loading . . . On Brainrot The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.
But reality tells an entirely different story. Muslims make up less than eight percent of Sweden's population. Non-natives account for less than thirteen percent of Germany. There are problems, certainly, real ones that deserve serious attention, but the online discourse had inflated them into an existential civilizational collapse that simply wasn't happening at the scale imagined.
Erickson's broader point is about what - precisely - has happened to our discourse and our decision-making. The Trump administration, he argues, has been captured by people whose entire education, whose entire worldview, whose entire paradigm of reality itself has been gleaned from Twitter.
This is about something much larger and much more dangerous than partisan politics.
Erickson and I would likely disagree on 90% of the issues that might come up on his podcast. But I think he's 100% on the money when it comes to this - our current epistemic disaster. He is quite accurately describing a phenomenon that has metastasized across the entire information ecosystem, across all political orientations, across geographic boundaries and cultural contexts.
We've entered the era of "brainrot" - though the term itself feels almost too glib // flippant for the scale of our cognitive and cultural crash out. Somewhere in the last decade and a half, something fundamental broke in how human beings process information, form beliefs, and engage with reality. We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses.
I want to be clear from the start that I'm not going to offer you clean answers or a tidy prescription for fixing this. The problem is too diffuse, too entangled with the basic architecture of modern life, too complicit with our own psychological vulnerabilities, too...messy.
What I want to do instead is map the terrain, to try to understand how we got here and what exactly is happening to our collective cognition.
If you wanted to know something about European immigration patterns in, say, 2005, you had a limited set of options. You could read newspaper articles, which were written by journalists who had (theoretically) done research and talked to sources. You could read books or academic papers. You could talk to people who had lived in Europe or studied the topic. Each of these channels had gatekeepers and friction. The journalist's editor, the book publisher, the peer review process, the social cost of saying something wildly wrong to someone's face. These gatekeepers were often flawed, sometimes catastrophically so, but they created an information environment of at least semi-reliability.
The friction mattered more than we realized. When it took effort to publish something or share an opinion widely, people were slightly more careful about what they said. When information moved slowly, there was time for correction, for nuance to emerge, for multiple perspectives to surface before a narrative hardened into conventional wisdom. The gatekeepers could be corrupt or biased or wrong or bloody stupid, but their existence created a different tempo and texture to discourse; and their peers offered a degree of balance.
Then came social media, but more specifically, the evolution of social media into its current form. The early internet forums and blogs were still somewhat curated and protected spaces. You had to actively seek them out, join them, participate in their specific cultures. Facebook initially connected you to people you actually knew. Twitter started as a way to broadcast short updates to followers who had chosen to follow you. But over time, the algorithms changed everything. The platforms discovered that engagement was the metric that mattered, and engagement was maximized not by showing people accurate information or valuable insights, but by showing them things that triggered emotional responses.
The psychology here is straightforward. In fact, it's almost banal in its simplicity. Human beings are not evolved to assess the accuracy of claims in real time. We're evolved to respond quickly to potential threats, to form snap judgments about social situations, to feel strongly about things that affect our status or safety. The algorithm learned to find the content that pushed these buttons. Outrage, fear, moral indignation, tribal allegiance, the feeling that something scandalous or important was happening right now and you needed to know about it. The feed became a IV drip of emotional triggers optimized for keeping you scrolling.
The platforms created a permanent present tense of crisis. There's always something happening, always a new outrage, always a reason to check again. This has a profound effect on cognition. When everything is urgent, nothing is important. When every day brings a new scandal or disaster or revelation, you lose the ability to maintain proportion, to distinguish between the genuinely significant and the merely viral. The platforms flattened all information into an undifferentiated stream of content, where a video of a cat and a report about a terrorist attack and a celebrity feud and a political scandal all flow past in the same endless scroll, all demanding the same quality of attention, all equally real and equally ephemeral.
Context is expensive. Context takes time to establish, space to explain, patience to absorb. A tweet can't contain context. A TikTok video can barely gesture toward it. So information circulates without context, as pure claim or pure emotional appeal. You see a video of a fight on a subway. Is this a random incident, a targeted attack, part of a pattern, completely anomalous? You have no way to know, but the video comes with a caption or a quote-tweet that supplies context, usually tendentious context designed to fit a narrative. The claimed context spreads with the video, becomes inseparable from it in the discourse, even if it's completely wrong.
