Of Brain Rot and Enshittification

By Doug Freeman

In their annual attempt to be hip and relevant, the Oxford English Dictionary chose “Brain Rot” as their 2024 Word of the Year. It’s a good choice, all things 2024 considered, and certainly seems to capture the Zeitgeist better than their shortlist of other contenders. 

The official definition that the OED composed for the term is equally inspired: “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. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

Brain Rot is a perfect circle of shit. It is both cause and effect. What causes Brain Rot? Brain Rot. How do you get Brain Rot? From Brain Rot. 

The best part of the OED’s efforts is undoubtedly their etymological work. They have traced the first recorded instance of Brain Rot as having been used by none other than Henry David Thoreau, whiling along on the shores of Walden Pond with nothing better to do than to complain about the pathetic decline in thinking from everyone else: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Public intellectuals, it seems, have always been insufferable bores. 

Brain Rot has, of course, always been with us in one form or another. Even as pearls could not possibly be more tightly clutched about Gen Alpha’s pandemic-propelled regression, I see your “Skibidi Toilet” and raise you Beavis and Butthead screeching “I Am Cornholio.” Every generation recreates culture (including absurdity) for themselves, much to their parents’ horror. 

With all due respect to Brain Rot, though, I think there is a better, though quite related, Word of the Year: “Enshittification.” In fact, Australia’s national wordkeepers, the Macquarie Dictionary, declared Enshittification their winner this year. 

Corey Doctorow first coined the term in a 2022 screed about how bad Amazon has become. Macquarie formalized the definition as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” 

Since its coining, this term has seemingly become increasingly relevant as our experience of everything from Facebook and Twitter/X to Google Search and news media has been utterly and thoroughly enshittified. It’s not just you, these services are becoming unusable — especially compared to their original vision and peak user-experience. 

The Case for Enshittification

There’s a distinct reason why I think Enshittification is a better word of the year than Brain Rot. The latter puts the focus on the user, on us. We’re the ones consuming this low-quality content that is rotting our brains, and that’s our fault. Maybe the failure really is our own inability to turn away from viral rage-inducing clickbait, and our getting sucked into the vortex that is flushing our brain cells down the proverbial skibidi toilet is just the inevitable willingness of our being unserious people. But maybe this is how these systems are designed to work.

Enshittification is of course very related to Brain Rot, but it puts the onus on the systems that uphold, circulate, and, most importantly, profit from Brain Rot. Enshittifcation happens because, in a capitalistic framework, you eventually reach a point where the only way to extract more money is to create a more “efficient” product or service. And if it’s free to use, that experience is going to be even worse. We spent the past decade riding on the digital waves of VC-funded user-growth, and now that we’re either hooked (social media) or traditional alternatives have been eliminated (taxis), this decade is finally bringing the reaping. (We’re the harvest, by the way).

As Doctorow has explained it: “Let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.”

So our Google searches are slathered in ads and increasingly irrelevant results; your Facebook and Instagram feeds want you to be friends with brands; your cell service sucks; any sporting event has become a platform for gambling ads. We can go on forever screaming at clouds. 

2024 has been an especially good year for enshittification. Twitter has devolved so spectacularly behind Elon Musk’s transparently juicing the algorithm as to become an unusable reply-bait factory, a record jump from Doctorow’s step two to step four. The US banned TikTok because another country was actually better at brain rot than we are. And news organizations have shit the bed so badly that Joe Rogan is now our leading public intellectual. 

The most amusing enshittification has been AI platforms like ChatGPT. They have gone through the entire cycle in the past year, from the dizzying hype and catastrophizing of inevitable AGI to the remarkable recognition of just how poor these services and their content are right now. I think we still have many more cycles for AI to go through, but the slop it’s producing right now is not exactly encouraging.  

Not to cut ourselves too much slack, but we’ve created a technology base and digital world where enshittification is the natural process, and brain rot is the result. These systems were intentionally designed (perhaps not at first, but certainly somewhere along the way) to produce precisely the kind of the brain-rotting experiences that they have become. Optimizing for user capitulation, while externalizing any mental health side effects. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

I think about enshittification in terms of Douglas Ruskoff’s notion of “Program or Be Programmed,” which is conveniently receiving a 15th Anniversary revision next year. These services are training us to operate in certain ways, with expectations that they have defined. While that is true of any form of media, it’s imperative that we remain cognizant of what is being valued and prioritized by these platforms and services, and whether they are actually serving our priorities and values. 

The rapid decline of X and rise of Bluesky is a valuable reminder that we do actually have a significant say in the process of enshittification — we do not have to accept what they are selling us. After all, the other side of capitalism is entrepreneurship. So long as we can keep the balance against monopolistic incentives, the cycle of progress can continue. As Doctorow reminds us, the final step in the process of enshittification is that those services ultimately, and mercifully, die.