I was in a suburban convenience store, near London’s outer rim, where the growing city bleeds into nature. A bag of sweets caught my eye, branded as BRAIN ROT. Oxford’s word of the year for 2024, “brain rot” refers to the state induced by scrolling compulsively through the increasingly surreal, incomprehensible content that proliferates in our modern digital environment.
Emblazoned across the candy bag, a menagerie of characters associated with brain rot: chimerical critters, all produced by generative AI, proudly nonsensical, gleefully ugly. Like _Alice in Wonderland_’s Mock Turtle, only more mocking. A pantheon of demigods, perhaps demons, for a godless age — slapped onto a sweetie bag.
Something about seeing these extremely online, aggressively abstract memes infecting my physical reality — and being used to sell me high-sugar treats — made me feel estranged. Another part of me felt excited. Weirdness can be exhilarating.
If part of the joke is that these images aren’t for human consumption (indeed, professedly, they rot our brains), then the punchline must be that we _enjoy_ consuming them anyway. They aren’t art in any traditional sense — for a start, they weren’t created by any individual but bubbled forth from the internet’s froth — but there’s something undeniably _Dada_ going on here. Absurdism, echoing a world that itself seems increasingly illegible and, in an age of AI, ever more structured by nonhuman agencies.
Most flowers cannot reproduce themselves without doting bees, just as digital memes still largely require humans to propagate and evolve. We clearly relish the content, just as bees relish the sugary nectar flowers provide. But just as the sugar-craving bee shapes the flower, so too does the flower sculpt the bee.
They coevolve, and surely something similar happens with us and our digital artifacts. We produce artifacts; in turn, artifacts transform us. After all, hasn’t _art_ itself always been defined as surrender to external forces?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
