Advertisement
In 1965, Bob Dylan’s “115th Dream” moves from the Mayflower to Captain Arab and ends with meeting a man called Columbus to ask why he doesn’t drive a truck. Don’t know what it means? That’s the point! That same year, in Leeds, Glen Baxter was pairing cartoons with witty, absurdist captions—like a cowboy in chaps facing a blank canvas with the caption, “It was Tom’s first brush with modernism.”
Among other examples, Dylan’s song and Baxter’s cartoon marked a new wave of literary nonsense, where the masses began to praise the inanity in works by their beloved artists. The mood of the time—influenced by events such as the cruel absurdism of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Malcolm X, and the violence that met the Selma to Montgomery marches on one hand, and the market introduction of SpaghettiOs and the Pillsbury Doughboy on the other—was chaotic. The news, previously narrativized and logical, began to break down into something nonsensical. And art reflected this growing shift.
Now, 60 years later, all logic has evaporated into server clouds, the institutions of education are dying, and the “news” doesn’t mean much. In the trenches of the 2020s, what reflects this?
The answer to this question may lie in Oxford University Press’s 2024 “Word of the Year”: “brain rot” (often stylized as “brainrot” or “brain-rot”). Though the definitions of brain rot vary wildly—a hint in and of itself to the fluidity of the term—the strained consensus agrees that brain rot refers to “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
As Oxford University Press notes, the earliest mention of brain rot was found in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the well-known 1854 book about Thoreau’s rejection of contemporary city life in favor of radical pastoralism. Thoreau writes, “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” For the press office at Oxford University Press, the “brain-rot” Thoreau speaks of is “society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favor of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.” It is the same criticism levied against contemporary brain rot—an accusation that the pleasures of silly scrolling reveal mental rot in users.
Brain rot memes are a more commonly encountered symptom of the larger structure. These memes can be textual or visual, characterized by a confusing yet catchy self-aware idiocy that is indicative of the zeitgeist. When Dylan and Baxter were working in the much older tradition of literary nonsense, they used confusion itself as the joke. That confusion has rarely been harmless: It’s historically been a way to mock and challenge those in power. Can our brain rot follow in this tradition?
The illustrations of Glen Baxter, which pioneered the placement of text completely disconnected from the image at hand, offer the closest analogue to contemporary brain rot. While unhappily stumbling through a university education, Baxter found comfort in “the clandestine, warm embrace of Dada and Surrealism,” movements that would go on to become central influences in his work. The artistic progression of Baxter’s work offers a roadmap to understanding contemporary brain rot. Baxter and contemporary memes share text-to-image structure, laughless humor, and an innate sense of a breakdown of words and meanings, but the latter lacks a canonical tag. We’re left with “brain rot.” Yet what we see online, in form, meaning, and consumption, is reminiscent of postmodern literary nonsense. Baxter’s work was celebrated, a favorite of the highbrow yet casual intellectualism of The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, but brain rot has yet to be understood critically. Lacking such byline prestige, contemporary brain rot rarely gets the same appreciation.
One brain rot offender—and perhaps the crudest example of all—is Gen Alpha’s “skibidi.” Writing for The New Yorker on the term, Jessica Winter notes, “‘skibidi’ has no fixed meaning or syntactic function—or, at least, none that a person born in the twentieth century could readily pinpoint. ‘Skibidi’ could be an adjective, an interjection, an exclamation, a perseveration.” The fluid nonsensicality is, of course, the point. Most critical observers of brain rot have been clouded by a sense of weary danger at digital decay over cognitive and linguistic abilities. For Winter, brain rot is a term “enfolding the psychological and cognitive decay wrought by screen addiction, the bacteria-like content that feeds the addiction, and the argot of a generation for whom much of this content is made.” Such assessments of decay are perhaps too hasty and reductive, ignoring the ways that brain rot can be a form of resistance.
Nonsense, in other words, has always used stupidity as cover for critique. When we participate in brain rot, as a watcher or creator, who plays the role of those elite poets, and who is the butt of the joke?
To better understand brain rot’s political utility, we might locate it as a part of a broader tradition of literary nonsense. Literary nonsense subverts logical reasoning and grammatical convention, disregarding punchlines for microhumors. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” with its fiendishly impish opening of “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” is literary nonsense. So is much of Dr. Seuss. The antilogic of literary nonsense underscores much of the experience of being online, subject to a stream of disconnected and unreliable information and lacking the linearity of a narrative. The nonsensicality of textual brain rot, in other words, isn’t new—it just has an inflated scale in the digital age, and worse marketing.
The lasting—and overwhelmingly political—legacy of literary nonsense might provide a clue as to the future of brain rot. The nomenclature of nonsense literature is perhaps misleading; the use of “nonsense” is more often than not a ploy on the serious literature of the period—the work rooted in “sense.” In a book about the literary nonsense of 17th-century English poets, Noel Malcolm provides the cleanest understanding of literary nonsense that I have encountered, writing, “It is … a literary genre with a particular history or histories, developed by individual poets and possessing a peculiarly close relationship—largely a parodic one—to the ‘high’ literary conventions of its day.” For Malcolm, literary nonsense has always been a reaction to culture. Malcolm’s poets weren’t just mocking bad prose, but rather, mocking the class and institutions of England that decided which prose counted as serious in the first place. Nonsense, in other words, has always used stupidity as cover for critique. When we participate in brain rot, as a watcher or creator, who plays the role of those elite poets, and who is the butt of the joke?
