Brain Rot and Blue Skies

2024’s Word of the Year augurs the beginning of the end for legacy social media

It seems the Oxford Dictionary has named “Brain Rot” its Word of the Year for 2024.

As a barometer for how we’re all feeling about our lives on the internet right now, it feels like they nailed it. And what more apt a way to close out a year in which much of the American electorate became existentially disconnected from reality, and the darkest, dankest, deepest corners of the internet’s festering conspiracy machine emerged as the new de facto source of political power in the country. Brain rot indeed.

The term prevailed against a handful of worthy contenders, of which at least two — “dynamic pricing,” and “slop” — similarly speak to the terminal deterioration of our collective online experience as we peer across the grim algorithmic landscape at the end of 2024. You might say there’s a zeitgeist emerging here.

“Brain rot,” as imagined by DALL-E

Its rise, Oxford explains, comes “amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content.”

“In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.”

Brain rot’s first use goes back quite a bit, all the way to Henry David Thoreau’s monumental transcendentalist essay Walden in 1854. But, as Oxford Press explains, it’s taken on new meaning and significance in the digital age, especially over the past year, gaining huge traction on social media platforms, particularly but not surprisingly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha on TikTok.

There’s an undeniable irony, of course, in the fact that the popularity of the term itself is a phenomenon born of the very digital spaces responsible for creating and perpetuating the effect it describes. Such is the funhouse-mirror metalogic of online ecosystems anymore; it’s the internet, all the way down, don’t you see.

The Oxford Dictionary isn’t the sole arbiter of the zeitgeisty vernacular, of course, only the most prestigious. As it happens, The Macquarie Dictionary, whose purview is Australian English, this year selected “enshittification” as its own word of the year. (For what it’s worth, 2024 is only the third time that Macquarie’s People’s Choice selection mirrored the Committee’s selection, making this year’s selection something of an alley-oop slam dunk.)

Enshittification, as I’ve written here before, is a deliciously parsimonious term coined by the essayist and speculative fiction author Corey Doctorow to call out the pernicious pathology of late-stage social media platform decay. As Doctorow summarizes it:

“Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.”

Like brain rot, enshittification punches well above its weight in terms of the sheer descriptive power it has to encapsulate what being online felt like for most of us, most of the time, in 2024.

Nor has a word as lip-smackingly sibilant as enshittification (how marvelously it rolls off the tongue, how satisfying the snap of those six syllables, how fine the phonemes it conjures!) restricted itself to the realm of social media. To be enshittified has, in the span of a year, sallied into the popular parlance as an all-purpose term for the spectacular decay of just about any digital service or product due to the unchecked greed, hubris, and/or ignorance of those profiting from it.

Now, I’ll admit, these platforms appear somewhat long in the dying. Still, Doctorow’s point remains — and as we’ve all been reminded many times in the past several weeks, the upstart social media platform Bluesky has had the Mother of all Months, after tens of millions torched their Twitter accounts following the U.S. presidential election, fleeing to what they believe are greener (or at least less MAGA red) pastures elsewhere.

On December 1 Bluesky reached 24 million users, rocketing it to the top of the US App Store and compelling it to quadruple its content moderation team. Even journalists and media brands are decamping in numbers significant enough to be considered an eXodus (fleeing journos are dubbing themselves “Xpats”). This week the more than 295,000 journalists in 44 countries that comprise the European Federation of Journalists announced that they will cease publishing content on X/Twitter from January 20th, 2025, the day Trump retakes office.

In a statement , the EFJ explained it can “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner, Elon Musk, has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda.” The statement continued:

“The social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric. X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies.”

But the mass migration to Bluesky, while small potatoes by the standards of the entrenched legacy social platforms, has been driven by much more than just political disaffectation. It represents one of the broadest and most visible repudiations to date by ordinary users of what is self-evidently a worsening user experience on these increasingly enshittified platforms.

The myriad ways, for example, in which Musk has torpedoed any good faith X/Twitter’s longest adhering users might have given him after he bought it have been well documented. And in just the past few weeks, Musk has elected to kill the block feature, making it easier for creepers to creep and trolls to troll. He’s also now allowing third party companies to train their AI on users’ posts, whether they like it or not. This is textbook enshittification: to hell with the user experience, and for that matter advertisers, too; all that matters is “number go up.”

Bluesky, on the other hand, was created specifically to champion decentralization, privacy, and user control over their own feed, while paying careful attention to user needs and the overall experience of being on the platform.

Facebook, X/Twitter and their ilk exert absolute control over your choices on their platforms, and their tightly guarded algorithms use everything they know about you (which, as Homo Deus author Yuval Noah Harari has observed, vastly exceeds what you know about yourself) to serve up a personalized, curated feed that’s optimized to keep you maximally “engaged,” i.e. scrolling until you drop. This is why you can’t stop looking at your phone, not because you lack “willpower.”

“The mass migration to Bluesky represents one of the broadest and most visible repudiations to date by ordinary users of what is self-evidently a worsening user experience on these increasingly enshittified platforms.”

But Bluesky’s decentralized or “federated” model instead means it’s like a network of interconnected networks. You choose which networks you want to be a part of and simply keep out of the others. It won’t (for now) show you posts from people you don’t follow or groups you’re not part of. The idea is that you’re in control, not the algorithm.

Where X/Twitter now simply empties your wallet to the tune of $8 for a toothless “verification” checkmark, Bluesky has made verification mean something again.

