What Does Brain Rot Do For Us?

Exploring brain rot as a cultural phenomenon

The ‘6-7 kid’ at an AAU basketball game. Photo from X.com

‘Brain rot’ is the name of a certain type of social media content characterized by its absurdist comedic style and apparent meaninglessness. Brain rot content is extremely popular, evidenced by the term being named the Oxford word of the year in 2024. The term references the apparent effects of consuming such content, but is also used to describe the genre of content itself. While it may seem unworthy of analysis due to its low-quality and penchant towards meaninglessness, I believe its popularity, especially among younger generations, warrants taking it seriously as a cultural phenomenon.

Before wrestling with brain rot as such a phenomenon, though, let me roughly illustrate what I mean by “meaning” when applied to media, so the connection between brain rot and meaning or lack thereof is clarified. For the purposes of this essay I am speaking about simple denotation in language and more general reference to something anterior or within. In the first sense, the word ‘dog’ means a four legged mammal that barks. In another sense the meaning of The Tortoise and the Hare, for example, could be said to be slow and steady wins the race. That is the moral of the story, or, what you are supposed to ‘get’ from it. In the same way what you are supposed to ‘get’ from the word dog is its denotation. Thus, I mean by meaning what you are supposed to get from some message. The connection between meaning and brain rot is then that it is a genre of content where what you are supposed to ‘get’ from it is highly ambiguous, so ambiguous, in fact, that there may not be anything to ‘get’ from it at all. If it is extremely unclear what exactly someone is supposed to get from some message, as is the case with brain rot generally, then I am characterizing that as meaningless. I hope that watching the examples I provide later will reveal to you explicitly why I say meaninglessness is a central characteristic of brain rot.

It is rather odd for such a popular content form to possess so little meaning, so it is not out of the question to ask: what is the societal function of brain rot? Or what does the popularity of brain rot tell us about contemporary culture? My impression is that brain rot is a reaction to a general trend in today’s world towards the deterioration of meaning. More specifically, brain rot functions as a way of dealing with alienation from meaning.

To motivate this position, I will turn to examples of brain rot and the way people respond to it. A prime example of a piece of brain rot content that embraces its own meaninglessness is the “6-7” meme. It is difficult to explain what exactly the “6-7” meme is because it is essentially meaningless, but the origin of the meme is the song “Doot Doot (6-7)” by rapper Skrilla. Videos which could be classified as “6-7”content generally consist of members of Generation Alpha exclaiming the words “six seven”. That the 6-7 meme embraces its own meaninglessness can be seen by this TikTok video by user @h00pifyreacts wherein he tries in vain to communicate what the meme means. The comments on the video express confusion with the explanation offered, and many of them insist that the 6-7 meme means nothing. But what the confused commenters fail to understand is that the reason people enjoy the 6-7 meme is its meaninglessness is what gives it its comedic value.

In fact, the meme divides people who come across it into two groups. The first group contains people who understand that the meme is meaningless and take away from this fact that it is funny. The other group is made up of people who see the meme and merely have a hunch that it is meaningless, or, put differently, it is made up of those who cannot find any sort of meaning in the meme and so end up confused. Here we can see the first signs of brain rot functioning as a way of dealing with the deterioration of meaning insofar as a coping mechanism used to deal with deterioration in the 6-7 example is comedy. To clarify, we generally find comfort in knowing what something means. If we know what something means we are more comfortable with it than if we do not. For example if a friend started speaking in gibberish, we might feel at least a little unnerved. You might think something is wrong with him like he’s having a bout of psychosis. Comedy is often used to cope with feeling uncomfortable. In the situation I have in mind, the creators and users of brain rot like 6-7 feel or have felt uncomfortable with a perceived loss of meaning which is a general condition of our age; a claim I will substantiate later. However, I think this is something we can all intuitively recognize because it is instantiated in recent cultural phenomena like AI slop, post-truth politics, and fake news. Users of the 6-7 meme understand its meaninglessness, but embrace it and continue to employ it instead of being uncomfortable with its lack of meaning. This is how they are using comedy as a coping mechanism for the loss of meaning. Creators and enjoyers of brain rot embrace the epitome of the loss of meaning: meaninglessness. By using meaninglessness as something of a punchline, they are able to disarm whatever about it was making them uncomfortable. This is a familiar way of using comedy as a coping mechanism. People find it funny in part because they are cognizant of their being privy to a language game most others see as baffling.

