how brainrot becomes brainrot

a meditation on the aesthetics of internet addiction

I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten the definition of “brainrot” quite right.

On a literal level, the implication is obvious: the term describes when the internet “rots” your “brain.”

But the more familiar you get with brainrot (and I’ve gotten pretty damn familiar), the more you understand that the idea behind “brainrot” goes a lot deeper.

For one, there’s an inherent connection to language, specifically Gen Alpha or Gen Z slang. People largely understand this, even if it evades their first attempt at a definition: the Wikipedia page for “brainrot” notes that it’s “commonly linked to an individual's vocabulary,” and the New York Times acknowledges that “one of the easiest ways to tell if someone’s brain has been destroyed by social media is to notice how often they reference internet jargon.”

This idea—that words are manifestations of our online dependencies—is so essential that the words themselves are often referred to as “brainrot.” Phrases like skibidi, gyat, and rizz are seen as the canaries in the digital coal mine, so we metonymically attribute our problems to those words.

As a linguist who talks a lot about slang, I always try to be extremely clear that there is nothing bad about saying skibidi. The Rizzler song doesn’t destroy your intellect any more than a Shakespearean sonnet; both are normal uses of language that your brain processes the same way.

The difference is that brainrot words are seen as harbingers of internet addiction, with all of its deleterious effects. Shakespearean language is seen in the same contexts as knowledge and academia, so we think of it as better for the brain.

The only difference between skibidi toilet and a thought-provoking piece of modern art is your perception of the medium in which it occurs.

So it’s the context of brainrot that makes it brainrot—namely, short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. It’s perfectly rational to distrust this content: we’re definitely seeing a concerning decline in attention spans and reading comprehension levels worldwide, and it definitely seems linked to social media. “Brainrot” is what happens when we extend those concerns to the vocabulary spread online.

Crucially, not all internet language becomes brainrot. I haven’t seen anybody refer to goblincore or delulu as “brainrot,” even though those are also recently coined, goofy-sounding social media words. Rather, “brainrot” is when words get repeated as memes to the point of nonsensicality.

Goblincore and delulu are still used with their real meanings in unironic contexts. Skibidi and gyat, on the other hand, are more frequently used as examples of brainrot than with their original definitions. I might hear people actually talk about goblincore clothing or say that they were acting delulu last night, but nobody really says “gyat” instead of “butt.” Rather, it and skibidi are treated in the sense of “haha funny word.”

“Brainrot” is “brainrot” because it’s a comedic aesthetic referring back unto itself. Skibidi is more than skibidi: it’s part of a deep canon of irony knowingly parodying itself as an example of what it means to be “chronically online.”

Part of the in-joke is that you can only understand brainrot if you’re also “chronically online,” able to connect the words to the shared internet folklore you’ve consumed. This means that you, too, are brainrotted, adding a layer of self-awareness to the aesthetic.

Since its inception, the internet has progressed through dozens of layers of irony. Millennial lolcats were followed by dank memes making fun of pre-existing memes; dank memes were followed by absurdist and deepfried offshoots that continued to poke fun at their predecessors. Brainrot is just the next step.

We might act like skibidi and rizz and gyat are nonsensical reversions to childhood humor, but in reality they’re post-post-post-ironic nods to themselves. Each term reflects a hyperawareness of our hyperonline reality, but also fits into a greater memetic context. Brainrot words become funny because they’re funny. The more we repeat them, the funnier they get, and the more “brainrotted” we all become.

---

Big news: I’ve finished writing my book!! This means that I’ll probably be posting more on Substack, so be sure to subscribe for email updates ➡️🧑‍💻 I still have a lot to unpack about brainrot in a future post…

You can also stay tuned for future announcements about how to preorder Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language.

love, adam