An 11-second video with 257 million views showing a head peeking out of a toilet while singing ‘skibidi dop dop dop yes yes’. Strange edits of JD Vance's face that spread so widely that Vance himself joined in on the joke. The repeated trolling of WNBA games with sex toys. A US president who has floated buying Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, annexing Canada and possibly invading Mexico. The death of a disabled Frenchman on a livestream after 299 hours of violence and sleep deprivation. All of these are recent events that are not directly connected, although they are deeply related. When Delbert Carver, a 23-year-old man, was arrested in connection with the first incident during a WNBA game in Atlanta, he allegedly admitted that throwing dildos onto the court ‘was supposed to be a joke’ and that his intention was ‘to make it go viral’. These are events and content designed to go viral, to capture our attention. The fact is that attention, and not information, is the true currency of the digital age. Our dystopian present is not found in Orwell's 1984, but rather in Huxley's Brave New World and, more specifically, in Infinite Jest. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”–Neil Postman In the 1996 novel by Foster Wallace, there is a film called Infinite Jest or simply The Entertainment. It’s so fascinating that those who watch it lose all interest in anything else, watching it over and over again until they die. The pleasures we choose say a lot about who we are. Brainrot sums up a generation that is fluid in irony but hungry for meaning. Context, details, relevance, reflection—all of that has faded or fragmented, lost in the infinite scroll. It ’s replaced meaning with noise. If you refer to information or entertainment as brainrot, you mean that it is of poor quality and often not true. Reality TV is brainrot. A president who was a reality TV star for 14 years and comes with an insane clown posse of court jesters is lethal brainrot. It's absolute garbage. Although it is quite entertaining garbage.