Another popular piece of brain rot, the property in Egypt meme, also exemplifies how brain rot content functions as a reaction to the loss of meaning. The property in Egypt meme makes fun of the inanity of ‘hustle content’—content that purports to educate people about how to generate passive income—by taking a clip of hustle influencer Cam Easty saying, “When you buy a property in Egypt, they give you the property”. The popularity of the meme reacts to the ubiquity of hustle content on social media platforms. This ubiquity is made possible by the quantity over quality approach to content creation many hustle influencers employ to drive engagement. Creators and enjoyers of the meme understand that the redundant statements of Cam Easty resemble hustle content as a whole, pointing out that whatever meaning or credibility it is supposed to have is largely undermined by the attempt of creators like Cam Easty to create as much content as possible because this proliferation often takes away from the meaning of the content. Although the popularity of the meme makes it apparent that people– by which I mean the literal creators of the content as well as the users who interact with it– recognize the non-ideal aspects of hustle content, its comedic intention reveals that the relationship between enjoyers and creators of the meme and the meaningless content they take aim at is not a substantive critique. By this, I mean it is not a critique that is intended to negate some aspect of the phenomenon. For example, Marx’s critique of capitalism was intended to show people that we need to change to another economic system because capitalism’s inner logic inherently exploits people. That this is the case is clear because, as you will see if you view the content I linked earlier in the paragraph, commenters are not critiquing the advice Cam Easty is giving or suggesting he stop making content; they are latching on to the meaningless statements he makes and repeating them. This is a recognition and ironic celebration of the meaninglessness of hustle content. An example of how the property in Egypt meme functions as something of a celebration of meaninglessness can be seen by how the meme evolved over time. This is what the property in Egypt meme became. This acceleration into meaninglessness supports the idea that brain rot functions as a reaction to the loss of meaning. By celebrating and emulating meaninglessness through the creation and interaction with comedic content that centers so fundamentally around it, creators and enjoyers of brain rot are able to recognize the general condition of alienation from meaning and take away the discomfort it causes them by making it into something funny.

Both “67” and “property in Egypt” are referenceable memes whose prima facie meaninglessness is supposed to be funny, but upon further inspection, they signal a recognition of the discomfort brought about by meaning slowly seeping out of our world. It is precisely this message of recognition which is distributed alongside the meme that shows how closely the popularity of brain rot is related to alienation. Creators of this brand of brain rot, consciously or unconsciously, imbue it with a message about their own feelings of alienation. If the meme gains popularity, then they can be sure other people feel the same way, and so they receive some psychologically palliative effect. Seeing as the “6-7” meme and the property in Egypt meme achieved massive popularity, if my thesis about the hidden message contained in the memes is right, then a lot of people reciprocate these feelings about the loss of meaning. Also, creators use brain rot as a medium to express something about how they experience the world, and cast it out on social media with hopes of having these feelings recognized by others. However, questions remain about the cultural and historical environment that makes so many people feel alienated from meaning.

Why would people feel estranged from meaning? Because the historical moment we occupy is a postmodern one, by which I mean one that has not dealt with the damage done by an extreme crisis of legitimation. This crisis became apparent during the latter half of the 20^th century; it can be characterized by people’s, particularly academics’, realization that the claims of the legitimacy of certain kinds of knowledge rely on an unstable metaphysics, or contain assumptions that, if not plainly shown to be ridiculous by the intellectual progress of the 20^th century, went out of style. For example, people turned away from orthodox Marxism at this time due to its seemingly unjustifiable reliance on the assumption that history is teleological. Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher, takes this crisis as a starting point in his book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, wherein he famously defines the word postmodern as “…incredulity towards metanarratives”. Metanarratives, in this case, are the stories that serve as material to justify a claim about the way the world is. Familiar frameworks which are metanarratives are religion and liberalism. Illustrating how appealing to them works, if you were to conduct a science experiment and report that you have obtained whatever result, when a skeptical interlocutor asks you things like ‘how did you know how to design your experiment?’ or, ‘how do you know that the result you obtained communicates something about the way the world actually works?’, you would appeal to a scientific metanarrative, which would probably include claims about the efficacy of the scientific method, elements of logical positivism like the verification principle, or the correspondence theory of truth. Simply put, the verification principle states that there are two ways a proposition is able to be endowed with meaning: either the truth value can be confirmed empirically or its truth value can be confirmed by the form of the proposition. For example, the proposition “it will rain today or it will not rain today” can never not be true. Again, simply put, the correspondence theory of truth is one that claims something is true to the degree it is a faithful reflection of reality. Returning to the example of the skeptic, if they press on and start to attack the justifiability or the veracity of the metanarrative, eventually you and the skeptic will hit philosophical bedrock, and you will be relying on first principles, which cannot be justified because there is no longer something justificatory to appeal to. This is relevant because the epistemic environment brain rot is born out of is one where the puzzlement of academics regarding how things are to be justified has leaked into the epistemic air of the layman. The proliferation of fake news can provide some evidence for this claim. It is now difficult to tell a true news story from a false one, and any appeal to a criterion of truth or falsity may be contested. For example, person X reads a news story claiming ICE deported 30 people from their town last night. Person Y doubts this claim and asks Person X to justify it. Person X justifies it by talking about the good reputation of the journalist who wrote the story, or that there are a few other stories online making similar claims. Person Y responds that these justifications are dependent on fabrications made by political enemies of ICE. I am sure you can recognize that this type of conversation is not one that we would be surprised to hear in today’s world.

