The tyranny of brain rot

“Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say,” declared the Oxford University Press (I imagine with a drum roll), “We’re pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’.”

Brain rot isn’t just a temporary state of mind, it’s the zeitgeist of Generation Alpha

What is brain rot? Google’s AI Overview defines it as “the supposed negative effects of consuming low-quality or unchallenging online content.” Of course, being a chronically online Gen Z, I knew this already. Brain rot isn’t just a temporary state of mind, it’s the zeitgeist of Generation Alpha, a generation raised on CocoMelon and TikTok. Its cousins are doomscrolling and slop and bedrotting; its predecessor is digital dementia, coined in the ancient year of 2012 by neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer. Brain rot today includes everything from YouTube Kids to fixations with niche discourse on X. Now, 30 per cent of British boys prefer their devices to their friends. Gen Alphas worldwide taunt bemused elders with references to flagship brain rot series Skibidi Toilet, their inscrutable hyperactivity reminiscent of Gremlins (or the creatures from Cronenberg’s The Brood). A serious investigation into the phenomenon reveals skyrocketing rates of screen addiction, declining attention spans, and an increasing disconnection from reality.

Amid rising parental concerns, a petition calling for a ban on social media access for under-16s received over 120,000 signatures. The government’s dismissal of this petition reveals a startling disregard of overwhelming evidence for harm caused by social media and screen time. (You can read the full response here). The claim that there is no “causal link” between a screen-based childhood and mental illness is both inaccurate and complacent. Research already provided to the Government by nonprofit Common Sense found that “1 out of every 2 teens feels addicted to their smartphones and the majority of parents (60%) feel their kids are addicted”, and that “among adolescents who spent 1 hour a day on electronic devices, 29% were found to have at least one suicide-related outcome”, while “among adolescents who spent more than 5 hours a day on electronic devices, 48% were found to have at least one suicide-related outcome.”

As a now-vintage meme goes, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 2-year-olds glued to fast-moving, headache-inducing, lurid YouTube for Kids shows in shopping trolley seats, parents equally distracted. Sedated with iPads in restaurants, absent-mindedly picking at dinner. My friend’s niece knew how to press the “Skip Ad” button on YouTube before she could walk or talk. In a pub I worked in there was a regular who brought his infant son along in a buggy, where he sat all afternoon pawing at a tablet in the darkness of the raised sleep cover. There’s a little boy of about 7 at church who stares at his mum’s iPhone throughout the Sunday service. He’s extremely hyperactive and she has no way of managing his behaviour besides giving in, giving him the phone, on which he is visibly dependent. When he does get up to receive the Eucharist, she holds him still as he jerks and leaps about, nervous and overstimulated in a ritual intended for prayer and calm. After Mass, he sits apart from the other children and chatting adults in the crypt, and watches TikTok, every week. 

It is not enough to defer responsibility to bad-faith actors. “It is right,” begins the government’s response, “that tech companies should take responsibility to ensure their products are safe for UK children, and the Online Safety Act 2023 is a crucial tool in holding them to account for this.” First of all, the companies in question engineer damaging, addictive properties into their platforms. They cannot be trusted to ensure anybody’s safety, least not while fueling epidemics of eating disorders and depression. No matter the restrictions on explicitly “extreme” content, the algorithm (particularly the TikTok-style short-form video format built into every platform) is programmed to retain users’ attention at the expense of their developing brains. Secondly, shoe-horning the Online Safety Act and Ofcom regulations into every instance of embedded British social rot is transparently dishonest and ineffective. It is unsurprising that the petition’s response postpones serious attention to the issue, while insisting on the magical healing powers of somebody else’s office. 

Prior to its being enshrined in law, the Online Safety Bill was recommended in 2022 as a solution to the Jay Inquiry findings of a decade prior. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation, led by Professor Alexis Jay, investigated the grooming of over 1,400 children in the town of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Rotherham’s rape scandal, like others across the country, was determined by particular, localised factors and relations. It was not merely a result of anti-vax content or Andrew Tate. Offenders operated primarily in public spaces, exploited “children’s residential units and residential services for care leavers”, and abducted children “outside schools by cars and taxis”. While there exists an “explosion in online-facilitated child sexual abuse” (Report, 2022), it is highly questionable the extent to which the Online Safety Act would address, or be relevant to, the grooming gangs and their causes. 

A similar paradigm applies to the failure of the Online Safety Act in addressing the plight of women online, as argued by the charity Glitch. The Online Safety Act’s measures — age verification barriers (but only for content already deemed harmful, including pornography), its crackdown on “disinformation” and tougher restrictions on hate speech — have been presented as a catch-all solution to a wide variety of issues. In truth, the Act serves merely as a gloss over deep crises at the heart of Britain. It risks legitimising regime-backed censorship and surveillance, while stumbling at the real challenges of systemic exploitation and the suffering of women and girls. How could it be equipped to loosen the iron grip of the world’s most powerful companies on children’s brains? 

Theorists have labelled compulsive internet use a form of “digital labour”. The “appropriation of leisure-oriented, unpaid activities of users by Internet companies”, through advertising engagement for instance, is comparable to “unremunerated work that online users undertake through their activity” (Gandini, 2020). This life of servitude begins on CocoMelon, develops into a debt-inducing Erewhon haul and ends in a failed Subway Surf. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of bestseller The Anxious Generation, sharply points out that while Steve Jobs, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Bill Gates, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg have all significantly restricted their own children’s social media exposure, the average teen spends nearly nine hours a day on screens. When the government promises to “continue to work with stakeholders to balance important considerations”, insisting it has placed “a range of new duties on social media companies”, it forgets that its responsibility is to the welfare of its own people.

… hours of screen time are integral to Alpha existence from birth

The shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, Haidt points out, trades “risky, unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility” for an upbringing  which “blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing.” Much ink has been spilled about the responsibilities of parents to properly engage their children; that “it’s not the phone, it’s the parent”, veering into the anti-natalist tendencies of a cohort worse off and more worried than its forebears. Yet these are often unrealistic demands for dual- and low-income households, where parents cannot afford to host puppet shows or teddy bears’ picnics for their enlightened progeny. The success of grassroots campaigns such as Smartphone Free Childhood, while promising, rely on informed, often university-educated attitudes towards entertainment and consumption. 

Having struggled to manage my screen time for as long as I can remember, my heart breaks for Generation Alpha. Many of us zoomers were introduced to social media after our brains had already developed significantly — hours of screen time are integral to Alpha existence from birth. While kids’ entertainment, teen social media habits, addiction and digital subcultures are separate issues with their own intricacies (and one platform can feel as though it exists in a separate universe to another) adolescence has overwhelmingly been flattened, dematerialised, in favour of corporate interests. In Spain, policymakers have cited Haidt’s research to introduce stricter regulations on smartphones. Australia has approved a ban identical to the British petition’s demands. In the United States, governors in Utah and Arkansas have enacted laws requiring parental consent for minors to access social media platforms. At home, Parliament’s dithering consideration of the Safer Phones Bill will prove crucial in highlighting any change. Though for now, it’s doubtful whether sheer will, however strong, will be able to purge the brain rot.