The Truth About Brain Rot

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport explores the phenomenon of 'brain rot' content among Gen Z, interpreting it as a nihilistic form of protest against the digital

Key takeaways

• Gen Z's consumption of 'brain rot' content like Skibrot Toilet acts as a form of digital Dadaism, rejecting meaningful narrative to avoid being monetized.
• The attention economy treats user focus as a commodity, incentivizing engagement over high-quality content.

Main topics

• Gen Z Brain Rot phenomenon
• The Attention Economy

Notable quotes

If everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content.

Conclusion

True digital agency requires embracing the friction and difficulty of

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I want to talk about brain rot. Now, to my middle-aged millennial brain, when I think about brain rot, I think about it as something that happens to your brain. Like if you scroll too much, you begin to reduce your cognitive capacity. But Gen Z has another definition for this term. They use brain rot to describe a specific type of video content that is aggressively devoid of meaning. Let me give you an example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot known as skibbity toilet. Let's play that. Speaker 2 (0:37) All Speaker 1 (0:37) right, let's do another example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot that's popular where you use AI to create hybrid animals. For whatever reason, this is big in Italy. So this clip is in Italian. It is of what is known as trippy-troppy. Let's look at that. Speaker 1 (0:56) I can tell you right now, MIT is really proud about having given me a doctorate. After watching me present trippy, troppy, and skid-divity toilet to the public. But that's what brain rot content is. It's content like this. And it's very popular among Gen Z to watch videos of this type somewhat obsessively. Well, this obviously triggers some key questions such as what is going on here? Why is a whole generation so obsessed with this particular type of content? Why has God forsaken us? Real big questions that this phenomenon raises. Well, I didn't really have a good answer to any of those until recently I came across an op-ed in the New York Times that shed some light. It was titled The Truth About Brain Rot, and it was authored by a professor at Rowan University, Maxi Heitmeier. This essay explains why the brain rot content phenomenon is so important. is so popular. And I'll tell you, the answer is not what I expected. It is actually an answer that is way more significant than I would have thought, an answer that has implications for all of us. So here's what I want to do today. I want to proceed in two parts. Part one, we're going to go through that New York Times essay, and we're going to get to the core of why the brain rot phenomenon exists and why this is actually a problem. that is relevant. It's indicating a problem relevant to all of us. Part two, I want to talk solutions. And here I'm going to look at my own childhood. We didn't have brain rot when I was a kid, but we did have movies. And I'm going to actually turn to a cult classic movie from the late 1990s that I'm going to argue exactly captures the problems we're having right now as epitomized by the brain rot phenomenon and provides us a potential way out. And so we're going to get into all of that, what's going on and what we can all do about it. So we have a lot to do, but before we get started. Let's get another hit of that skibbity toilet. All right, that's the stuff. Let's go. Speaker 1 (3:05) All right, so let's start by looking at this New York Times op-ed that I talked about before. I'll put it on the screen here for people who happen to be watching instead of just listening. All right, so as I mentioned, the article was called The Truth About Brain Rot. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. I'm going to scroll down to some key quotes that I think gets to the core of what I want to emphasize. All right, here is quote number one from this op-ed. The business model of social media treats user focus as a commodity to be extracted and sold. The more time we spend, the more advertising revenue we generate for the owners of the platforms. This attention economy increases engagement. It does not promote high quality content. Okay, so we can start there. This is well known, right? This is what happens on these sort of social media platforms that we all use, and in particular, Gen Z uses. But the article goes on. What struck us in our interviews, however, was how clearly Gen Z understood this dynamic. They then go on to quote one of the Gen Z correspondents that they talk about who said the following. If everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content. It is the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid that it can't be monetized. All right, let's move on here. I want to keep going. Brain rot breaks the mold of social media through its absurdity, its deliberate refusal of narrative purpose or message. A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately irrational anti-aesthetic work. Dada rejected the cultural logic that had led... to industrialized killing. In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on the economy's terms. The joke is that there is no joke. The meaning is that there is no meaning. And for a generation that grew up with its every digital interaction tracked, measured, and monetized, that refusal is experienced as a form of honesty in a dishonest system. Let's stop there for a second. This is interesting. The brain rot phenomenon, according to this professor who interviewed a lot of Gen Z members, members of Gen Z, is in some sense like a protest. They grew up so enmeshed in this world of digital attention economy distraction that the ultimate rebellion is to basically make themselves. boring. I'm going to consume the stupidest