up more and more of late in a raft of scare stories, pseudo-clinical studies and ‘think of the children’ broadsheet exposes. According to The New York Times, the term ‘brain rot’ dates back as far as 2007, but has found new resonance in the age of algorithmic short-form video content. The name likely shares some etymological DNA with ‘gut rot’, an antiquated phrase for abstract stomach ailments, and ‘rotgut’, an old-west slang term for knock-off liquor. It’s also closely related to ‘brain fog’, an affliction often cited by stressed-out, screen-burnt office workers.

Much of the hype around brain rot recalls earlier panics around excessive media consumption, such as the ‘TV addict’ kids of the 70s (immortalised by the character Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), the ‘couch potatoes’ of the 80s (later ‘mouse potatoes’), the moral uproar surrounding ‘video nasties’, and video-game violence in the 90s onwards.

There is also some debate as to what constitutes brain rot. For concerned commentators, it’s a condition, a self-inflicted, low-frequency depression brought on by perusing the toilet wall of the internet. For younger, hyper-online types, it’s a genre – a niche subsection of content which builds on half-sensical streaming lingo such as ‘rizz’, ‘fanum tax’, ‘Ohio’ and ‘gyatt’, as well as porno slang like ‘gooning’ and ‘edging’. It’s the latter strand of brain rot I’m particularly intrigued by. Right now it seems to be nothing short of a global phenomenon. A friend, Hashim, tells me that his cousins – who are nine and 13 years old, and live in the conservative country of Oman – have been using VPNs to access brain rot content. My girlfriend tells me that, one evening, she walked past a group of children doing Irish dancing while their younger brother shouted “sigma, sigma, off the hook” over and over again.

To find out more, I’m put in touch with 23-year-old Dylan, a self-appointed “warden of disinformation”. In a slightly terse message exchange over Instagram, I ask him what this title entails: “Ensuring the safe and successful spread of disinformation.” he writes back. Dylan is apparently a brain-rot expert, so I ask how he would sum it up. “I would define brain rot as content that is both completely nonsensical but also strangely addictive,” he suggests. “It’s content that undoubtedly causes you to lose brain cells, simultaneously taking valuable time out of your day and reducing your cognitive ability. The unpredictability and irrationality of the content is probably the thing that makes it entertaining for most people.”

In search of the more casual brain-rot consumer, I speak to Lottie and Daisy, both 21-year-old students. I ask if they’ve seen any good brain rot recently, and they point me in the direction of ‘prognozpogodi69’, a trove of absurdist AI-centred videos, including some where the US chat show host Steve Harvey speaks Mandarin. “I think those videos are so funny,” says Lottie. “They turn your brain off and make you giggle,” adds Daisy. How would they define brain rot? “I think it means different things to different generations,” suggests Daisy. “To people younger than us, brain rot is just normal – as that’s all they’ve ever seen.” “It totally links to attention spans and stuff,” says Lottie. “Like, nobody can sit through a YouTube video any more, but they’ll watch tons of brain rot content. It’s all those iPad kids who had a phone shoved in their face from day one – to make them shut up. They need this constant stimulation.”

I ask which content they enjoy particularly: “Some of the AI stuff and weird airbrushed art is funny because it’s so obscure,” Lottie replies. “And a lot of contemporary art these days can be quite similar. I don’t like some of the more fucked-up stuff, but the weird AI videos with dubbed voices are amazing.” What does she mean by ‘fucked-up stuff’, I wonder? “Well, I don’t like when it becomes gory and sexual, and kids are still seeing it. That makes me wonder about the people who are making it.”

Through them I’m put in touch with Dom, also 21. Dom is a more committed brain-rot fan, so I ask him for his thoughts on what it is, exactly. “It’s just low-quality content,” he muses. “It has no value, it won’t teach you anything. A pointless bit of content. My favourite videos would be the ‘sigma’ stuff with Patrick Bateman. I’m also really hooked up on all the skibidi toilet stuff – I like how it started as a meme for pointless views and then became something different.”

There is no doubt that brain rot, as a genre – as a style – is a real entity. But to define it by such niche parameters seems a little short-sighted, and rather purist in its outlook. To me – someone in their mid-30s – it seems to be both a syndrome and an aesthetic, and one that reaches far beyond ‘skibidi rizz goon’. Because if tedious influencer videos, iShowSpeed livestreams, pensioners doing “Apple” dances and Tatecore inspirational monologues aren’t brain rot, what are they?

My girlfriend tells me that, one evening, she walked past a group of children doing Irish dancing while their younger brother shouted “sigma, sigma, off the hook” over and over again.

