Behind the Brain Rot
Oxford’s controversial Word of the Year captures how chronically online life has become.
By John Hendrickson
The image is black-and-white, lending it an air of “historical artifact”: A modern-day Donald Trump standing next to Elvis Presley. The president-elect posted the picture on Truth Social last night. Presley is strumming a guitar; Trump is idling in the frame. Of course, this scene is impossible, and it’s not a real photograph. Elvis died in 1977, when Trump was 31 years old. Nevertheless, here’s Trump, side by side with the King, not smiling, not singing, just … hanging out. There is no punch line, or even a semblance of a joke. It is literally just something to look at.
Amid a string of recent Cabinet-nomination announcements, the incoming president chose to share this image with his millions of social-media followers. The people responding in the comments loved it, and some replied with similar images, most of which appeared to be AI-generated. You could say that this is harmless. But what is it adding to the world? How is this even entertainment?
The heavy sigh and slightly hungover feeling this type of content elicits might best be described as brain rot—Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year.
Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” It has a symbiotic relationship with internet garbage, or, as shoddily made AI-generated content has been deemed, slop, some of which is created by spammers who find financial incentive in flooding social platforms. Brain rot is the symptom, not the disease: It stems from this daily avalanche of meaningless images and videos, all those little tumbling content particles that do not stir the soul.
And yet these ephemera nonetheless seep into our skulls. Slop has a way of taking up valuable space while simultaneously shortening our attention span, making it harder to do things like read books or other activities that might actually fulfill us. Brain rot doesn’t hurt; it’s dulling, numbing, something more like a steady drip. You know you have it when you have consumed but you are most certainly not filled up. And the deluge of disposable digital stuff often feels like a self-fulfilling, self-deadening prophecy: Rotting brains crave more slop.
The Trump era, and especially the current phase in which we find ourselves, is likewise the era of brain rot, of junk, of exhaustion. My colleague Charlie Warzel argued over the summer that the MAGA aesthetic, in a word, is slop: “The high-resolution, low-budget look of generative-AI images appears to be fusing with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement,” he wrote. He’s right, though it’s important to acknowledge that slop (and its attendant brain rot) transcend politics. Even if you tune out the news, you’re still bound to deal with the never-ending stream of meaningless digital debris. Take, for example, the slate of popular Netflix reality shows, which often feel designed to watch while you’re looking at something else on your phone. These programs are like a televised Yule Log, flickering in the background for comfort but not actually providing much of anything.
Though it seems highly modern, brain rot, as a phrase, dates back to Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of this magazine.
As Oxford University Press notes on its website:
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Today, Walden Pond, outside of Boston, is one of the surest places one can visit to alleviate brain rot. You can swim in the cool reflective water, stare at the swaying trees, wander along the muddy shore. I went a few summers ago and felt more offline than I had in a while.
Oxford itself has received flack for being too online in its Word of the Year choices: Last year was the comparatively peppy rizz, while the year before was something more of a brain rot brethren: goblin mode. But getting mad at words is like getting mad at the weather. For better or worse (almost certainly worse), the distinction between our online and offline lives has been vanishing for years, and the line is now all but gone. The best thing we can do is see it all as life itself, and know that whatever feeling we are dealing with is a version of what Thoreau dealt with 170 years ago. Only slightly more stupid.
