Brain rot and toilet videos

Michael Cook has a timely Mercator piece on the Pope’s antidote to brain rot caused by excessive use of social media.

The Pope has an antidote to ‘brain rot’

The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “brain rot” as its word of the year. As the Christmas holidays approach, other dictionaries and publications have nominated their own neologisms. The Collins English Dictionary chose “brat”, which Kamala Harris was apparently. I still don’t know what it means. The Macquarie Dictionary, the leading Australian dictionary, chose “enshittification”, which confirms British stereotypes about Aussie yobbos. The Economist chose “kakistocracy’, the rule of the worst, which, it says, fits President Trump’s cabinet nominees.

The others will fade, but brain rot is here to stay. It refers to the intellectual decay caused by overuse of social media, video gaming, doom-scrolling, zombie-scrolling, and so on. If you want to research the area further, check out the fabulously popular Skibidi Toilet videos, about animated toilets with talking heads trying to take over the world.

Not the the Pope is a sound guide to modern fads and fashions, but the whole piece is worth reading as we contemplate rather obvious cases of brain rot in our governing class. Or ethical rot, it isn’t always easy to spot the difference.

After his reflections on literature earlier this year, the Pope turned to the study of history. Again, he emphasised the need for depth – we study history not to accumulate facts for trivial pursuit but to know ourselves and our societies better.

He introduces a useful distinction. Internet brain rot is diachronic or horizontal– concerned only with the here and now. But the human spirit needs to be synchronic, vertical, – looking to the past and the future. “No one can truly know their deepest identity, or what they wish to be in the future, without attending to the bonds that link them to preceding generations,” he writes.

Essentially Pope Francis is saying that control of smartphones is a moral crisis. If we fail to help the emerging generation conquer brain rot, we will have a lot to answer for. Society will be run by post-literate morons who grew up watching Skibidi Toilet videos.