Looking to speak to a brain-rot content creator, I reached out to Elliot Cox, a 23-year-old actor and musician who has developed a sizeable following through his Gen Z-ified interpretations of Radio 2 torch songs and Broadway numbers (Michael Buble’s cover of “Cry Me a River” becomes “Goon Me a Rizzer”, for instance.) From his bedroom and production studio, Cox explains that he fell into this line of work while trying to make his little brother laugh by inserting Fortnite vernacular into popular songs. He decided to throw a few of these online, not knowing where it would lead, and before long his version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (sample lyric: “load up on squads with your friends, it’s fun to goon and cool to edge”) had catapulted him to viral quasi-fame.

I ask Cox how he would define brain rot: “At first I would have said it was a trend,” he considers. “But it’s such a big umbrella term now. Some people use the words ‘brain rot’ to describe spending too much time online. Like, if you can’t go more than five minutes without looking at a screen, or looking at your phone… that’s brain rot. I suppose it’s the dumbing down of a generation. It’s a problem, and I’m definitely not helping,” he laughs.

How has Cox, a true digital native, seen the internet change in his time? “I remember going to friends’ houses, looking at YouTube and thinking, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’” he says. “I grew up on a lot of the original gaming YouTubers – PewDiePie and people like that. And when you think about it, brain rot has existed since those days. When you look at the Minecraft parodies that were huge back in the day, or the Call of Duty montages where they have the glasses and the Doritos bags, that was all early brain rot. So I think it’s always been there, it’s just way more obvious now, and that’s because it’s more accessible.”

But no doubt, brain rot goes even further back than PewDiePie and Call of Duty. It would be impossible to say where brain rot really started, as there has always been plenty of cultural sewage to indulge in. But you can certainly look at the 1990s as a kind of sea change in popular media, with the birth of trash TV, gross-out skate videos and early internet weirdness. As someone who was a child at that time I remember it well: Jerry Springer, Ren & Stimpy, World’s Scariest Police Chases, The Tom Green Show, the Japanese game shows and Italo-smut replayed on Eurotrash and Tarrant on TV.

Later, as desktop computers became easier to use, came chatrooms, Jackass clips, chain email jokes about Osama Bin Laden, scratchy QuickTime prank videos and early online games like CounterStrike (where terms like ‘pwning n00bs’ set a precedent for the skibidi toilet era.) Indeed, when you look back on pre-social-media sites like somethingawful.com, it feels remarkably similar to the brain rot of today.

Yet despite its long-established presence in society, we are only just getting to grips with the effects of this kind of internet usage. One of the most cited reports in brain-rot scare stories was written by Great Ormond Street and UCL researchers Max Chang and Irene O Lee, and published in the medical journal PLOS Mental Health in 2024. The report centres around children’s use of the internet, and seeks to examine the effect on their neurology. It does contain some alarming lines about “potentially negative behavioural and developmental changes”, but it’s actually far more open-ended than much of the coverage would have you believe. “Predictably, the present answers merely paint an unfinished picture that does not necessarily depict internet usage as overwhelmingly positive or negative,” the report concludes.

Dr David Ellis, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Bath, is calling for some perspective when it comes to the matter. “The thing that always strikes me is that smartphones are ultimately social tools,” he tells me over the phone. “More people now meet their long-term partners on smartphones than in any other way, and yet we’re still having conversations about how they are ruining a generation. It’s like saying that spoons have made everyone obese. It depends on what you do with the spoon.” Dr Ellis is also sceptical about the notion of the ‘digital detox’, that one-size-fits all antidote which has become a broadsheet fad du jour, with all manner of retreats and books to help you reach unplugged Valhalla. “The whole notion of a digital detox is probably about as scientifically sensible as a health detox,” he goes on to say. “It sounds good, but it’s akin to selling a diet. There’s no strong evidence that stepping away from technology altogether will bring any long-term psychological or physical health benefits.”

Many have taken the negative link between the internet and attention spans as gospel, but Dr Ellis quickly pours water over this: “As far as I’m aware to this day, none of that has ever held up to scrutiny.” Dom also doesn’t buy the argument that brain rot is making us more stupid. “We shouldn’t be too worried about Gen Z and content because millennials also had this stuff – the same GMod animations,” he says. “It hasn’t slowed down our brain development. [The reaction] is exaggerated.”

I’m somewhat sold on Dom and Dr Ellis’s thoughts, but then I consider my own slide into short-form singularity. For a decade, I didn’t have a smartphone, subsisting on burners and laptops alone. It wasn’t particularly considered: I got mugged and never replaced it, I read The Face’s interview with Aphex Twin where he said that phones don’t make our lives better – and it seemed to stick. Because of this I never really had Instagram, and certainly not TikTok. Granted, I still saw a lot of viral content, mostly relayed on other people’s phones or copied on to Twitter – but I never felt the cut and thrust of it all.

