What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

(Plato)

I work with children and teenagers in Spain. A few weeks ago, at the end of a class, there were a few minutes left. We had no extra work to do, and to fill up those minutes, we usually played games or watched videos. This time around, I had run out of ideas to fill the time, so I asked my students what they wanted to watch, bear in mind this is a group of six sixteen-year-olds. Asking them what they want to watch and or listen to is never a good idea. On this particular occasion, one asked me to put on a video: “Tralalero Tralala”.

I immediately asked him, What? (No expletives were used to form the question.)

It was at this very moment that I realised just how big the gap had become. I am now in my mid-40s, and I still remember the world before the Internet. I remember the early Internet. I fondly remember the hopeful and optimistic Internet. I then lived through the corporate big business takeover of the Internet. Now, I'm living through an Internet that is changing at such a rapid pace that it is becoming impossible to keep up. I might even be tempted to suggest we may, in fact, be experiencing the age of the Dead Internet.

Generation gaps

I have been working with young learners for 13 years now. And since 2012, I have noticed a dramatic shift in the world they live in. As Plato mentioned two thousand or so years ago, young people are odd and not to be trusted. Moreover, the older you get, the odder they become. Once upon a time, I too was a somewhat odd and untrustworthy young person. Nonetheless, when I was 16, I don't think my oddness was so completely alien to my father. With him growing up with the Stones and the Beatles, my world of Nirvana and Pearl Jam was not all that different. Despite the slightly different clothes and slightly different levels of distortion, it was still just jeans and good old Rock 'n Roll.

Furthermore, I would suggest that were we to go back in time, generational differences would take more time to become pronounced enough to elicit being considered “different”. In fact, I would argue it might even be possible to go far enough back into human history, perhaps even as recently as the Middle Ages, and we could see it taking a very long time indeed for a young person's world to be dramatically different from the world of their predecessors. Go further still, and perhaps generational difference ceases to exist altogether.

Now, however, it feels as if generational differences can be measured in months rather than decades or centuries. With much of that to do with where the next generation lives, that world being the Internet, a land where time works slightly differently than the AFK world those born before the 1990s grew up in.

Brain rot

Let us start with the most pressing question: What is Brain Rot? According to the venerable and highly informative source of Know Your Meme, “Brain Rot is a slang term used to describe content that has little to no artistic, educational or substantive value, painting it as having a negative impact on the viewer and thus leading to the degradation and "rot" of their brain.”

The story of Brain Rot runs deep into Internet lore. It finds itself intertwining with many aspects of Internet culture: cinema, television, memes, and of course, video games. With the now-famous line “you have contracted Brain Rot” spilling over from Skyrim and into the real world. Of course, in the age of the Internet, all things blur, and reality becomes gradable rather than binary. And from the late 2010s, it snowballed, moving from the fringe regions of the chronically online and moving into its now central locations, to be found everywhere from YouTube to TikTok and beyond.

Which came first: brain rot or the internet?

As a person with a background loosely shaped by studying History, I find this question to be quite useful. In this case, it may seem immediately obvious that yes, the Internet came first. However, ask my father what he thought of Beavis and Butthead back in the 1990's and maybe things become a bit more blurry. The point that I am trying to make is that every generation has had some form of Brain Rot. I am certain that even in Plato's time, there would have been some seemingly degenerative equivalent that the older generation feared and could not or would not understand.

In all likelihood, that has always been the point. Each generation has the culture it gives birth to that says, We are not you. What we are doing is new and different. However, that has never fully and totally been true. Take Punk, for example. Born as a reaction to long-winded Progressive Rock ideals and the Middle Class's privilege of playing with enlightenment, peace, and love that the Hippy ideal offered, Punk was a working-class middle finger raised against such frivolity. Yet it was still just Rock 'n Roll, with jeans and guitars. It was still just the younger generation going in the imaginary opposite direction of their elders. But that direction was still defined by the direction their elders had originally taken.

This generation of Brain Rot is both the same and different. While most popular culture trends of the latter half of the 20th Century were in some way shaped by drugs, be it alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, or something else, this iteration of Brain Rot is the drug.

Consumer capitalism and its marriage to the Internet

They’re coming for every second of your life. They’re not even doing it consciously. It’s because these companies like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, and everything, they went public, they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based on growth. We used to colonize land. … They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life.

(Bo Burnham)

Clicks make money. This simple fact has had significant consequences on so many different forms of modern life. Education, entertainment, politics, and even religion have adapted to a post-Internet reality. While it goes without saying that Capitalism had already started this transformation long before we so happily moved every aspect of our lives online, the Internet has taken it one massive step forward. In this age, psychologists and neurologists have been employed by large Social Media corporations to figure out what exactly is the best way to “colonise every minute of your life”.