Despite the enduring belief that literary nonsense is primarily directed toward children—an idea that has its roots in the popularity of Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss—literary nonsense has historically been weaponized by the masses, always under the guise of stupidity, to effect change. Just as Malcolm’s poets, by mocking the high literature of the time, were also mocking the systems of power that sustained society, the same is true of Bob Dylan’s less easily singable songs. (I am sure protesters would prefer the melodies of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the thrilling chaos of “Tombstone Blues”). In “Tombstone Blues,” the lyrics behind the rock shuffle betray anger toward the Vietnam War, police brutality, and a general sense of alienation from a world that no longer makes any sense. In the song’s flip-flop between legends of the Old West and the oxymoron of a Jezebel nun, Dylan manages to land on a point that cuts deep to the politics of the time, comparing those who sit in power to Jack the Ripper.
Decades later, Dylan’s trick is still in use. In an article on political brain rot, New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka suggests that brain rot is, in fact, a serious expression of political frustration: “We participate in the memes to express our anxiety that whatever is coming next might be even more chaotic than what is already happening.” Although the sentiment was expressed in the context of a Tesla showcase at the White House and the growing absurdity of politicians, Chayka shows one way to wield brain rot to our advantage. One of the examples Chayka employs is memes of JD Vance’s zoomed in, round face—such as this one—that proliferated across social media sites following his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The lack of a single punchline (the meme, without pointing to a single of Vance’s traits, somehow manages to mock them all) and the creative absurdism of the bit makes this brain rot par excellence. It’s an entirely self-replicating genre, increasingly absurd and unmoored from the original joke, expanding for its own sake. That excess, that refusal to resolve into a clean message, lowered the barrier for participation—and subsequent consumption. It seemed as though everyone, excluding the small few mocked, were in on it, creating an “us” versus “them” that felt like the lowest form of mobilization. The stupidity worked; the joke landed and tarnished the image of a head of office. As Chayka puts it, “The images of the Vice-President function more like voodoo dolls, casting vengeful spells from afar.”
We also see the reverse—brain rot as political support rather than disparagement. Two years ago, Narendra Modi won the Indian general election by a narrower margin than any exit polls had predicted; an effective slash to his supposedly infallible image and brand of right-wing, Hindutva politics. During the lead-up to the election, and following the result, videos of “daddy” Rahul Gandhi—his primary opponent from the Congress Party—flooded feeds.
Gandhi walking the length of the country: Daddy. Gandhi fixing a motorcycle: Daddy.
Prior to the election, these videos, along with all other anti-Modi brain rot content, were a mere amusement, a symptom of our collective idiocy. Following the results, they proved that schoolyard taunts and mass mocking can work. Not only do they work, but often, the more catchy and nonsensical the taunt is, the greater its appeal to the chronically online public. Conversely, the movement also showed that brain rot, like Gandhi as daddy, can be used to amass support. Brain rot became a mere tool, and whether the subject was a voodoo doll or an idol depended entirely on the hyperonline public.
Similarly, the summer of 2026 saw one of the largest mass protests in Indian history, helmed by the “Cockroach Janta Party” (translated as the Cockroach People’s Party), directly in response to Chief Justice Surya Kant calling unemployed youth “cockroaches” and “parasites of society” during a court hearing. The party is a product of brain rot, rallying the youth of India who have been labeled lazy, unserious, and overly educated with no employment in sight. By banding together as cockroaches—many people arrived at the protests in full cockroach costumes—the youth mobilized against the residing education minister and channeled real frustration under the guise of a joke. The tactics used by participants of the protests included filming “IRL Subway Surfers” videos as they fled the police, swooping and swerving through the streets of Delhi that echo the famously split-view clips of the mobile game Subway Surfers that typically play alongside brain rot content. Another viral format of the protests included an audio clip from an unreleased Lana Del Rey song with the lyric, “Everybody knows that I’m a good girl officer,” filmed next to police officers before and after they unleashed violence upon the students. The familiar unseriousness attracted more people, and the demands of the protest were met.
That brain rot proliferates under the veneer of kid content to be consumed by Gen Z and Alpha makes it easy to dismiss as entirely meaningless. But even the most absurd brain rot examples contain a kernel of cultural analysis. Skibidi has spawned a life of its own, but it originates in Alexey Gerasimov’s web series about a raging war between toilets with human heads and humanoid with Big Brother–esque surveillance cameras and TVs for heads. The conflict spans across the series, featuring an underground facility for the rebel toilets and secret, infiltrative agents. Even here, the lowly masses—mere toilets!— rise up against the omniscient heads of state. In the unlikeliest of places—the depths of Gen Alpha’s skibidi—brain rot and literary nonsense can be a form of resistance, whether users who scroll through know it or not.
The poets that Malcolm mentions didn’t set out to topple systems of power; in fact, many of them came from elite backgrounds and were pals with the royal family. Yet in their writing, under the disguise of jest, they levied senselessness to scratch away at the symbols of authority around them, showing that their nonsense literature was only a reflection of the stupidity they saw around them. And when we engage with brain rot, perhaps it is indicative of larger, rotten structures we see around us—a flaw not in ourselves, but in the world we have inherited. 