possible content. I'm not going to play the game that I saw the millennials play where they get really attached to these figures that they're encountering on Twitter or on Instagram and they feel like they have a parasocial relationship and that they're part of a big discussion when they're really being exploited. We're not going to be exploited. And the way we're going to show that is by looking at the stupidest possible content, right? Every generation goes through something where they have their own type of rebellion. This is Gen Z's. I mean, look at like Gen X, the slacker phenomenon. How did they respond to a sort of 80s corporatized rise of boring, yuppie, suburban capitalism that was happening in our culture is that they tuned out. They got ironic. They got sardonic. Nothing is interesting to me. We're seeing the same thing happening with Gen Z but in the digital realm. All right, you're going to turn me into a commodity, Mark Zuckerberg. You're going to try to monetize every minute of my day, try to trick me into thinking that your fake artificial digital universe is somehow real. I'm going to watch Skibbity Toilet. So it's a rejection in some sense. It's da-da. It's do shop in the fountain installation. But here's the key addendum to this observation. So if we go, I'm going to go back to the article here in a second. But the author said, do not romanticize brain rot. Do not romanticize it. This ambivalence that Gen Z feels towards their world has its own darkness to it. So let me go back to the article and read this final quote here. This ambivalence communicates the emotional register of people living inside a system they cannot escape. They see the manipulation, understand what the algorithms are doing, but they keep scrolling anyway because they cannot imagine a life outside the system. Most of them. never lived one. So there's this melancholy kind of conclusion to this analysis in this op-ed that it is an act of rebellion and self-protection, but they're still stuck in the system. There's a nihilism here about this is the world I have to live in, and this is my sort of futile rebellion that at least allows me personally to feel like I maintain some sort of intellectual or character integrity. In other words, brain rot is less about resistance than it is resignation. Okay, so I read that article. This is really important. I think this is really important, right? Because brain rot as a performance being done by Gen Z is pointing the figure to the world that everyone else lives in as well. My generation, my parents' generation, we're all living in this artificial digital world. It's just Gen Z, because they were born in it, are the ones who are actually doing this performance art, this digital da-da, to try to react to it by watching Skivity Toilet and Trippy Trappy. But it doesn't mean the rest of us aren't also trapped in the same world. They're just showing us. They're firing up the signal flare. They're the ones who are having the sort of resigned performance activities to show us like this world is almost nihilistic in the way that it just breaks us down into bits to be monetized, attention to be mined. So this is actually a really big problem. Speaker 1 (8:58) And this is not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear, yeah, Gen Z, they're impressionable and they got tricked into watching dumb videos. No, no, Gen Z is pointing out to the rest of us, this is a nihilistic situation, a digital artificial content universe in which we are all now trapped and they're putting a sort of despair, a performative despair around that reality. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, if you're anything like me, as the world gets more stressful, AI, and sleep is harder to come by, you might find yourself reaching for that second or third cup of coffee before noon. But I want you to consider instead Elements Lemonade Ice Tea. Now, this has two advantages over coffee. First, Caffeine in tea works differently than in coffee. It comes bundled with L-theanine and polyphenols the way it exists in the plant. And this will give you a noticeably steadier feeling with less spike and less drop. Second, your body produces energy through a process that runs on electrolytes and no amount of coffee can replicate that. 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That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash deep. One more time, gusto.com slash deep. All right, let's get back to the show. But can we escape this nihilism? Or is Gen Z just pointing out the meteor is on its way and there's nothing we can do? I have hope. I have hope. And the hope came from, this is an unexpected place, but a classic movie, one of my favorite movies from the second half of the 1990s that I rewatched recently, rewatched it with my kids. And I realized it has a lot to tell us about the current moment that the brain rot movement is reacting to. And not only does it capture our current moment really well, but if you fast forward to the end of the movie, it shows us a way out. Okay, so what movie am I talking about here? I'm talking about the 1998 Jim Carrey vehicle, The Truman Show. I don't know if you've seen this or not. It was directed by Peter Weir. It was pretty successful, actually. Peter did it on a $60 million budget. It made a quarter billion dollars at the box office. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay. There's a lot of big movies from the 90s, but it stuck around as a bit of a cult classic. So the claim I'm going to make here is that this movie does a sort of almost eerily prescient job of describing our current moment and points us towards a solution. All right. So we have to start by sort of setting up what is the setup for this movie? What is the plot? Well, Jim Carrey plays a character named Truman who is an insurance salesman who lives in this sort of kind of. perfect, polished neighborhood. A little movie trivia, they actually