Oxford named 'brain rot' the word of the year. Is it an accurate depiction of 2024?

Oxford University Press has announced their word of the year is "brain rot." They define it as "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state," especially in relation to the online content we consume every day.

Today on Commotion, culture writers Rebecca Jennings, Jackson Weaver and Mel Woods join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain what the term's newfound place in history says about the internet in 2024.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Rebecca, there's, I think, an awkwardness to making the jump from translating online culture to normies, to people who don't live in the sludge the way that the rest of us maybe do. Oxford Dictionary people will be like, "Well, actually it was Henry David Thoreau who first used the phrase 'brain rot.'" And he was! He did it in 1854, I think. The quote was, "While England endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not anyone endeavor to cure the brain rot?" Which, valid question. The idea that this phrase has existed for that while, it keeps popping up — there's something different about every generation's version of brain rot. You know, the idea of Saturday morning cartoons is different from watching unboxing videos on YouTube. And so when you get to 2024's version of brain rot, what makes it unique, you think?

Rebecca: It's absolutely the scale of it. We've never had this much stuff being shoved into our timelines and our feeds without us having to go searching for it. I think that's the difference. With Saturday morning cartoons, you're the one that's turning on the TV. You can flip between channels, you're choosing to watch that. You don't really have a ton of options, but you can at least change the channel. Whereas with algorithmic feeds, it just shows you what it thinks you're going to like. These platforms are so good at this now that, on the one side, they know exactly what you want to watch, but at the same time, you have all of these content creators who are really, really good at making videos that have been A/B tested to death. They know exactly when people scroll and when people want to stay.

The scale has gotten so big that there are these people who now teach other people how to create these brain rot empires where you make money from these platforms, whether it's Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok, whatever. They make money directly from the platforms based on the amount of engagement that their content gets. You can make thousands of dollars a month that way. And for a lot of people, for anybody really, that's a ton of money. You can live off of that. And so as long as there's that incentive for people to keep creating these giant brain rot empires, then it will keep being shoved in our faces…. Even if regular users are like, "Why am I feeling like I was in a daze for the past two hours and I don't even know what I was just consuming?" It's good for the attention economy, which is the world we're all living in.

Elamin: Long after the fire has stopped burning, long after all the cities are gone and the grass and the trees take over that detritus of society, I'll be thinking about the phrase "brain rot empire." So thank you for that burden I'm going to be carrying forward in my day.

Jackson, the reason we're talking about this is because the good folks at Oxford English Dictionary were like, "You know what? We shall bestow upon this some kind of recognition." It sort of formalizes the engagement with it. They've been doing this for 20 years. Every year they go, "This will be the word of the year. This is the thing that defines how we've lived this year." What's the methodology behind how you arrive at something like that?

Jackson: Well, I'm going to say it's not maybe as official as an election or something. There's votes from the internet, but also it's decided upon by Oxford English Dictionary, different language dictionaries across the world related to Oxford. It's not them saying this is the best word of the year, or this is the most official sounding word. It's them trying to encapsulate what word best defines the sentiment that has been at the forefront of conversations and discussion and writing of the past year.

Collins's word was "brat." Dictionary.com's was "demure." If you go back to last year, Oxford's was "rizz," and it was "goblin mode" the year before that. These are words that really describe what we're talking about, what we're thinking, similar to how Time magazine does the person of the year. They're not thinking of the best person of the year. Hitler was person of the year in 1938. It's the person that best encapsulates, for better or for worse, what we focussed on. That's the attention economy.

Elamin: Mel, when you look at this year, what does it say to you that the Oxford folks chose "brain rot" as the word of the year?

Mel: I think, for lack of a more nuanced term, this year was weird in a bad way. The vibes crashed.

Elamin: The vibes were off before, but they really— yes.

Mel: And there's various reasons for that. You look at what's happening in Palestine. You look at the American election. You look at these various news cycle items that are big and dark and bad. Let's talk about another year where the news cycle was big and dark and bad: 2020. The difference between this year and 2020 is that 2020 was a collective experience of big and dark and bad. Everybody was able to name the thing and have that "we're all in this together" mentality. So while we retreated online, we also weirdly kind of collectively retreated online and into collective online spaces. Whereas in 2024, we are all just on our own little dissociation islands trying to process what's happening out there…. There's a lot less collective to our experience of 2024, so I think brain rot fits really well for this year because that is that isolated, "I'm alone in my bed, scrolling and trying to feel something.… and I need that because that's the only thing that's keeping me going through all of the horrible things going on right now." And I think that's relatable to a lot of people.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.