Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Brainrot

The Edge of Civilization

Lately, bizarrely edited videos have been appearing on short-form video platforms, including TikTok where they often populate the generic “For You” page. These videos are characterized by an editing tendency which presents two unrelated clips side-by-side. One clip often contains emotionally charged and contentious content: a candid video of a public freakout, an embarrassing prank, sexualized (or easily sexualizable) vlogging content, or a controversial take on social issues. The other clip depicts a soothing, sensory experience: items being flattened in a hydraulic press, pimples being popped, colourful cakes being cut, or crafts being produced in stimulating and mesmerizing ways.

Clearly, in what is essentially a multi-tasking viewing experience, a segment of content meant to evoke emotional agitation is combined with another which is meant to soothe and mesmerize. One causes a spike in complex human emotions, the other floods the viewer with the inhuman logic of mathematical repetition and geometric reliability.

Unironically, considering its anti-cerebral nature, the broader category under which this content is classified has been endowed with the title ‘brainrot.’

Such content is often mass-produced and mass-posted by blatant content farms. These ‘farms’ produce content meant to be viewed passively, affectively – felt out by the entrails, rather than glanced at by the eyes, like a form of smooth(-brained) braille for an organ of sight which has yet to develop.

Although it is often condemned as vacuous and degraded, brainrot content has a vital role to play in the economics of attention. It aims to induce habitual viewing – a viewing experience which is gone in 60 seconds, yet which impresses a lasting impulse to keep watching. In this sense, brainrot content – balancing the hysterical excitation and mesmeric negation of stimulus – perpetuates a self-sustaining system of continuous engagement. From the perspective of a platform, brainrot assist in the continuous extraction of user data and (on paper, at least) a statistical affirmation of a platform’s efficiency.

In this way, brainrot is peak digital culture, the logical summit of technologically-facilitated aesthetics. Which should be no surprise, because technology is certainly not synonymous with progress – especially when progress is measured, as it hardly ever is, by human dignity.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud famously pointed out that our technological developments – our prosthetic Godhood – are deeply unfulfilling even as they realize many previously unthinkable conveniences.

According to Freud, all technology begins as an ideal or dream – an “I wish…” which is answered by a material and technical augmentation of our bodies and minds. Technology, in Freud’s analysis, simultaneously tantalizes and fails to fulfill a regressive desire – the desire of continuously meeting one’s instinctual demands, with no impulse going unfulfilled. Technology inches us towards the realization of this primal wish, arguable the first wish, before Daddy was internalized in the form of a superego or conscience. Yet technology, bound by the same material and social limitations which affirm the untraversable chasm between infantile desire and its fulfillment, disappointingly preserves the presence of the initial renunciatory demands we encountered in infancy.

We can’t get what we want and we must live with that disappointment or perish. Technology reaffirms this cold fact of existence with a knowing wink that implicitly promises otherwise.

In this way, technology, like many achievements of civilization including art and religion, is a kind of infantile edge play.

Preserved in a cordoned off realm we call the ‘imagination,’ the ‘sacred,’ or ‘cultural identity,’ we dip our toes back into the most immature and narcissistic ideals we hold for ourselves. Simultaneously we frustrate the possibility of realizing these ideals. They remain art, or god, or the nation; they perpetually stroke our narcissism as they reside in plain view, and though each might wish it, no one individual can possess them for himself.

In this way, Freud contended, our instinctual impulses, although never eradicated, are at least tamed. Although we are certainly not content with sacrificing our personal desires for a collective greater good, so long as the scales remain balanced between the indulgence and renunciation of our fundamentally antisocial wishes, humanity can find equilibrium.

Through these first civilizing steps – these great cultural ideals of art, religion, identity, and technology which realize and negate our deepest desires – we have achieved the height of humane and dignified existence.

Ordinary and supremely bearable unhappiness, nothing less and certainly nothing more.

This situation is maintained so long as we retain a relative autonomy from the terrorizing superego. As Freud argued throughout much of his work, although the behavioural guidance enshrined in cultural ideals was a step in the development of civilization, the erosion of these ideals is an inevitability as humanity learns to recognize its agency and, indeed, its role in projecting these ideals from within.

The mature mind finds solace in the fact that “although far from ideal, I, myself, take ownership of my actions and curb my indulgence.” It is a regressive mind that remains wholly terrorized by coercive forces from without – such a mind thinks “if it were up to me, which it is not, I would indulge in such and such a thing.”

Such an immature psychic organization is ever ready to slip into a state of barbaric play the moment the parents are away. And whereas Freud traced civilization’s discontent only up to the threshold of barbarism, having died in 1939, Adorno was witness to the crossing of that threshold.

In his “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” Adorno notes that it is precisely the psychological organization which is dependent on an external ideal of authority which sustains fascistic and authoritarian forms of social organization. The authoritarian agitator’s aim is to negate the possibility of the individual’s independence from the superego, which is, instead, located in increasingly reified and unyielding cultural ideals such as nationhood, race, religion, and other political deployments of otherwise imagined identity formations. The agitator makes sustained irrationality the rational mode of social existence by cancelling the possibility of self-reflection and autonomy.

Adorno writes that

“it may well be the secret of fascist propaganda that it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today's standardized mass culture, largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity, instead of setting goals the realization of which would transcend the psychological status quo no less than the social one. Fascist propaganda has only to reproduce the existent mentality for its own purposes; it need not induce change […] Under the prevailing conditions, the irrationality of fascist propaganda becomes rational in the sense of instinctual economy. For if the status quo is taken for granted and petrified, a much greater effort is needed to see through it than to adjust to it and to obtain at least some gratification through identification with the existent.”

