I wrote a term paper called ‘Brainrot and the FYPocalypse’ during my final semester at Georgia Tech. This is a fast-evolving space online, and research (let alone industry/policymaking) is still playing catch-up with social media users to understand its full depth and impact. I can’t think of many more examples of something becoming so ubiquitous and accessible with such speed before being critically analyzed or guardrailed. Asbestos? Asbestos. (jk. fun fact: Asbestos guardrails still aren’t well-implemented around the world(!), Veritasium has a great video on the topic.)

In any case, I thought I’d pull some ideas from that term paper and contextualize some of my analyses and extrapolations in a way that is palatable and bite-sized for the non-academics among us (ඞ). I will try my best to keep this much more structured than my 4(?) blogging attempts from years past (Weebly, Wordpress, Substack,…).

Brainrot was Oxford University Press’ word of the year in 2024, and is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (2025) as “A perceived loss of intelligence or critical thinking skills, esp. (in later use) as attributed to the overconsumption of unchallenging or inane content or material.” In recent times, the term has been associated with the overconsumption of such content posted online, on social media platforms. More colloquially, we use the term to describe the content itself.

Viewpoint: Decompression and Coping Link to heading

Emilie Owens from the University of Oslo theorised that brainrot is not just mindless media consumption, but also a mechanism for the youth of today to decompress, as “algorithmically curated time, away from social obligations”. When I read her paper about this, I thought of it as being similar to dark or edgy humour, which also exists offline: Why do we watch stand-up comedy by Gianmarco Soresi, or enjoy Ian’s deadpan bits on Smosh TNTLs? Why do we engage with media online, anyway? This view of brainrot as a coping mechanism also puts into perspective that a lot of our activity online, as compartmentalised as it is, can satisfy needs that aren’t met IRL.

But what makes brainrot unique is its apparent meaninglessness. Why do I enjoy deep-fried memes (ts frying me) like that of Markiplier saying “You’re so Portuguese” to a cat in a video game? Gianmarco and Ian deliver jokes about real historical/political events or aspects of daily life with a certain tact, but brainrot is just not something you can logically parse. A lot of it is funny to a user, well, because it just is! Maybe it’s the absurdity, the timing, the implication, or the low-effort/high-graphic-design-effort to extend them into meaning even less.

Brainrot has the decompressive effects of conventional meme humour, but is also so prevalent because of this very meaninglessness. Let’s say, hypothetically, for the sake of my surely very strong and based argument, that you’re Gianmarco. You’re on one of those stand-up stools, elbows out, of course. If a joke requires some important niche context, you likely lose out on getting to a subsection of your audience. If a joke requires any context, for that matter, you will still statistically (sorry, statisticians!) lose out on some of your audience. Of course, as Gianmarco, you’d make jokes across several subjects and get every audience member to chuckle at least once. But what if you made a joke with zero apparent context? IRL, an audience would likely spend time trying to contextualize this, since your presence on that stage as a comedian must mean you’re making a joke about something meaningful (value judgements aside). Online, there is little to imply that context is necessary; brainrot eliminates this very premise of needing context.

Reclaiming your attention to own the neolibs Link to heading

There is this notion in CyPsy of the ‘attention economy’. There is (essentially) unlimited content online, but your attention is a bottleneck in the information consumption pipeline. Politicians, advertisers, big corporations - they all want YOUR attention. There’s also a certain cultural aspect of needing to be productive with your attention all of the time - which is lowkey neoliberal capitalist (not my own words, I think it was Saindon (2021)).

Brainrot allows a user to seemingly reclaim this attention and wilfully dump it into a void of context-free enjoyment. If the alternative to consuming brainrot is catalogues of political and ideological ads, or reading mainstream news (that also essentially meets powerholders’ needs of you paying attention to their preferred narratives), why bother? Of course, there are other outlets for your attention, but the general media landscape is very easily dominated by people with power. And considering that brainrot can be made and consumed by anybody with essentially no (perceived) middleman (except the algorithm and social media platform which wants to keep you online), brainrot is seemingly decentralized!

Personally, I may not entirely follow the kinds of brainrot that kids these days engage with (triple T and six seven), especially the AI-generated ones which essentially put together brainrot in LLM fashion (BTW: triple T was ‘generated’ by an LLM that essentially copied a tweet verbatim from several years ago, which the user meant to be the pre-dawn beating of drums in some Indonesian communities to wake residents up early for the ‘Sahur’ during Ramadan). In this sense, some of what we deem brainrot are simply things without accessible(!) context, or context which is wilfully ignored in favour of full labubu-fication (commercialization).

There are many more viewpoints about brainrot - mostly negative - and you can probably develop them from base principles yourself (by thinking about your own social media engagement), which I thought are a tad less interesting than these ones. In true academic fashion, this is left as an exercise to the reader.

Here are links to some media I recommend based on this post:

  • Veritasium’s video about asbestos issues
  • My term paper for CS6268 Psychology of Cybersecurity, all citations included
  • Markiplier deeming a cat to be Portuguese