Skibidi, Sisyphus and Scrolling

By /

I’m standing on the train between London Bridge and East Croydon, whilst an annoying kid blasts Italian brain rot, specifically “Cappuccino Assassino.” I can’t really say I’m into it. A few seats away, I can see a woman holding her phone awkwardly, squinting at a horribly formatted image about border control. Both enjoying a bit of digital trash during their commute, but there’s a fundamental difference… One of them has full awareness of what they are doing, and the other doesn’t even know what’s happening.

Mind the generational gap

“Brain rot” is massive, hence why it was Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year. The term itself is a self-deprecating shorthand for the chaotic, overstimulating content dominating TikTok and YouTube.

You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking younger generations are totally done for. But when you zoom out, brain rot is actually perfectly suited to the algorithms that reward it. It’s fast, fragmented, overstimulating, and remixable – engineered for absolute sensory chaos. And yet, what I find fascinating about this is that Gen Z and Alpha seem to be totally OK with this. They enjoy the idea of it rotting their brains.

But is there power in what they’re doing? The world is falling apart and kids are just making weird little videos instead of acknowledging it. Meanwhile, older generations scroll through their own versions of digital rot, full of pseudo medicine and right-wing “news”. But without a protective layer of irony. For this generation, content is taken at face value, internalised, and shared.

Perhaps it’s not just what is being consumed, but how. The new generations are dancing to OoEeeAaaEe cat, and Karen just shared another post in the family group chat warning everyone to stay away from foreigners – and this time, she really thinks she’s onto something.

We’ve been here before, kinda

After the first world war, and the spanish flu pandemic – a wave of artists responded with Surrealism. Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks. René Magritte painted a pipe (that apparently wasn’t a pipe). Reality had become absurd, so they created a way to escape from it. 

You might already have a bit of an idea of where I’m going with this, but I do think there’s a strong case to be made for Gen Z and Alpha creating a digital version of the same thing. These kids aren’t necessarily trying to make art or send a political message – but in a post-capitalist world that is on the brink of climate collapse, plus a sprinkle of algorithmic overstimulation, I’d say that surrealism is a fair response.

But that’s not all! Philosophically, brain rot also shares parallels with Absurdism. French thinker Albert Camus wrote about the tension between our search for meaning and a world that offers none. One of his most famous works, The Myth of Sisyphus, tells the story of a man condemned to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down for all eternity. Camus closed with “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. It’s not a stretch to swap out Sisyphus with Gen Z – or the boulder pushing with scrolling.

I think there’s something important going on with this brain rot stuff.

How should the media respond?

So yeah sure, maybe it matters – but what do we do with it? Well, first it’s important to acknowledge that younger generations were born into misinformation, corporate manipulation, and constant overstimulation – and they know when they’re being sold to. They’re naturally skeptical.

Older generations on the other hand, didn’t develop this defence. Many Boomers, and a lot of Millennials too, use the internet with a baseline of good faith, and this has consequences. Studies show that adults over 65 are seven times more likely to engage with fake news than younger adults. Not because they’re less intelligent, but because they’re less conditioned to view content as being potentially weaponised or exaggerated.

To genuinely communicate with a young audience, a brand can’t just throw a few memes into a content calendar and expect it to perform. The smarter move is to recognise which parts of society that a brand should comment on – and which ones aren’t theirs to disrupt. Try to understand it and move out of the way.

But if you are going to attempt to join the conversation, you better know what you’re getting into. Because you’re risking yourself and your company getting trolled into oblivion. Basically, what I’m trying to say is: hire someone young to do it properly, and pay them properly whilst you’re at it.

Or maybe I’m over thinking and kids just like watching silly videos 🤷

Sources:

RELATED POSTS 🤠

Scroll to Top