Interestingly brainrot content, too, is affirmed as rational by the prevailing conditions of platform culture. Just as the fascist agitator does not invent, but indeed exploits the already existing malaise of his alienated followers, brainrot does not literally inflict ‘brain rot.’ The fascist is a symptom of a world grown tired of having no external authority to answer to, just as brainrot is a symptom of a world in which the logic of efficiency and computation has commandeered that place of authority – a perennial yardstick, inhuman, cold, and calculating, by which all future successes and failures of civilization can be measure against.

Brainrot encapsulates a simultaneous agitation and soothing which is emblematic of civilization itself. It does so, however, in commodified performance that maintains the continuous consumption and production of tense affective states. Fascist propaganda, for example, similarly shocks its audience with the depravity and chaos of the other – the outsider as identified by race, religion, or custom – in contrast with the soothing order and reliably calculated stability of identifying with the internal mass. Independence from the mass is constantly depicted as a dangerous fall into antisocial degeneracy, whereas a reliance on reified forms of thinking which occur outside of the individual is depicted as the reliable and fine-tuned machinery of civilization.

Brainrot’s smooth, alluring rhythms in combination with jarring, affective agitations are a kind of automation of societal discontent. The pattern of self-regulation is automated as a reified, cultural unconscious in brainrot which no longer allows for a self-reflective realization that the responsibility for regulating one’s emotions lies within oneself. The pattern of brainrot reinstates with renewed force the terrorizing figure of the superego which we are increasingly unable to shake. Instead of thinking through the tension between the agitating impulses our body drives us to fulfill and their rationalized renunciation and sublimation into productive social actions, the culture of content – specifically content as a means of optimizing the unbroken stream of consumption/data-collection – outsources thinking and negates responsibility.

This is partly a matter of speed. Thinking requires reflective moments, whereas brainrot lubricates the real content – i.e. the data extracted from users – down the digestive tract of digital Daddy. This is the only content that matters as far as the system of efficiency and optimization is concerned, and today, that system is literally king.

I would suggest that, perhaps, the pattern of brainrot content – as both simultaneously agitating and soothing – is a stripped-down baseline for ‘content’ as we know it. By content I mean visual material which is meant to be consumed on social media platforms, whose main justification for existence is the facilitation of an unbroken and continuous stream of data capture – as each snippet of content does not serve as a discrete unit of information that exists for itself, but serves to usher users to the next, and the next, and the next fragment of affectively resonant media.

To derive meaningful information from one single unit, would be a premature ejaculation – as far as the system is concerned. All that would be left would be to roll over and fall asleep, satiated. Paraphrasing Adorno on fascist propaganda, the system which necessitates the form of brainrot content would rather we remain wide awake, albeit unconscious.

Brainrot leaves us perpetually stimulated, yet perpetually deprived. Civilization on the edge.

The pattern of content takes it upon itself to simultaneously point out and elicit our antisocial impulses for aggression and sex, only to hypnotically deconstruct the organic eruptions of bodily drives into calculated matrices of geometric organization and endlessly pleasurable computation.

The mind-machine outside of me makes me hard and soft, evokes arousal while forbidding climax. Just ones followed by zeros followed by ones. Mommy’s license, Daddy’s taboo, and no chance to grow up.

While I was writing my dissertation on the psychoanalytic implications of digital culture, a friend formulated a pun on Freud’s title: “Civilization and Its Disc Contents.” In a way, this piece is an elaborate attempt at killing a joke – by pointing out the theoretical value of its absurdity.

To kill the joke that civilization does, indeed, have “disc contents,” is to explain that civilization has a particular kind of encoded logic to the cultural content that it produces. The hardwired program encoded in the human subject is fascism, plainly put. It is the tendency to instate automated thinking in order to alleviate the pressure of having to do so continuously and autonomously. Fascism does precisely that – not the historical authoritarianism of Hitler or Stalin, necessarily, but a generalized fascism which flattens, totalizes, and automates the otherwise organic process of beating ourselves into submission. Today, that fascism continues to take on new forms in brainrot.

This is also to say that brainrot is not regressive, although it places a cap on the future. Brainrot is, in fact, peak civilization even as it forecloses the possibility of different, future civilizations. Brainrot is the automation of discontent at stable levels, never erupting into vicious violence nor allowing for societal transcendence. And, indeed, such transcendence involves risk. To become increasingly independent of external authority risks a collapse into a deeper desire for such an authority. Brainrot holds the balance – just watch and feel, now forget that feeling and watch some more.

In the name of optimization, risk is obliterated – no more autonomy, no more heteronomy either.

No more humans, only fans – worshipping at the fanum [lat. shrine] of efficiency, participating in the abrupt cancellation of progress in the name of an anxious preservation of society as-is.

Orgasm denial, combined with a machinic apparatus that won’t stop stroking.

But how long can civilization hold its edge?

To critique brainrot as base and degraded is to ignore its fundamental nature as an excess of progress – a progress that has rationalized its own stagnation rather than risk the decadence of failed emancipation. To critique brainrot as trash is tantamount to suggesting that the hard drive of civilization ought to be wiped clean.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. 1991 [1951]. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” in The Culture Industry. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge. 132-157.

Freud, Sigmund. 2005 [1930]. “Civilization and Its Discontents” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XXI. Trans. & ed. James Strachey. London: Vintage. 64-145.

Lowenthal, Leo & Norbert Guterman. 2021 [1949]. Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator. London: Verso.