Bluesky also aims eventually to become interoperable so that account holders can interact seamlessly with users on other platforms like Facebook, TikTok or (if they must) X. Of course interoperability, AKA data portability, is anathema to the Big Platforms and their walled gardens, even though it perfectly replicates the way we interact and connect with human beings in our real lives. Imagine, for example, if you could only send texts and calls to people who use the same phone carrier as you, or were prohibited from conversing with friends at your local supermarket who live in a different postal code.

Sure, the big platforms say they want the world to be “more open and connected,” but only if we do so exclusively on their platforms as commodified products in thrall to their advertisers and algorithms.

Brain rot and enshittification’s enshrinement as 2024’s words of the year are a testament to how perfectly they seem to capture a truth that the global public sphere is slowly coming to grok: social media anymore feels like punishment.

Who among us today does not feel worse about themselves and the world, a sense of having been spoonfed, slapped, insulted, and violated, after having spent even a few minutes scrolling the troll-and-bot-infested wastelands of Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, Threads, and the rest of Big Tech’s addictive arsenal of mass distraction? How it started is a far cry indeed from how it’s going.

Writing at Offline Worldwide, Carley Burr puts a cherry on it: “People are waking up—to the wasted time, the constant comparisons, the endless reel of “highlight” moments that feel anything but real. We’re seeing the effects on ourselves, our loved ones, and society at large. And it’s no small thing.”

But the phenomenon of enshittification is hardly exclusive to social media. It’s endemic to platforms of every kind and ken in the attention extraction economy of modern surveillance capitalism — an inevitable outcome of rapacious venture funding, the imperatives of global scale, and a universal business model based on eyeballs and engagement in the service of ad dollars.

There is no such thing as “enough” engagement or profit for the titans of these dystopias, nor for their bonus-chasing senior leadership, or their investors, and least of all for their insatiable shareholders.

Where “customer centricity” was once considered the buzzy hallmark of a great business, the dictates of enshittification require growth at all costs, customer experience be damned. Whatever is required to keep people scrolling, clicking, trrolling, edgelording, rageposting, emoticonning, viewing and “engaging” — whatever will prevent them from looking away for even a moment, that is what the product owners and the engineers and the marketers and the behavioral scientists are on the hook to make happen. Their jobs, and their annual bonuses, depend on it.

Hence: brain rot.

Make no mistake, these are design choices. Let’s please dispense once and for all with the self-serving myth that technologies are somehow neutral. Nothing is neutral. Everything is a design choice. And a choice implies an intent to achieve some desired outcome.

To show a like count or not to show a like count? Each has obvious consequences on the user experience and on retention. Like counts incentivize negative behavior, leading users to chase engagement as a measure of self-worth. Eliminating like counts, on the other hand, shifts creators’ motivation from getting as many likes as possible to putting out content that’s authentic and real.

To include an endless scroll or not? Again, there’s nothing neutral about it; one design choice keeps users on the platform vastly longer. The other allows users to check the time they spend on the platform, giving them greater choice and agency.

To provide a chronological newsfeed based only on direct connections? Or an algorithmically-curated feed that may or may not include posts from your friends, depending on how “engaging” those posts are, and instead stuff it full of amplified misinformation, conspiracy theories and AI slop, fringe groups, posts that are “performing” well elsewhere on the platform, and a tide of bot-generated, dogma-affirming clickbait you never signed up for?

The savvy product manager knows there’s only one answer to all these questions. And even if she were inclined to consider the actual wishes and interests of her users over the demands of the bean-counters that employ her, she’d be faced with the hard truth that the other platforms will not make these user-centered design choices, putting her employer at a distinct disadvantage in a wholly unregulated, dog-eat-dog-eat-customer marketplace.

Brain rot is only the most granular consequence of this cynical shell game. The malignant political environment that’s metastasized in its wake is more abstract but no less destructive to us. As Sam Harris has observed, at the other end of the scale, we’re now facing a crisis of meaning in the developed world.

“Culture has atomized. We’re all on our phones and our laptops, and our digital media experiences are each unique; no one knows what someone else is seeing on some level. There’s been this shattering effect on culture. We need a truly open-ended conversation with eight billion strangers. But what makes that hard to do is an increasing level of political fragmentation, extremism and partisanship borne of our engagement with these new technologies.”

In other words, the very technologies that were heralded as the means by which we might, for the first time in human history, have a truly global public square, have so fragmented and divided us in the service of their insatiable lust for profit, that such a conversation is now nearly impossible for any two strangers to have, much less eight billion.

And yet despite the many ways our online ecosystems have divided and fragmented us in 2024, it seems overwhelming numbers of us this year agreed on one thing: our feelings about being online are tipping over into antipathy.

Landing on a word of the year list does not a cultural harbinger make. But it does provide a tidy window into the collective consciousness. Our private disillusionment is beginning to leak out into the open spaces of the public sphere.

Will “brain rot” and “enshittifcation” become the storied beginnings of a new paradigm for how we now think about the world created by legacy social media platforms? Or will these terms be buried by the algorithms, shunted away into digital memory holes by the very platforms they take to task? Having witnessed the controlled demolition of X/Twitter under its new ownership over the past two years, such a scenario is laughably easy to imagine.

My own sense is that this is the beginning of the end for legacy social media (or is it the end of the beginning?). When the most popular frames of discussion about our online experience shift to playful ways of describing its sheer awfulness, you can bet the rest of the culture is about to shift accordingly. The timing that elevated brain rot, enshittification, slop and the rest to the peak of pop cultural salience — i.e. just as earth-shaking federal antitrust suits against Google, Meta and Amazon are reaching their dramatic denouements — suggests 2025 is going to be a watershed year for the way we think about, and perhaps experience, what it means to be online. Break out the popcorn. Train wreck, dumpster fire, or shitshow, it’s going to be something to behold.