The Brain Rot Generation of Content

The Oxford Word of the Year - It's just content for contents' sake

Brain Rot - Image courtesy of Sky News

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Oxford Word of the Year 2024 is “Brain Rot”. They say it refers to “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterised as likely to lead to such deterioration”. This is something which has perturbed my friends and I over the course of this year and slightly preceding it. It comes as a result of how we have operated online for years, and now what is rewarded by the platform, brands and the public alike. Interestingly, last years word of the year was “Rizz”, a formerly unheard abbreviation of the word charisma, which so happens to also be an example of brain rot - the pure laziness of turning words into almost incomprehensible other non-words.

Instagram was the first major social media platform from which folks could earn a living. Most of the successful early creators were ones who were, at their heart, creative experts. The best were either photographers, architects and bloggers who put time and effort into their content because it was a translation of their craft and expertise. But overtime, translation turned to dilution. After a couple of years, high-res, high-production value content was castrated by the algorithms, and in its’ place, iPhone merchants rose. Handheld content with zero thought about lighting, production, art direction, composition and styling flooded the platform. The opposite of Less But Better; More And Worse, propelled itself to the main zeitgeist of the platform. Formerly it was only people who used the platform for its’ intended purpose who would upload this sort of content, but now the platform itself was telling us if you want to be successful you need to upload more (dumps), don’t be too concerned with the quality of your content, and upload very often.