The Opposite of Brainrot

Universal dislike of slop and brainrot creates an opportunity to push back against bad corporate art writ large and create communities of aesthetic cultivation.

The word “brainrot” usefully combines AI slop, weird short-form content generated by humans, and the mental degradation that comes from consuming it. We should use the broadness of this concept to wage a counteroffensive to not only free ourselves from short-form video feeds but also reject the media that laid the cultural groundwork for it. I will use Marvel movies as a metonym for focus-grouped corporate art that disdains its audience, but feel free to mentally sub in Real Housewives, Cocomelon, etc.

Good critics over the last century (1920s, 1980s, 2010s) have made cases against inane media that I won’t improve on. What’s new is that current algorithmic media is so horrific that you can make these arguments without sounding like (as much of) a snob. It’s obvious that harm is being done to us; slop can’t be defended as a benign expression of different tastes like Marvel movies can.

So can we push back against Marvel movies while pushing back against slop? Most people agree that scrolling through AI-generated videos of old ladies with rocks destroying glass bridges is harmful to an individual’s attention span and to society’s collective aesthetics. It will be harder to make the case against Marvel movies, but it’s all just a matter of how tight the optimization loop is. The Meta Vibes app is 100% slop, 100% optimization loop. A human-created “satisfying” video in a TikTok feed has a human in the loop, but it’s mostly the human giving the algorithm what it wants. Marvel movies have a lot of humans involved and a looser optimization loop, but they operate on the same principles.

As I write the above, it’s clear that anti-snob reflexes are just too strong to wage a frontal assault. To be clear, just like I don’t think it’s a moral failing to be overweight, I don’t think it’s a moral failing to be brainrotted. Trillion dollar companies are precision engineering both short-form video feeds and Doritos to make us this way. But to avoid coming at people directly, we’ll have to be more subtle and argue for active aesthetic self-cultivation instead of against Marvel movies. We all know our brains are rotting, so we can make book clubs and art nights to unrot oursevles. We can make reading dense novels or trying challenging music aspirational in the way that running 5Ks is aspirational.

It would help if we had a snappy name for the opposite of brainrot. “Active aesthetic self-cultivation” will not catch on. If you have a good name for this, please let me know.