A deep dive into ‘brainrot’
A layering of cultural references, images, sounds, and songs into incoherent, avant-garde flashing messes has become one of the most popular genres of short-form content today. Often labelled as ‘brainrot,’ ‘lobotomy-core,’ or ‘sludge’ content, this bizarre media seems to have encapsulated Gen-Z’s generation-specific disorientation, born out of their pioneering existence within an era of digital capitalism.
It might be a clip from a movie, a content creator, or a viral video, appearing to play out normally before things break down. Suddenly, the audio glitches or pauses; a celebrity is briefly flashed on screen, or a culturally significant, often memed phrase or word triggers a cascading hell of glitching screams, synths and industrial sounds played over warped sequences of brain scans, ‘cursed images’, and digital decay. A character from an unrelated video game may become roughly overlaid onto the screen, while the theme song from an early-2000s reality show is played, and an ad for multiple sclerosis treatment appears sideways.
The style is something I call post-détournement — a chaotic, unconscious reincarnation of the radical media sabotage most famously practised and theorised by the 1950s revolutionary movement: The Situationist International. To the situationists, détournement referred roughly to the rerouting, hijacking, or more directly, the “subversion” of existing artistic elements within a capitalist context, repurposed into a new composition that disrupts and uncovers the hidden nature of its original: A Marlboro billboard graffitied and rearranged to say “It’s a bore” or a film critiquing mainstream media, created entirely through repurposed Hollywood films, newsreels, commercials, and propaganda.
The rebirth of détournement signifies Gen-Z’s unique position in a stage of digital late capitalism and hyper-consumption, one saturated with new kinds of commodities, marketing and separation. The videos exist as revolts to these developments, instinctive responses to the suffocating weight of ‘cyber consumption’ that has subtly terraformed our social relations, expectations, and daily life.
A major difference in ‘brainrot’s’ reincarnated contemporary revolt is the unique conditions it responds to and arises from. By hijacking TV and movie clips, celebrity news, and Instagram slop, post-détournement reveals the obvious subject of revolt to be the incessant noise of the digital sphere. It goes without saying that this noise — the endless scrolling of short-form content, the constant background playing of YouTube or a thousand indistinguishable braindead podcasters —has consumed Gen-Z’s existence, increasingly relegating social life to the online realm. The accompanying isolation, alienation and amnesia — with hours of media consumption you’re unable to recall a single thing from — is deeply understood and captured by this content’s natural attempts to both parody and escape it.
The media forms then aren’t just random, odd evolutions in humour or art or some new quirk of the younger generation, as many see it, but a deeply human revolt to our rapidly shifting existence. Videos will often explicitly tell the viewer to “wake up”, that “we’re in hell”, or “this is hell.” Their redirections are one of the few resources of counter-propaganda we can utilise to re-cement humanity in this digital-capitalist age.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
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Gen-Z’s Post-Détournement
A deep dive into ‘brainrot’
A layering of cultural references, images, sounds, and songs into incoherent, avant-garde flashing messes has become one of the most popular genres of short-form content today. Often labelled as ‘brainrot,’ ‘lobotomy-core,’ or ‘sludge’ content, this bizarre media seems to have encapsulated Gen-Z’s generation-specific disorientation, born out of their pioneering existence within an era of digital capitalism.
It might be a clip from a movie, a content creator, or a viral video, appearing to play out normally before things break down. Suddenly, the audio glitches or pauses; a celebrity is briefly flashed on screen, or a culturally significant, often memed phrase or word triggers a cascading hell of glitching screams, synths and industrial sounds played over warped sequences of brain scans, ‘cursed images’, and digital decay. A character from an unrelated video game may become roughly overlaid onto the screen, while the theme song from an early-2000s reality show is played, and an ad for multiple sclerosis treatment appears sideways.
The style is something I call post-détournement — a chaotic, unconscious reincarnation of the radical media sabotage most famously practised and theorised by the 1950s revolutionary movement: The Situationist International. To the situationists, détournement referred roughly to the rerouting, hijacking, or more directly, the “subversion” of existing artistic elements within a capitalist context, repurposed into a new composition that disrupts and uncovers the hidden nature of its original: A Marlboro billboard graffitied and rearranged to say “It’s a bore” or a film critiquing mainstream media, created entirely through repurposed Hollywood films, newsreels, commercials, and propaganda.
The rebirth of détournement signifies Gen-Z’s unique position in a stage of digital late capitalism and hyper-consumption, one saturated with new kinds of commodities, marketing and separation. The videos exist as revolts to these developments, instinctive responses to the suffocating weight of ‘cyber consumption’ that has subtly terraformed our social relations, expectations, and daily life.
A major difference in ‘brainrot’s’ reincarnated contemporary revolt is the unique conditions it responds to and arises from. By hijacking TV and movie clips, celebrity news, and Instagram slop, post-détournement reveals the obvious subject of revolt to be the incessant noise of the digital sphere. It goes without saying that this noise — the endless scrolling of short-form content, the constant background playing of YouTube or a thousand indistinguishable braindead podcasters —has consumed Gen-Z’s existence, increasingly relegating social life to the online realm. The accompanying isolation, alienation and amnesia — with hours of media consumption you’re unable to recall a single thing from — is deeply understood and captured by this content’s natural attempts to both parody and escape it.
The media forms then aren’t just random, odd evolutions in humour or art or some new quirk of the younger generation, as many see it, but a deeply human revolt to our rapidly shifting existence. Videos will often explicitly tell the viewer to “wake up”, that “we’re in hell”, or “this is hell.” Their redirections are one of the few resources of counter-propaganda we can utilise to re-cement humanity in this digital-capitalist age.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
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