Brainrotting into an era without meaning
Context, subtext, and how we perceive the world
I’m not going to blame the kids for this one.
Every generation has its own form of deteriorating brainrot that seems to be getting more intense with every passing day. Boomers fall for the most obvious AI generated bullshit you can imagine, blasting 24/7 news at full volume. Gen Xers film themselves spouting angry political opinions while sitting in their cars. Millennials lurk in all the dark alleys of the internet they created, like 4chan. Gen Z can’t go a single hour without listening to a manosphere podcast. And Gen Alpha’s brains are going down the skibidi toilet.
(But really, isn’t skibidi just another form of this?)
I’m not going to even attempt to try and solve this, but I think a small part of the problem is that we haven’t been analyzing anything very deeply for at least a decade. Ever since social media started to dominate the internet, we see a thing, we gasp, we frown, we might even genuinely lol… then something else pops up and our attention is instantly elsewhere. Most journalism is yellow journalism now, because shiny clickbait is what gets attention. (“Senate Democrat SLAMS Republican Congresswoman in Fossil Fuel Debate!”)
We don’t even read the articles anyway, we’re fine with the hit of either anger or dopamine the headlines give us. When we do read them, we don’t question where the information came from. The internet demands every moment of attention, stretching it as thin as tissue paper, then throwing us new shiny crap to look at until we go cross-eyed. We can unplug, stupefy our smart phones, connect IRL all we want, but getting away from brainrot hell also demands that we understand the world we’re living in and the media we consume.
(Before I go any further… I’m not an expert in any of this. I’m not a sociologist, or a psychologist. I didn’t even major in English. These are just my opinions that I did a little research on. In other words, don’t use this article as a source for a paper or anything. [You really shouldn’t use Substack articles as a primary academic source for anything IMO, as there’s no peer review whatsoever and anyone can write what they want.] And feel free to correct me or give your own opinion in the comments.)
So, as mentioned in the subtitle; what do context and subtext have to do with managing brainrot? (You did read the subtitle, didn’t you?)
(*sigh* You didn’t read the subtitle.)
Context and subtext are two words in the English teacher’s lexicon that they love to throw at elementary school kids just to ruin their day.
But really, they’re ways to understand and analyze text and other forms of media. In a way, they’re part of the top-down processing… um… process. Top-down processing is using what our brain already knows to filter information. Bottom-up processing, on the other hand, is the unfiltered, raw information going into our heads. Neither of these are better than the other—top-down processing can’t exist without bottom-up processing—but if we’re bad at top-down processing, then we’ll be bad at understanding what we’re reading and what we’re looking at, and we’ll take everything at face value. Garbage in, garbage out.
Context: the big picture
Almost everyone has seen the infamous "I'm mad as hell" scene from the movie Network (1976)… or at least knows the gist of it. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is sweaty, suicidal, the world sucks, and he’s not gonna take it anymore, and he wants you to stand up and shout it, too.
That last part is what’s most important to the plot, not the speech itself.
The public loves it. They stand up and yell out their windows. They have no idea that behind the scenes, his boss is thinking up ways to turn his mental breakdown into ratings. And when he’s given a program that emulates a Sunday-morning church sermon, no one asks why the guy who said he was going to shoot himself on live TV is a televangelist now, because they like what he’s saying.
The fact that it’s the “mad as hell” scene that has survived almost 50 years, with the majority of people who know of it never watching the movie to see what it’s actually about, proves this particular point of the film precisely. People will eat up sound bites like candy and never question the context at all. So I guess we’ve been like this since way before social media or the internet existed.
(A little off topic: Here is the scene I wish had stuck in the public consciousness instead.)
However, despite the fact that humans are pretty predictable in their behavior, the internet did throw a monkey wrench into our brains in the form of attention deficits. I’m not specifically talking about ADHD. Pretty much everyone with more than a couple apps on their phone can’t help but cycle between them excessively when they’re bored. Or at least I do.
The same article notes that, “…a number of empirical studies have found that using the internet for information-gathering tasks does accelerate the process but appears to fail in recruiting certain patterns of brain activation important for long-term storage of the retrieved information.” The internet might be making us better at short term multitasking while ravaging our long-term memory. Checks out.
Huh? Oh yeah, the article.
You can imagine this can’t be good for anyone’s brain, especially kids. Some anecdotal evidence—I have a friend who teaches 5th grade. He’s told me that the kids will actually PROTEST if he puts on a movie. They literally can’t sit through it. THAT WAS OUR GENERATION’S ULTIMATE REWARD. UNGRATEFUL YOUTUBE SWILLING SKIBIDI BASTARDS. I didn’t ask him how he forces them to read. It must be worse than pulling teeth.
It ain’t just the young kids, either. Plenty of Ivy League college students have never read whole books. Just… wow.
How can we expect to understand any context at all if we won’t even sit through an hour and a half of entertainment, or read a damn book all the way through?
Subtext: between the words
The fraternal twin of context is subtext—the story going on underneath the text, not spelled out for you, but there all the same. If you’re of a certain age (or just terminally online) you’ve probably heard of this concept…
“The Curtains Were Just Blue”
Essentially, it means that authors are just writing their little stories and it has absolutely zero deeper meaning that the curtains in the story were blue and teachers are mean and I don’t want to do homework.
It could very well be true that the author didn’t consciously intend for the blue curtains to have a deeper meaning. However, just the act of thinking about that possibility will open you up to a realm of subtext. Remember in chapter 3, when the (hypothetical) character went on and on about his lost lover’s eyes being blue? In chapter 5, when he went out to sea? Maybe that’s why he bought those blue curtains at the end, when he’s settled down with another woman, far from his seafaring days?
If you noticed during this little thought exercise, examining subtext also made you have empathy for the character. It made you want to get into his head, explore his motivations.
