idle gaze 071: rotting upstream

the low brow sludge → high culture flex pipeline of brain rot

As most of you will know by now, the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was ‘brain rot’. A term they defined as:

“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 trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterised as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

There is some truth to the deteriorating effect of “brain rot”, that feeling that something is putrefying in your mind, as you’re lying in bed, the room pitch black except for the blue-tinted, harsh glow emitting from the endless algorithmic well of content on your phone. Every video aggressively optimised to drill into the deepest layers of the brain’s pleasure centre, while at the same time numbing the electrodes of the mind into apathetic oblivion.¹

Whether it’s mindless ASMR sludge on TikTok or skibidi toilet videos spewing out primary school slang, imprinting rizz, gyatt, and hawk tuah into the collective mind like a digital branding iron - brain rot has all the hallmarks of what society, since the 19th century, has compartmentalised into the bucket of “low brow” culture, the endemic of shallow entertainment that lacks intellectual engagement (as opposed to the high horse of "high brow" culture- referring to everyhting considered intellectually demanding, complex, or sophisticated).

The rule has always been this: high brow and low brow culture do not mix. They do not intermingle. In fact, members of the high brow elite wouldn’t be seen dead engaging with low brow culture. But with brain rot, something interesting - strange even - is happening. The seemingly degraded quality and aesthetics of online content is no longer just living in the gutter of low brow mind decay. It’s slowly but surely making it’s way into “high brow” culture too, from luxury brand TikTok channels to literature and art, infiltrating a realm usually associated with intellectual thought and finessed, carefully considered content.

Why is this happening? Firstly, we need to look at brain rot not merely as deterioration, but also as cultural alteration. A distinction

Drew Austin

also recently made, where he argues that digital slop - rather than decomposing like rotting fruit - acts more like a poison that stays in cultural circulation:

I prefer “brain poisoning,” [to describe brain rot] —it feels more precise. We are not decaying online so much as being incrementally loaded up with heavy metals like tuna in the ocean over the course of a lifetime, carrying this accumulation inside of us wherever we go.

Brain rot might start off in the murky depths of social media’s dopamine dispensers. But like undersea creatures swallowing tiny bits of microplastics - it inevitably makes its way up the cultural food chain, eventually finding it’s way into a fancy omakase joint, contaminating the blood flow of high brow culture.

This is how digital slop rots upstream.

Step 1: Mainstream cultural osmosis

This is where brain rot achieves a sort of contradictory double presence: becoming simultaneously meaningless and deeply meaningful. You start hearing empty phrases like “very mindful, very demure” and “it's giving" used in common water cooler parlance. ASMR videos and split screen subway surfer gaming content is adopted by big brands and mainstream entertainment as shortcuts to fleeting relevance. Brain rot transcends its original context to become a shared touchstone among the masses.

Step 2 : Achieves IYKYK flex

Next transmutation: brain rot becomes further detached from its origins, permeating the communication and visual language of luxury brands - an arena once considered a stronghold of “high brow” culture, as they capitalise on the if you know you know status of brain-fried online digital overflow.

Whether it’s LOEWE and Marc Jacobs creating content for the social media savvy, like soothing videos of hydraulic press machines crushing miscellaneous objects or wild CGI depictions of gargantuan tennis balls rolling over cityscapes, brain rot transforms from mindless low brow sludge - functional by design to ease our minds in the digital chaos and numb the anxiety - into something more akin to a cultural flex.

A way to signal to your audience (and for the audience to signal to each other): “I understand online culture, I am terminally online”. In this IYKYK culture, where niche knowledge reigns supreme, understanding the nuances of online culture offers a certain sense of cultural cachet.

@marcjacobs@bellahadid039 is ready for summer!

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Step 3: Attains high culture status

Eventually, brain rot begins to seep into the highest echelons of culture, shaping the vernacular and themes of a new generation of internet first authors and artists.

Today, the literary zeitgeist is awash with ‘internet novels’ that leverage the niche references of online discourse. As Becca Rothfeld points out, the way Twitter/X, TikTok and Instagram is shaping novels today presents a strange juxtaposition - going against the assumed role of literature in culture as an antidote to the perceived harm of online content: “The internet scoops out the mind and mashes it into wet pulp, which is to say that it is the opposite of a novel, at least when the novel is working.”

Books like Woo Woo by Ella Baxter, and Honor Levy’s My First Book (in which the writer even proposed the internet as co-author) embrace the scrolling binge rather than offering a respite away from it. They indulge in in-jokes originating from weird corners of Twitter/X threads and Discord communities, making a point of reproducing the fractured texture, drawn out and under-punctuated sentences and tonal quirks of the chronically online.

Meanwhile, artists like painter Chloe Wise, have similarly bridged the gap between still life paintings and online brain rot culture. Wise’s portraits feature youthful muses with very online sensibilities. In “Some pleasant lies would be nice”, a woman with bleached hair and a butterfly tattoo stares at the viewer with a pouty gaze. She’s nude, save for a pair of wired Apple headphones. Wise’s other pieces recall headshots of influencers with meticulous skincare routines, or zoomed-in selfies you might receive from a friend - capturing the intimate essence of, let’s say, a TikTok Get Ready With Me video.

“Some pleasant lies would be nice”, Chloe Wise, 2021

This is the mindless low brow sludge → high culture flex pipeline. Common discourse paints out brain rot as intellectual poison: refined sugars and seed oils for the mind². But it’s also become something more useful and valuable than junk food alone. In today’s surreal cultural landscape, it’s become a ‘badge of honour’³, offering people a semblance of a community and connection.

It offers what cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito calls a ‘genre of participation’. There’s a reward if you get the obscure reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same TikToks, following the same online conversations, reposting the same posts as you.

The very content that supposedly rots our brains has become a form of cultural literacy, a marker of sophistication. Is it irony? Or is it simply the natural physics of online culture, where even digital detritus can be turned into valuable art, commerce and connection?

1. More on this in idle gaze 053, where I wrote about sludge content and enslavement to the pleasure principle.

2. An analogy I came across in

Adam Singer

’s essay over at

Hot Takes

on TikTok and Instagram as intellectual poison.

3. As pediatrician Michael Rich observed in his study of teenagers with digital addiction, as relayed to The New York Times.