The Islamification of Europe narrative that Erickson described is a perfect example. There are real videos, real incidents, real problems. A terrorist attack happens, and video circulates. A clash between immigrants and locals gets filmed and shared. A politician says something about integration challenges. Each piece of content is real, but it circulates without the context that would allow you to assess its significance. How many terrorist attacks happen compared to the baseline? How many immigrants are involved in violence compared to the native population? How do these incidents compare to crime rates twenty or fifty years ago? What percentage of the Muslim population in Europe is involved in the behaviors being highlighted?
These questions aren't asked, partly because they're complicated and take research and thought, and partly because asking them feels like you're either defending something that is (to you, at least) indefensible or denying something that is (to you, at least) obvious. The algorithm doesn't reward careful analysis. It rewards hot takes, strong emotions, tribal signaling. So the information environment fills up with isolated incidents presented as patterns, with patterns presented as crises, with crises presented as civilizational collapse. And if you live inside this environment, if you spend hours a day scrolling through this content, it starts to feel real. Your brain is not equipped to distinguish between "I have seen twenty videos of immigrant violence this month" and "immigrant violence is happening at an unprecedented rate." The availability heuristic kicks in. The things you see most are the things that feel most common.
I need to be careful here about false balance. The left has its own versions of this dynamic, its own moral panics amplified by social media, its own tendency to treat isolated incidents as systemic crises. The mechanisms are the same even when the content differs. Spend enough time in progressive Twitter and you'll encounter people who are convinced that a Skynet-esque AI apocalypse is imminent, that we're living in a genocidal state, that half the population wants to murder the other half. Spend time in certain corners of the online left and you'll find people who believe that every social interaction is a minefield of microaggressions, that trauma is ubiquitous, that safety requires constant vigilance against potential harm. These beliefs are not entirely disconnected from reality. There are real problems with AI, real injustices, real harms. But the scale and scope get wildly distorted in the funhouse mirror of social media.
What happens to curiosity in this environment? Genuine curiosity is the impulse to explore something you don't understand, to investigate beyond the first explanation, to entertain multiple possibilities before reaching a conclusion. But curiosity is slow and effortful. It conflicts with the speed of social media discourse. By the time you've investigated something properly, the discourse has moved on. The cycle of viral content is faster than the cycle of understanding. So people stop being curious. They see a claim, they assess whether it fits with their tribal allegiances and prior beliefs, and they either accept it or reject it based on that assessment. The idea of suspending judgment, of saying "I don't know enough about this yet," becomes nearly impossible. Silence is read as complicity, and every topic demands an immediate take.
The death of curiosity brings with it a death of genuine uncertainty. One of the stranger aspects of contemporary discourse is how confident everyone seems about everything. People who have done no research, who have no expertise, who learned about a topic fifteen minutes ago from a viral thread will speak with absolute certainty about complex geopolitical situations, scientific controversies, historical events, legal interpretations. This is an unassailable confidence borne of tribal affiliation. If your side says something is true, it becomes true. If the other side says something, it becomes false. The epistemology collapses into pure red vs blue.
When you encounter the same narratives repeatedly, when you see the same arguments made in the same ways, when you observe the same tribal battle lines drawn over and over, you stop actually thinking about the content. You recognize the pattern and slot it into a pre-existing framework. The actual details become almost irrelevant. What matters is which pattern the story matches.
This is why fact-checking has become so ineffective. Fact-checkers will dutifully point out that a viral claim is false or misleading, provide evidence and context, explain the nuance. And it makes almost no difference. People aren't evaluating claims based on evidence. They're evaluating them based on pattern matching and tribal loyalty. If a false claim fits the pattern, it feels true. If a true claim contradicts the pattern, it feels false. The fact-check itself becomes just another piece of content to be sorted into the pattern, usually as evidence that the mainstream media or the elites or the fact-checkers themselves are biased.
Take any contentious topic and you'll find two completely different realities being constructed by different online communities, each believing their version is obviously correct, each able to point to endless content supporting their view. The content exists in both cases. The videos are real, the quotes are real, the studies are real. But each side has curated a completely different set of content, contextualized it in completely different ways, and arrived at completely opposite conclusions. And because the algorithmic feed shows you more of what you engage with, your view of reality gets continuously reinforced. You see more and more content supporting your existing beliefs, less and less content challenging them.
The echo chamber metaphor is too gentle for what's actually happening. An echo chamber implies you're hearing your own voice reflected back. What social media creates is more like a constantly updating simulation of reality, tailored to confirm your priors. Hearing echoes might be bad enough. But you're living in an increasingly divergent information universe from people in other bubbles. The shared baseline of agreed-upon facts that used to exist, however imperfectly, has fragmented into a thousand different versions of reality, each internally coherent, each mutually incomprehensible to the others.
