On brain rot

A thoughtful essay by Mahika Dhar in Public Books on brain rot as political resistance. Please read it.

I want to preface this by saying I could be wrong. This might well be a misreading of her piece. But I came away with a small confusion, and I think it’s worth sitting with.

A little mental exercise: replace “brain rot” with “satire” throughout the essay. A lot of the meaning still holds. That makes me wonder if there’s a subtle reframing going on. I don’t want to make the mistake of suggesting the author doesn’t know what she’s doing. Right at the outset she points to how fluid the term is, how it can hold a whole lot of meanings. But if you take brain rot in its popular sense, on its own terms, it’s vacuous content. Plain nonsense. Not the nonsense of Dylan, or of the poets who used it to poke power in the eye. Just drivel. (And I say this not as one of those hand-wavy critics lamenting the decline of literary culture. That’s not my point at all.)

That raises the question of who exactly Mahika means when she says brain rot. It seems to me there are three parties: the people who produce it, the people who consume it, and the people who reuse it. I think the reusers are what she’s really getting at, and it’s a brilliant point. Even as I write this, the Cockroach Janta Party is back at it, demanding the Chief Election Commissioner resign over the SIR controversy. You can see the same playbook: taking what would otherwise be throwaway brain rot and using it to drive home a political point.

But treating all brain rot as the same doesn’t seem quite apt to me. Is all brain rot nonsense? Is all nonsense brain rot? And if there’s a sharper point embedded in a piece of brain rot, is it still brain rot? Or has it become satire, sarcasm, absurdist commentary?

Take the ur-example of satire, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, where he suggests in a surgical deadpan that the Irish poor sell their children as food for the rich. Run it through the brain rot test. Is it brain rot, or is it satire?

Maybe this is all semantic yogasana on my part, and it obscures Mahika’s actual point: that brain rot works as a tool for saying serious things about power. Fair enough. But elevating all brain rot to the same level risks, paradoxically, flattening the very many meanings of the word she points to at the start. You could just as easily swap “brain rot” for “slop” in a lot of cases. What’s brain rot to one man is slop to another.

Having said all of this, I think the important point Mahika makes still stands, and it’s worth appreciating in full: that brain rot, done well, can be appropriated to speak back to power. It’s an underrated point, and not many people have made it. Kudos to Mahika for seeing past the absolutist readings and moving (delving, wink wink) into the nuance.

In a way, it’s a new linguistic development, if you think about it. I think we’re past the age of manifestos and polemics, that highly intellectualized, Europeanized mode of protest and speaking back. Memes, brain rot, slop have become tools in the linguistic toolkit of a new generation, used to raise grievances, to ask for what’s due, to poke power in the eye. In 2026, a good brain rot meme, used well, can do more than a ten-page manifesto.

Is this for the good or the bad? I honestly don’t know. And here I must confess I might sound like just another person with a generational gripe, but that’s not where I’m coming from. I just don’t have a good sense of how this plays out.