The postmodern age can then be characterized as one where it has become fashionable to seriously entertain the epistemic position of the unrelenting skeptic. For a book that does such entertaining with regard to the subject of meaning itself, see Saul Kripke’s influential Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I have suggested that the reason people may feel alienated from meaning is that we are steeped in the postmodern age, where the metanarratives we once relied on to justify our meanings are under attack. The semantic security people once enjoyed has been replaced by a semantic insecurity. Societally, we are saturated with this semantic insecurity, and our conscious or unconscious understanding of this fact leads some of us to express ourselves in ways that reveal we feel alienated from meaning. I suggest above that brain rot is one of those ways that has the particular characteristic of being a medium that embraces meaninglessness to communicate an insecurity of the creator with their being estranged from meaning. Under this interpretation, the societal function of brain rot would be to act as a sort of cry for help or at least a cry for solidarity in feeling, meaning slowly fading out of the world.

However, there is another, similar way to interpret the societal function of brain rot. Such an interpretation would entail taking up the position of Fredric Jameson in the foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Here, Jameson suggests that rather than thinking of the results of the crisis of legitimation as leading to an incredulity towards metanarratives, we think of these metanarratives as having moved underground into the unconscious. Here, metanarratives that Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers suggest have disappeared, or lost their pragmatic role, are still effective in our lives and interactions with the world. I believe this explanation of what happened after the crisis of legitimation is more believable, although it would be difficult, if not impossible, to support this perspective without a doomed appeal to some metanarrative. Popular metanarratives like Evangelicalism, Marxism, positivism, and the Great Man theory of history, though dirtied by postmodern skepticism, have not disappeared, but are effective now unconsciously. On this interpretation, brain rot’s expression of alienation from meaning is not a reaction to the societal air’s being rife with meaninglessness, but an uncomfortability with the distance between the surface and the crypt in which the grand old metanarratives are buried. It is a recognition of a shift in position of powerful stories, a reaching into the part of the unconscious where we store the crypt of the metanarratives.

A third way to understand the societal function of brain rot is to see the experience of being alienated from meaning as a symptom of the societal adoption of a new grand metanarrative marked by incredulity towards the old ones. Under this interpretation, the postmodern age would not be defined by when we decided to break with our old metanarratives, but by when we decided to embrace a new one that placed value on the kind of skepticism that chases theories about the world back to their shaky foundations. If we buy this interpretation, alienation from meaning reflects our society’s distancing itself from meaning’s being justified by reference to metanarrative. In this case, experiencing alienation from meaning is akin to feeling pangs of nostalgia for a time when our philosophical attitudes were different. Brain rot, then, is an expression of this painful nostalgia. Generation Z is the people who predominantly produce and consume brain rot, and they are notorious for being infatuated with nostalgia, so perhaps these phenomena are related, and brain rot explicitly or implicitly functions as Generation Z’s nostalgia for a different epistemic age.

Regardless of which account most accurately or usefully captures the nature of the phenomenon, it seems highly plausible that brain rot content in some way expresses suffering caused by a change (positionally, existentially, attitudinally) in meaning. If this is right, we should pay attention to this suffering. If the stories we used to tell ourselves offered us some solace from the terror of confusion, despite the terror of confusion ironically seeming like the most realistic state of affairs according to our own intellectual progress largely fueled by these stories, perhaps we should return to the cozy confidence they offered us. However, I feel after having a taste of the postmodern brand of skepticism, we are stuck on a completely novel path, and brain rot is an expression of our only being able to look backwards at the cozy confidence of meaning’s being grounded acceptably in metanarratives.