There's a specific way people talk now that feels like they're not generating thoughts so much as playing back content they've absorbed. You can almost hear the tweet structure in how they speak. Someone makes a point and you think, I've seen that exact formulation before, that exact turn of phrase, that exact argument structure, that memetic cadence. It's not that they're consciously plagiarizing. It's that they've absorbed so much content that their own thinking has started to mimic it. The voice gets flattened into a generic online register.
This happens across the political spectrum. There's a progressive way of talking that sounds like a committee drafted it, full of therapeutic language and academic jargon and carefully calibrated hedges against being "problematic". There's a right-wing way of talking that sounds like a podcast transcript, full of performative contempt and knowing references and shared grievances. There's a centrist way of talking that sounds like a think tank memo. And these ways of talking are becoming more uniform within their respective bubbles, more recognizable, more predictable. People are learning to speak in the language of their chosen discourse community, and that language is increasingly shaped by its viral exemplars.
The regurgitation has a way of infecting...pretty much everything.
And damn near everyone.
I've watched arguments circulate through social media, mutate slightly as they spread, and then get repeated by thousands of people who seem to believe they're articulating their own original thoughts. They're not lying or deliberately copying. They've genuinely internalized the argument to the point where it feels like their own. But track the genealogy and you'll find it originated in a viral thread or a popular podcast or an influential writer, and then spread through the network like a meme, picking up slight variations but maintaining its essential structure.
You'd expect that with billions of people online, with unprecedented access to information, with the ability to find and engage with diverse perspectives, we'd see an explosion of intellect, innovation, new ideas, creative synthesis. Instead, discourse feels stale. The same arguments keep circulating, the same debates keep recurring, the same battle lines keep getting redrawn. Maybe there's innovative thinking happening somewhere, but it's getting drowned out by the sheer volume of repetition.
The relationship people have developed with their feeds is pathological. They describe it in almost medical terms: addiction, compulsion, the inability to stop even when they hate what they're seeing. The negativity bias of human psychology meets the engagement optimization of the algorithm, and the result is people spending hours consuming content that makes them angry, afraid, disgusted, despairing. They know it's making them unhappy. They often say they want to stop. But they can't.
What the doom scrolling does is create a constant state of low-level psychological activation. You're always slightly on edge, always waiting for the next thing, always primed for threat. This is terrible for mental health, obviously, but it's also terrible for cognition. When you're in a state of chronic stress, your brain shifts into a more reactive mode. You become more tribal, more defensive, less capable of nuanced thought. The executive functions that allow for careful reasoning, for updating beliefs based on evidence - these all get suppressed when you're in threat mode.
And the platforms want you in threat mode, at least economically speaking. Threat mode keeps you scrolling. Calm, contemplative, secure people don't engage as much. They log off, go outside, read books, have conversations. The algorithm isn't trying to make you unhappy, exactly, but it's trying to maximize engagement, and unhappiness is engaging. Outrage is engaging. Fear is engaging. The feeling that you need to stay informed about all the terrible things happening is engaging. So the feed learns to show you terrible things.
The blind acceptance Erickson observed in political discourse has become universal. People accept the most improbable claims without question if they come from trusted sources within their bubble. Someone they follow tweets something outrageous, and instead of thinking "wait, is that actually true?" they think "this confirms what I already believed" and share it. The tribal markers have become more important than truth. Is this person on my team? Do they signal the right allegiances? Do they speak the right language? If yes, believe them. If no, dismiss them.
People are simultaneously deeply skeptical and deeply credulous. They're skeptical of anything from the mainstream media, the experts, the institutions, the other tribe. But they're credulous about anything from their own side, no matter how dubious the source, no matter how implausible the claim. They've developed elaborate epistemologies that explain why mainstream sources can't be trusted but random Twitter accounts can be. They talk about doing their own research, but their research consists of finding content that confirms their priors in alternative media spaces.
The mainstream institutions did fail in various ways, did miss important stories, did get things wrong. The Iraq War, the financial crisis, COVID policy mistakes, media bias - there are legitimate reasons to distrust official narratives. But the response hasn't been to develop better standards of evidence or more reliable alternative institutions. The response has been to trust nothing and believe everything simultaneously, to treat all claims as equally valid or invalid based on whether they fit the pattern.
How do you know what's true? What counts as evidence? Who can you trust? These questions used to have rough-and-ready answers that mostly worked. The experts probably know more than you. Multiple independent news sources reporting the same thing probably means it happened. Academic research, whatever its flaws, at least tries to be systematic. These answers are breaking down, and what's replacing them is more fragile, more prone to capture by bad actors, more vulnerable to motivated reasoning.
