It’s late at night and I’m gliding from Welsh influencers eating beige processed food to a group of guys bikepacking through India. I watch as a delightful man makes multilayered burritos then Nara Smith whispers a homemade ice cream into existence. Pro-democracy protestors battle water cannons in Georgia, before a London historian shows me the quirks of my hometown.
‘Tis the era of brain rot, which has just been announced as the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year. While “brain rot” might seem to refer specifically to the impact of online content, the phrase was actually coined in 1854 by the writer Henry David Thoreau. Bemoaning society’s slip into stupidity, due to what he saw as a decline in people’s intellect, he said: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
I can see why he was bummed out. All those people reading magazines! And right now, I can see that fear turbo-charged, with people – including me – legitimately scared of what short-form videos might be doing to us, our attention spans, cortisol levels and, yes, our brains. According to research from Opal, an app designed to reduce your screen time, the average Briton spends five hours and six minutes on their phone every day. That sounds about right for me.
And when I stop to think about it, although my analytics tell me that I only spend half of my time engaging with so-called brain rot – short-form videos – the regret bubbles up. Is this really what I’ve done with a whole month of my year? The algorithms have me by the neck – just as they are designed to. As the comedian Bo Burnham put it: “They are now trying to colonise every minute of your life. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone and they could be gathering information to target ads at you.” It’s true, and I’ve spent too many nights being suckered in to the scroll-hole, discovering so much about so little. The most dystopian moments come when I watch as flower-tattooed #vanlife girlies drive to idyllic mountain ranges, just knowing this carefree wanderlust is funded, at least in part, by my own blue-lit eyeballs.
The pace is a concern and harsher, more enforceable time limits are definitely required. If deliberate misinformation could be shut off by these billion dollar publishers that would be nice. But short-form videos aren’t only creating problems, they’re also rushing in to fill voids created by modern life. Many people, especially young people, don’t trust or see themselves in mainstream media. Many people, especially city-dwellers facing extortionate rents, can’t afford to live near their friends anymore, so can’t invite them to pop round in the evening. As for mums up breastfeeding at 3am… what did they even do before Instagram?
In addition, TikTok offers lessons on anything you care to come up with – language, cooking, fashion, history, cleaning, geography, dropshipping, DIY, beauty, politics – in short, sharp busts. I’ve seen every one the inspirational speeches Charli xcx has made during her intro to “Girl, so confusing” while on tour. I’ve learned so much about different cultures and histories. I’ve laughed and laughed at absurd videos of people singing to their lemon head dogs. Where it starts to tip is with the people peeling boiled eggs using nail clippers. Or the AI generated clips of tiny 10ft houses for a man named Little John. Or deliberately gross food videos, like a frozen roast dinner deep fried in gloopy oil, with a flurry of salt poured over the top.
