Brain rot

Brain rot names the material and its effect at once: the rapid-fire, absurd short-form content that holds attention without asking anything of you, and the flat, scrolled-out feeling afterwards. Oxford University Press chose it as word of the year in 2024, after usage climbed sharply.

It now gets used two ways. Critics say it as a complaint about the feed. Creators use it as a genre label, and a good deal of the stuff is made on purpose. The phrase is far older than any of this: Thoreau used it in Walden.