When you can't agree on basic facts, every political debate, every policy discussion, every social conflict becomes unresolvable because the parties involved are working from incompatible versions of reality. How do you compromise about immigration if one side believes immigrants commit more crime and the other believes they commit less? How do you discuss police reform when people can't agree on whether police killings are increasing or decreasing? How do you talk about climate change when people inhabit completely different evidentiary universes?
Democracy, whatever its many flaws, depends on some shared understanding of the world. You need to agree on what the problems are before you can argue about solutions. You need some common facts to deliberate about. When that common ground disappears, politics becomes purely about power, about whose version of reality gets to be treated as real, about which tribe can impose its understanding on everyone else.
I think this is what frightens me most about brainrot. We're not talking about individuals with distorted perceptions. We're talking about the breakdown of the social processes that allowed large groups of people to coordinate their understanding of the world. The shared reality that undergirded social cooperation is fragmenting into incompatible reality bubbles, each sustained by its own information ecosystem, each increasingly sealed off from the others.
There are moments when the absurdity becomes visible. You see people arguing furiously about something, and you realize that they're not even arguing about the same thing. They've taken the same event or statement and interpreted it in completely opposite ways, so they're essentially conducting parallel arguments past each other. Neither is listening to the other because listening would require a kind of cognitive flexibility that the brainrot has eroded. You'd have to entertain the possibility that your understanding might be wrong, that the other person might have a point, that reality might be more complex than your bubble suggests. But that possibility feels dangerous. It feels like betraying your tribe, like giving ground to the enemy.
Most people seem at least dimly aware that something is wrong. They'll complain about social media, talk about taking breaks, acknowledge that discourse is broken. But then they log back in, scroll through the feed, engage with the same toxic dynamics. The awareness doesn't translate into action, partly because the problem is structural. You can't individually escape something that's reorganizing the entire information environment. You can log off Twitter, but your coworkers are still on it, your friends are still on it, your boss is still on it. The brainrot bleeds into offline spaces. People start talking the way they tweet. Conversations start following social media logic. The patterns of engagement spread.
I wonder if we're watching the formation of something like distinct cognitive cultures, each with its own way of processing information, its own standards of evidence, its own discourse norms. People in one bubble literally think differently from people in another. They attend to different things, weight evidence differently, draw different inferences from the same data. The differences aren't just in beliefs but in the underlying cognitive processes that generate those beliefs.
If that's true, if brainrot is creating fundamentally different styles of cognition across different populations, then we're in for some difficult decades. You can't bridge cognitive differences just by presenting facts or making arguments. The differences run deeper than that. They're about how attention works, how trust operates, how reasoning proceeds. Fixing them would mean something like cognitive rehabilitation at a mass scale, and I have no idea what that would even look like.
From where I'm sitting, the momentum all seems to be in the wrong direction. The platforms are getting better at manipulation, not worse. The incentives point toward more engagement, more division, more reality fragmentation. The political incentives reward polarization. The economic incentives reward sensationalism. The social incentives reward tribal loyalty. Every force seems to be pushing us deeper into our separate bubbles, further from any shared understanding of the world.
The brainrot is seeping into business, into education, into science, into every domain where people need to reason together about the world. Boards of directors are making decisions based on whatever narrative is trending in their information bubble. Teachers are dealing with students whose entire understanding of history or current events comes from TikTok. Scientists find their research being filtered through social media dynamics where complexity dies and only the most extreme interpretations survive.
We built a machine for destroying epistemology, for fragmenting shared reality, for eroding the cognitive capacities that let people think clearly about the world. We built it accidentally, while trying to connect people and share information and make money. We optimized it for engagement without considering what engagement in this form would do to human cognition. And now we're living with the consequences: a global population that's losing its ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, pattern from noise, the significant from the viral.
Brainrot is a genuine civilizational crisis, not a social media problem or a political problem or a youth problem or a boomer problem or any other neat conundrum. We're watching the mass degradation of human cognitive capacity, the fracturing of shared reality, the triumph of pattern matching and tribal loyalty over genuine thought. And we're watching it happen to ourselves, feeling it happen, unable to stop it even as we complain about it.
The future looks like increasingly incompatible reality bubbles, each growing more extreme in its own direction, each less capable of communication with the others. It looks like politics conducted entirely in terms of power, with no shared factual basis for deliberation. It looks like truth becoming an increasingly quaint concept, replaced by tribal narratives and algorithmic rankings. It looks like whole populations whose understanding of the world comes from viral content optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.
That's what brainrot means.
That's what we've done to ourselves.
And I think we're only beginning to understand the implications. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/on-brainrot/
