A Semiotics of Spoilage: Brain Rot and the Archaeology of Cognitive Collapse (or SKIBIDI TOILET)

In 2024, Brain Rot was officially canonized, paraded out as Word of the Year by authority Oxford English Dictionary and defined 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. Now also: content or material that is perceived to have this effect.” A word that’s a noun, an adjective, and sometimes even a verb. Its lineage has been traced to Thoreau. 

RIP, Henry: you would really hate YouTube Shorts.

Millennials insist the phrase belongs to Zoomer/Alpha nonsense lexicon, the “surreal gibberish” of our youngest siblings. But the original problem Thoreau was circling around doesn’t seem generational at all. It was about distraction, about bread and circuses, and the refusal to stretch one’s mind beyond its little cell of understanding. Socrates said the same thing—“the unexamined life is not worth living”—but who actually gets to examine their life? Did Socrates ever work back-to-back service shifts for a wage that doesn’t even cover rent? Thoreau never had to decide between groceries and Walden Pond lumber. Adjusted for inflation and his entire cabin would still cost under a grand to build in 2024. That world is a dream now, a straight-up hallucination.

What fascinates me is how quickly Brain Rot has mutated. First, it was about conformity. Then the alleged stupidity of “kids these days.” Now, it’s mostly self-deprecation: A reply of “brain rotting” when a friend checks in and asks what you’re up to (doomscrolling on Tikok.) A joke that’s not really a joke, because it lands so precisely on our contemporary affect: guilty pleasure feels more like survival these days. 

I think a lot about Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock’s collapsed rot-umentary. The whole premise hung on a lawsuit that claimed McDonald’s engineered its food to be addictive, poison dressed up as Happy Meals. Spurlock staged himself as guinea pig, a medicalized morality tale about fast food that (unsurprisingly) didn’t hold up. The science quickly dissolved under scrutiny. Despite it viewing as entirely fiction two decades on, when I watch it now I wonder if the question was never about health at all. Reframe it through class, through the economics of exhaustion, and it suddenly makes sense. It isn’t addiction so much as dependency. Not brain rot but infrastructure rot, the collapsed scaffolding of a world that funnels people toward whatever is cheapest, closest, least resistant. I think the claimants of that lawsuit had a right to feel owed, but I think this goes way higher up than McDonalds. Like, way higher. We forget that “bread and circuses” had bread in it, that distraction and survival have always been a two-for-one deal.

Sir, please, I beg.

What I’m trying to say is that when the world gives us so little, the body starts begging: please sir, may I please have a crumb of serotonin? And the loop begins. The same mechanism that captures substance-users also captures us in scrolling, snacking, watching. A slow attrition of joy. Not one dramatic collapse, but the long-term erosion of our ability to feel good.

Brain Rot also folds into something darker, more insidious: a mediated form of anti-intellectualism. And honestly, I get the appeal. The left has managed to academ-ify almost everything: Instagram captions, dating app bios, whatever mundane act can be retconned into discourse. At best, it’s cringe. At worst, it's a six-foot iron wall built to keep plebs from gaining entry to the castle. So Brain Rot feels like a refusal, a way of opting out of the neoliberal charade: instead of pretending to “do something” while actually doing nothing, why not just do nothing? There’s at least honesty in that.

But yes, the slope is slippery. We’ve all watched the trajectory—dirtbag left podcasters curdling into alt-right grifters. I can’t dismiss the impulse outright, though. The desire to stop performing intelligence, to rest the mind, to be stupid and vacant when the world demands you to constantly be aware and present. Unfortunately the results are in though, and survey says that despite the immediate high, Brain Rot = bad.

Nightmare blunt rotation

The Last of Us felt prophetic to me. Not in the literal sense—no cordyceps outbreak lurking in the soil—but as allegory: society collapses because humans succumb to decay, and their only power is in sheer numbers. The human-zombie hybrids, those tragic fungal puppets, are just rot given form. Mycology is one of our oldest metaphors for decomposition, for the in-between state of life feeding on death. Watching the show, I was hypnotized by the piles of bodies, the way they twitched and pulsed together, not-alive yet stubbornly animate, existence itself becoming grotesque. And sometimes I wonder: if I put on my Carpenter sunglasses, what would I actually see? Not spores, but Millennials and Zoomers hunched over their phones. The mounds of us, not with fungal stalks bursting through skulls but with our faces illuminated by little rectangles, endlessly pathologizing our wounds into therapy-speak while simultaneously doomscrolling AI-generated videos designed to keep us docile. Rot that doesn’t stink or drip—it’s shiny, subscribable, and endlessly monetizable.

Maybe this is why Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World keeps rattling around in my head. His warning wasn’t just about pseudoscience, but about what happens when we stop practicing thought, when we let the muscle atrophy. We don’t even need demons anymore, we have algorithms. I don’t think Sagan could have predicted TikTok, cla**ers, or AI slop, but he really did understand the stakes: that when we give up on critical thinking, we leave ourselves open to whatever parasites are most efficient at filling the void. 

IYKYK

Rot no longer looks like torches or witch trials, it is frictionless scrolling, polarizing culture wars, the slow erosion of our ability to want anything more than another hit of nothing. The tragedy of Brain Rot isn’t just distraction, it’s the horror of mistaking survival for living.