It seems like Netflix gives us everything, but it only exacerbates our brain fog. It has become an immense waste container full where, it’s not that you can’t find a suggestive title, it’s that you can’t search
It doesn’t just happen to you. Mental confusion, a feeling of lethargy, and the inability to focus on a task are signs of cognitive impairment that are more widespread than it seems. That is why the Oxford Dictionary has chosen ‘brain rot’ (“brain rot”) as word of the year. There are days I can almost feel my brain softening. If I squeeze it with my finger it sinks like a rotten potato.
Rotten potatoes cannot be eaten. The rotten brain cannot be used. I can quickly think of at least five things that break down when the brain does:
- Thinking critically (that feeling of no longer knowing whether something is real or invented).
- Our relationships with others (being with someone without being there, looking at unimportant things on the phone).
- Virtual public spaces (wandering through networks where we only see hate and falsehoods).
- Our approach to culture (without expecting it to elevate us, but rather to lull us to sleep and dispel insomnia).
- The ability to enjoy leisure (without the obligations imposed by FoMO syndrome, the fear of missing out).
I want to focus on the last two, because the abundance of cultural products can mislead us regarding their flowering. An example: more films are being made, more accessible and at better prices than ever. Willy Staley calculated recently in The New York Times that, by watching Netflix content at a rate of three hours a day (the average consumption of an American), it would take a person 29 years to consume the current catalog. It seems like Netflix gives us everything, but it only exacerbates our brain fog. It has become an immense overflowing waste container where, it is not that you cannot find a suggestive title, it is that you cannot search. For its owners, however, everything is fine, because it is a gigantic money-making machine.
Art and culture serve to give meaning to the experience. Since the technology industries have assaulted culture, it has stopped fulfilling that function. In the attention economy, cultural products have value to the extent that they can be ‘monetized’ (another word). It is not that it is perverse to want to sell a film, a text or a piece of music on any digital platform. It’s not about the content itself either: the digital world is full of great movies, texts, music or podcasts. The softening of the brain has to do with the exhaustion of our attention. We are mentally stretched and yet we waste our free time swiping through our TL: jumping from one video to another, chaining interruptions, inundated with content that means nothing. Networks and platforms have flattened our leisure.
Why brain rot could be good news? Because being aware of it constitutes the essential starting point. And because the brain is a plastic organ. The traces left by the swill can be erased. The neural pathways of daze can be unstepped, so that fresh grass can grow again. All this is reversible. We must value our attention for what it is: the most valuable thing we have. In the same way that we can regain the shape of our muscles after a few years without exercising, we can green the brain. It’s about starting to exercise it. It is not easy, but we have to try: choose stimuli that make us think instead of sinking into stupor; that bring us closer to others, instead of filling us with hatred, that induce us to talk with others instead of isolating us.
Words tell us a lot about the moment we live in. It can’t be a coincidence that Australia’s oldest dictionary, Macquarie, has chosen “enmerdar” as its word of the year (‘enshittification‘). If we think about everything that has rotted, from Twitter to political conversation, we will see that it corresponds to the food we give our brains to keep it rotting.
#brains #rotted #good #news
