I have a tweenager now. Her friends are teenagers. I am learning the wonders of brain rot - there are two Jons in her class, and for simplicity's sake one of them is "Jon" and the other is "Brain rot Jon" because he speaks in memes.

I'm also on a number of questionable discord channels. There are plenty of people there who speak in memes. Here's what I'll say:

The memes stopped being fresh at Gamergate.

Internet discourse used to be a flourishing lab for different forms of expression, a mish-mash of registers, slang, cultural references and in-jokes. But the meme "artists", if you will, either (A) aged out of it or (B) were chased off the Internet by all the bad blood. I'm pretty sure it isn't (A) because Millennials are, as far as I can tell, the biggest abusers of memes and they're still rerunning the greats. The language of memes is the language of "90s kids." Same movies, same TV shows, same time capsule of 'boomerkids refusing to indulge in any culture that wasn't concurrent with their adolescence.

The kids, when they speak in memes, speak in nihilist, meaningless, context-free gifs and images. You don't get a Picard facepalm, you get a cat bopping its head. Doesn't matter what the response is to - it's whatever you like that was in the meme-bank. It's not "I am responding to this question with this discourse" it's "I am responding to this question with this non sequitur."

Which is not to say that the kids are incapable of speaking. It's to say that the medium is more fully the message and the message is "present."

My daughter, barely twelve, said "I've taken to typing out 'right now' and I've never felt so luxe." I think she and her friends are discovering that slang and lingo and injokes and memes are only useful for communication if they contain information - obviously, "rn" and "right now" contain the same amount of information but the latter is at a register that indicates seriousness. I've asked her about "Brain rot Jon" and whether he's nice. Her answer is "yeah, but you can't really talk to him."

If I'm fifteen, and every meme I see is a cultural reference dating to before I'm born, yer damn skippy I'm putting up a bunch of meaningless nihilist bullshit. I'm Skibidi toiletting my way to greatness because /b/ is generations gone and Lowtax is three years dead. If I'm going to stake my claim on the Internet my choices are corner-case splinter-culture memes or pure unfettered nihilism. And nihilism is universal. Especially since you can't use the references you don't know. Memes are now the things you put up on the office wall and they're done by the same people who don't know not to use Comic Sans.

But the end result is you can't talk with them.

I feel like we've built the Tower of Babel and now the best some people can do to express themselves is link to some long-form advertising. Not everyone - out here in the land of richkidz the universal parental rule is "you can talk online to people you know in real life, period" - and no wonder. But the spirit that built early, middle and late Internet communities is hard to find nowadays.

I found Duncan Black on Bsky. It was about a week before someone pointed out that the whole platform was basically a retirement home for early-aughts liberal bloggers. Can you remember when we had bloggers, not influencers?

No one under 25 can.

The argument for memes was that they contained syntax, context, and a rich informational payload for their intended audience. The argument for brain rot is that everyone needs to relax sometimes. So here we are - someone we're not sure if they're a bot or not attempting to participate by linking an hour and a half of advertorial and responding to resistance by typing "robot" into the gifbank and not bothering to learn how to hotlink it.

The biggest trend nobody is talking about is that the majority of people told to touch grass over the past ten years went outside and never came back. The people taking their place? They don't even have the basis of knowledge to know that facts aren't feelings. They don't even have the eloquence to speak in sentences. The Internet was an equalizer, now it's a trap. The ones who will rule the future are the ones who don't even bother with this bullshit because it's fucking pointless.

find'n'replace "shopping" with "talking"