But then, in 2022, life changed. I realised I needed a fully connected phone to do pretty much anything, and took the plunge. My neo-luddite era was over and, like all late starters on an addictive product, I was instantly hooked on Instagram Reels – enraptured by Biser King and Wakey Wines (very much the flavour of late 2022.) I knew it was highly banal, but I enjoyed it, and certainly did feel like living at the coal face of something, being back in the fast world once more.

“For all its flaws, a lot of brain-rot content is actually rather ingenious – a hilarious and absurdist form of democratised art that we really shouldn’t ignore. Meanwhile, traditional media – that is to say, the stuff you’re supposed to consume – cannot match up to this strange and raw vitality”

But the effect it’s had on me has not been particularly edifying. I don’t read as much as I used to, I give up on prestige series a few episodes in, and my sense of humour has fallen in line with the brain-rot universe. Perhaps that’s more my fault than the technology or the content’s – and there are plenty of Reels consumers who manage to continue a well-balanced cultural life – but I also sometimes feel like a 1930s smoker who was told tobacco is good for the lungs.

A friend, 31-year-old ad man Joe, had a similar reckoning recently. Struck down by flu and a come-down, he went deeper into the content rabbit hole than ever before, and came out a ruined man. “I was bedridden for two days,” he recounts. “And I spent every waking hour flitting between X, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. It started when I woke up, and the next thing I knew it was fucking midnight. I saw everything from people doing Rick and Morty crochets on YouTube to Brazilian bar murders on X. At one point it felt like I wasn’t even conscious any more – like I was plugged into the Matrix. Luckily I’m not on TikTok because that would have destroyed my brain.”

Clearly, this stuff is not great for you. But there is one lingering thought I can’t quite escape: that, for better or for worse, social media is where the good stuff is now. That, for all its flaws, a lot of brain-rot content is actually rather ingenious, a hilarious and absurdist form of democratised art that we really shouldn’t ignore. Meanwhile, ‘traditional media’ – that is to say, the stuff you’re supposed to consume (Sally Rooney, Saturday Night Live, broadsheet columns) – cannot match up to this strange and raw vitality. Perhaps, as the American man of letters Gore Vidal once said, “Shit has its own integrity.”

Ben Ditto, a creative director who trawls the weird end of the internet on his Ditto Nation channel, agrees: “I think people are harking back to an era of intellectual media, which just didn’t really exist. There was so much less choice when I was growing up, and a lot of it was really lowest common denominator stuff. I think nowadays your average media consumer is much more likely to be confronted with something unexpected or interesting.”

“When I was growing up, there was a vague, self-referential culture within magazines like Melody Maker,” he continues. “You’d find a Fields of The Nephilim in-joke or something. But that was so basic compared to what we have now. There’s this whole complex language, this very niche vernacular, and that’s the stuff I absolutely love. Then, you can see how it plays out in China compared to here – how they have their own incredibly niche vernaculars.”

Dom believes that some brain-rot content is maturing into new forms. “I would use the example of the skibidi toilet stuff,” he tells me. “It’s become a proper YouTube animation series, with story, dialogue and proper characters with their own personalities. People still refer to it as brain rot, but I think if it was just meaningless videos people wouldn’t talk about it as much as they do. “I think it’s going to stick around, there’s no way of getting around that. But I don’t think that’s anything to worry about; it’s not going to get worse with time. It’s been around since the early 00s and it’s pretty much at the same level it’s always been at. It’s not heading in a bad direction.”

I ask Ditto where he thinks it’s all headed in a technological sense. “This is not a particularly new prediction, but I think it’s going more into the sort of OG chat room area – siloed, individual servers,” he says. “I think the age of the influencer is toning down. Then you have to look at the impact of AI replacing algorithms. The creation of alternative realities – that operate on many levels – will be the next big thing. But I don’t think it’s going to be the Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse. It might be about creating new and complex levels of reality, and narratives built around semi-fictions. We don’t really know where it’s going, but we definitely know it’s moving.”

But for the people on the ground floor of brain rot, the future is even more uncertain. It’s a fast-moving medium, a freakshow and a cinema of attractions, and that ‘15 minutes of fame’ cliche now starts to look rather optimistic. In just a few months, Hailey ‘Hawk Tuah’ Welch will be resigned to the lowest, most provincial end of fame – one reserved for local news anchors and forgotten sitcom stars.

For people like Cox, however, the key is just to keep going, keep harnessing the weird machinations of the world wide web. “I’ve got Halloween coming up, so all the Halloween bangers are going to get absolutely desecrated,” he beams at the end of our call. “And then, obviously, after that it’s Christmas. So I’m going to torch Mariah Carey and all the Christmas songs, everyone.”

It seems that as long as there is a public thirst for the bizarre and the inane, there will always be brain rot to get stuck into.