And the most common method is to keep your eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible. Clicks make money. Rage and fear drive clicks, and dopamine, too. Like a hamster on a wheel with an opiate drip. Driving us spinning and spinning to no destination at all. The older generation has found itself equally negatively affected by this; just look at Brexit, look at Trump. These two things are very much intended consequences of organisations such as Cambridge Analytica, which looked to hack what Meta and other Social Media organisations naively used merely to advertise and sell products. Clicks make money very quickly and easily became clicks can make governments.

Content vs creativity

This changed everything. Art died, and in its place, Content was born. The cynical employment of creativity in pursuit of “clout” and wealth. Clicks came to define culture.

Facebook became the domain of the Older Generation, and newer social media spaces became the spaces of the Younger Generation. And Brain Rot media, fast-paced, easy-to-consume mash-ups of media, cut up, distorted, and reinterpreted so that they got it, and if you didn't, it's because you're too old, or you're not in the inside group. Two easily definable groups are consequently created: those who don't know and those who do.

However, despite all of this, this was still a human endeavour. Human content creators and human consumers. Mostly. I think.

What comes next is completely different, in my opinion. And that brings me to Italian Brain Rot Animals.

Italian brain rot: what is it and where do we go from here?

Glocalisation is the next step in globalization. Take hip hop, for example: birthed in New York, it went truly global in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and then you could go anywhere on earth and hear hip hop in the local language, talking about local issues. Brain Rot is the same. Part pure stupidity in the same vein as Beavis and Butthead. But then, other times, it is powerfully political. And political views from both political extremes, both extreme Right and the extreme Left. First, it came from the USA, but quickly it became localised. And different variants of it would then go global, and then, in turn, localised once more.

It should therefore come as no surprise that, as Brain Rot has gone viral, it has picked up a local spin. And one of those spins has been Italian Brain Rot Animals. AI generated images of an animal mixed with some mechanical or inanimate object. A back story is then created for the hybrid, which is then spoken over the video by an AI-generated voice. Common sound devices, free to use music that is used to set a tone for a thriller or a conspiracy, is used along with overly used graphic explosions. It is truly, truly quite bizarre. Not only is it quite bizarre, it is equally Post Modern, in that it reappropriates what has already been made, and reinterprets it to be used as a lens to see the here and now.

Take, for example, Bombardino Crocodilo, one of the most popular examples of Italian Brain Rot. It is an amalgamation of a crocodile and a bomber. In the video, an AI-generated voice says the following:

Bombardino Crocodilo, a fucking flying alligator, who flies and bombs children in Gaza and Palestine. He doesn't believe in Allah, and he loves bombs. He feeds on the spirit of your mother. And if you translated all that, then you’re an asshole. Don’t break the joke, bitch.

It is an inside joke. And if you don't get it, you're not supposed to. If you need tools to understand, you break it. You are not allowed in, and you probably never were. This is not for you.

It goes without saying, the content is not funny. And making light of the current situation in Palestine is problematic, to say the least. However, when my 10-year-old students in Spain watch this video, or gleefully laugh at the fact that I, a man in his mid-40s, do not get the joke, they don't think as deeply about this as I have done. It is just a stupid crocodile/bomber hybrid with silly noises that may or may not be Italian.

Conclusion

Warnings regarding Brain Rot and the effect it is having on the next generation are becoming more widely publicised, but just as refutations to the misinformation spread on Facebook might take a lifetime to undo any damage, much of this is likely to be too little, too late. After all, look at the generations raised on Beavis and Butthead, South Park, the Simpsons or even Shakespeare. They all turned out quite disastrously.

The Internet has reached a stage where it is doing exactly what it has been designed to do by Consumer Capital. If panem et circenses was opium, this is heroin. This is the dial turned up well past 11. Yet, and this is something important to understand, there is no going back. There is no undoing this. Because what comes next may be far, far worse.

As mentioned with the description of Brain Rot, this was done by human agency. How much human agency is required when the images are AI-generated, the writing is AI-generated, the voice-over, and so on? This is far beyond AI feeding off of humans as a data set, this is roles reversed. This is now humans feeding off of AI-generated data. And once that line has been crossed, there is no uncrossing it.

Finally, are we conditioning AI thought experiments using the youngest generation as thought guinea pigs?

I don't know.

All I know is, as a father of a two year old child, I am more and more considering buying a plot of land, with no electricity, no internet, no smart phones and no AI, and just burying my head in the sand and hoping my child never feels the need to look over the fence to see what's going on outside.