This famous six-word sentence from Hemmingway has to have the most brilliant use of subtext of all time: “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”
Our thoughts immediately go to something terrible. But hey, maybe the shoes were obviously too small? That could be it, right?
Right??
The digital age doesn’t ask you to analyze anything deeply. It only wants you to look, and look, and look. Don’t look away. Keep scrolling. Baby shoes for sale? Yeah, whatever. Stay on our app, buy from our advertisers. This reinforces our dwindling attention spans, which I already touched on. I think. I don’t remember. What’s on Reddit…?
I’m still kind of appalled that there are people who listen to audiobooks at double speed and say they can still grasp everything, or that many, many people skip entire paragraphs of description to get to the dialogue when they read. Just rip pages out of the book, it’s easier.
Without exercising the tools of context and subtext, we can only react to exactly what we see without thinking any deeper about it, and we won’t even see everything if we skim. This isn’t just detrimental to our fun novel reading skills, but our news media literacy, and understanding the truth around us in general.
This isn’t the internet. This is real life.
The way that our current administration is doling out executive orders like confetti in a ticker tape parade, in my opinion, functions in the same way as doomscrolling. It’s been a gish gallop of craziness Every. Single. Day. since he was inaugurated. Some are excited for the possibilities of a president who will actually Get Things Done.
Except, the things he gets done won’t help anyone but himself, and if that isn’t clear by now, I don’t know how to explain it to you, so I won’t. Let Dan Rather tell you about it. Let’s keep it on topic.
The President has been issuing executive orders and making bold statements that honestly don’t make any sense, except to rile people up. Making Canada the 51st state? Taking over the Panama Canal? Buying Greenland? These statements serve to make people react, to make them seethe or cheer, while other stuff is declared silently in the background.
The title, “President Donald J. Trump Reins in Independent Agencies to Restore a Government that Answers to the American People” seems innocently patriotic enough… until you read to the fourth bullet point.
The President and the Attorney General (subject to the President’s supervision and control) will interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.
Um… The AG and President will interpret the law? That’s not what they’re supposed to do, right? The AG is supposed to enforce the law, not interpret it. Isn’t that someone else’s job? Like the courts? He can’t just declare that he can do that, right?
Using top-down processing, depending on the filters you have formed in your consciousness, will inform you about what this EO actually means. In context, Trump seems to want to keep himself out of jail really, really badly. A Supreme Court ruling placed presidents above the law, saying that they can’t be prosecuted for official acts they took while in office. What are official acts? Apparently whatever Trump does while in office. The subtext implies he doesn’t believe anyone but him and the AG that he put in place are capable of interpreting the law, which sounds a lot like what an authoritarian tyrant would say.
If you only take what Trump says at face value, then our horrible country will be great again if we just do everything he wants, forever. Please, conveniently ignore the fact that he’s lied more than probably anyone in existence.
The most insane thing to me is that this particular EO wasn’t front page news. I found it on Reddit. (So I guess doomscrolling did something good in this case.) I’ve been sending my concerns about this to all of my representatives and so far haven’t gotten any responses, probably because they’re swamped with angry calls about everything else… and this other guy, too.
To add on to all of this, it’s quickly becoming harder and harder to tell what’s true and what isn’t. The most popular news outlets are biased, one way or the other. People on opposite sides of the political spectrum can’t even agree on what is real. AI is getting better at fooling the eye and ear. Anyone can make a video of the Obama family eating babies at Thanksgiving dinner and somebody out there will believe it. As of 2016, 82% of middle school kids can't tell the difference between an ad and a news article. Those kids are adults now, and I assume they’re still not a whole lot better at it, either. We’re doing a very bad job teaching our kids, and ourselves, how to discern truth from lies, and the result is that everything blends together into “it could be true because I think it sounds true.” We’re all guilty of this, not just conservatives or liberals. All of us.
We’re quickly becoming desensitized to stuff we shouldn’t be. We wonder, “what new insanity will I see in the news today?” as we sip our coffee, gasp, frown, and move on to the next thing. Just like we do for every other bit of media that crosses our screens. We cannot normalize this. Yes, there’s too much stuff to care about (if any of it concerns you). Yes, the average person has no way to stop it, except to call representatives and protest. But don’t for a second think that this is supposed to be the new normal. Step back. Unplug. Think about it. Gather research from reputable sources. Read a book all the way through. Watch a movie without pausing it every fifteen minutes. Don’t let yourself skim over the important stuff. Don’t let political, cultural, and social brainrot become the new normal.
If I didn’t alienate you with the political talk then you should
And if you really want to you can
There is a generational element of "such and such is rotting brains." But this scares me.
Being much older than my younger siblings (24 years older than my youngest) I've watched it in real time. I was programming the VCR at 4. My 8-year-old brother thinks the I-Pad is broken if an app crashes. If something doesn't just boot up, it is too much effort. I was told in my teens that the following generation would be programming tech geniuses. I am the only one of 12 that regularly reads books. And out of my family as a whole, it's just my grandmother who reads. I am not sure what happened.
I certainly don't think it is the memes or humor. I've had a chuckle at Skibidi - and I come from a time when Charlie and the Unicorn was the funniest thing (and it is hysterical). We do just get to an age where we don't get the lingo or the humor - it isn't necessarily brain rot.
It's the thought processing and attention span, as you say - that is the concern. I get this uneasy feeling that this is going to have long-lasting and sinister effects on us.
It's wild that we live in a time and place where not reading books is 'normal' - and it is actually kind of weird if you do?
I have loads of adult friends that cannot sit through a film - or if they do they are playing a game on their phone at the same time. This was not always the case!
I won't get into the politics, and I normally steer clear of that content here on Substack, but nice piece.
Good read. Thanks!