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Brain rot is a protest
What brain rot is
Gen Z uses the term for a specific kind of video that is aggressively devoid of meaning. One example is Skibidi Toilet. Another is AI-made hybrid animals such as Trippi Troppi, which is big in Italy and narrated in Italian. A Rowan University professor, Maxi Heitmeier, explored why in a New York Times op-ed titled The Truth About Brain Rot, drawing on interviews with Gen Z.
Why it works as protest
Social media treats user focus as a commodity: the more time people spend, the more advertising revenue the platforms earn, which raises engagement without promoting quality. Gen Z understands that dynamic clearly. One interviewee described brain rot as anti-content, the only way to be free online, because it is so stupid it can't be monetized.
Brain rot deliberately refuses narrative, purpose, and message. A century ago, artists answered the horrors of World War I with deliberately irrational work, and Dada rejected the cultural logic that had led to industrialized killing. For a generation raised with every digital interaction tracked, measured, and monetized, the refusal is experienced as honesty in a dishonest system.
The darker side
The refusal has a darker side. Gen Z sees the manipulation and understands what the algorithms are doing, yet keeps scrolling, because most of them have never lived a life outside the system. That makes brain rot read more as resignation than resistance. Generation X had a version of its own: when corporatized, yuppie capitalism rose in the 1980s, the slackers tuned out and went ironic.
Why did Dada come out of World War I?
Dada began in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in neutral Zurich, where poet Hugo Ball and fellow artists, many of them refugees from the war, staged nonsense performances. Their target was the reason and progress that European society claimed as its highest values while the trenches filled. They built art from chance, collage, and sound poems made of invented words. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt, titled Fountain, to an exhibition in New York, where it was rejected.
How do platforms turn attention into revenue?
Most platforms are free to use and earn their money by selling advertisers a share of users' time on screen. Ads are sold by the impression, so every extra minute means more ads shown, and recommendation systems are tuned to predict what will keep a person watching. In 2012, YouTube announced that it would rank videos by minutes watched instead of clicks.
Why did Generation X turn to irony?
Generation X came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when advertising and corporate culture seemed able to absorb any rebellion and sell it back. The 1990 film Slacker and Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X made detached irony the signature voice of the cohort. In a 1993 essay called E Unibus Pluram, David Foster Wallace argued that television had learned to use irony to defuse its own critics.
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